            The three girls clustered around the chipped red Formica table, all intently listening to a fourth, who recounted for her listeners a dream she had had the previous night. Each girl sipped the same flavor of strawberry mango kiwi fruit smoothie (low calorie, fat free and enhanced with natural additives to give it that special *zing, * of course) while carefully listening to her companion's nightmare.
            "Well," the storyteller started, "it started after I got home last night from my date with Bry…."
            "Ohmigod, how did that go?!" the blonde one asked, twirling a piece of her chemically altered hair around her index finger.
            "It was amazing! He is SO sweet and he, like, pulled out my chair for me, and" she paused for what she believed was a dramatic effect, "he drove me around in his convertible."
            The blonde gasped. "NO! Not the Porsche! He didn't even let me breath on it!"
            The first girl smiled. "That's because you didn't put out."
            The other three simultaneously gasped. "You DIDN'T!!!!"
            The storyteller waved away their inquiring eyes with a flick of her freshly manicured hand. "I'm trying to tell a story, here! You don't understand how perfectly awful my dream was last night!" Her cadaver-like frame shook with shudders. She had not, however, successfully drawn her adherents away from the tale her date.
            "Oh come on! You must tell us what happened with Bry!" The slender red head chirped. She nudged the girl sitting to her left, the smallest of the four. "We've got a beginner here who needs some pointers!"
            The small one reacted in horror. "That was so uncalled for! Ohmigod, like, I totally have plenty of experience! Just 'cause I'm not, like, a total slut bag like you...."
            The storyteller cut her off, annoyed that the attention was not focused solely on her. "Enough! Can we please focus on me for a minute? I will tell you guys everything later, ok? Now, I have to tell you about my dream. I went to sleep right away, right, and I dreamed that I was in this, like, place. I can't describe it, but it was so…weird! There were all these people who were, like, walking around and they had these HUGE masks on, and they were these big, exaggerated masks. But here's the really freaky part! Underneath, the people were all UGLY! They were hideous! And they were dancing around in this weird dance that, like, everybody knew. They were all dancing together perfectly, and when they paused, the took off their masks and they would breath for, like, two seconds and then put their masks back on. I guess they didn't want everyone else to see how ugly they really were, because some of these people were just nasty, and I don't mean it 'cause they weren't wearing makeup or anything, but nothing seemed to help these people! It was so tragic!"
            There were vague murmurings of "yeah," "totally," and "I so understand!" among the three lemmings.
            The storyteller continued. "And then, I was walking along, and I was trying to get away from all the ugly people," she leaned in close to make her superficial point even more profound "because you know that where there are ugly people, there are bound to be ugly guys, and besides, it's, like, you spend so much time around ugly people and then YOU become ugly, and then only ugly people will want to date you! What a horrible thing!" She paused, and was pleased to note that her listeners were devouring her words with the same gluttonous intensity they applied to finding matching shades of eyeliner and handbags.
            "Anyways, like I was saying...." she continued after taking a sip of her smoothie, "I was walking away, right, and then I saw this group of people standing in the middle of all the ugly people. I tried really hard to, like, look at their faces, but I just couldn't do it! It was so weird! So I, like, walked towards these people, and I knew that they were screaming, but I totally couldn't even hear them! But I could hear everything else, 'cause I started to call out to them, but they, like, totally didn't even bother to respond to me! And then, I realized they were beautiful and I totally didn't understand why I thought that because I couldn't even see their faces or what clothes they were wearing, so I don't even know why I thought they were beautiful, but somewhere, like, inside of me I knew they were. And I was standing right in front of them and I still couldn't see their faces, they were still all blurry, and I totally wasn't drunk or anything, I mean, I was dreaming, hell-oh!" The storyteller sat back, silently signifying that she had finished recounting her nightmare.
            The four media produced teenagers lacked the ability to look beyond their surgically "corrected" noses at an approaching figure. She wore plain clothes: a white T shirt with smears of charcoal and the smell of Persian cats and a pair of green pants that hung off her hips. She played with a loose strand of brown hair to calm her nerves as she approached the four, taking deep breaths all the while. She licked her cracked lips and managed to quietly utter, "Hey guys, what's going on? Do you mind if I sit here?" She paused, waiting for an answer. She waited a few moments, and even attempted to laugh with them at a joke she knew was far below her intelligence. When the lemmings and their leader paused for a moment, but then decided this intruder wasn't even worth the effort of turning around, the girl's sharp chin began to quiver slightly. Her defeated eyes found an interest on the floor and remained there as she turned and shuffled away.
            "As I was saying, Bry drove me around in his convertible….."