The Girl’s Not Attractive
Part 1
The Alternate Universe, 1982
“Lois! What are you doing?” Lucy Lane, Lois’s older sister shrieked in frustration. “What’s the matter with you? You’re so slow. C’mon, you’re gonna make me late for school, too! I’ll be in the car waiting for you so get your butt out there in two minutes or you’re dead meat!”
Fifteen-year-old Lois Lane had 4 outfits that she’d tried on resting on the floor of her bedroom, and was analyzing the slimming effect of the fifth one while she tried to tune out Lucy’s rant. Why couldn’t she be thin and pretty like her older sister? The new guy in her class, Steve, wouldn’t even give her a second glance unless she found something to wear that disguised her weight and made her look a little thinner. And even then, she probably had no shot with him. The popular, cliquey girls in school were the ones that always got the great looking guys.
“Great Dane Lane” had been Lois’ middle school nickname. Now that she was in high school, she was making a sincere effort to exercise and diet, especially since she had crushes on several guys in her ninth grade class. So far, however, nothing was working. Her mother had brought her to a doctor to see if she had an under-active thyroid. No dice. The doctor just informed her that she needed to eat less!
Being fat was a fate worse than death. Her sister Lucy, who was a senior in high school, was a pretty blonde cheerleader who had dated the entire football team in her junior year. The phone was constantly ringing for her. Lois, on the other hand, had a couple of close girlfriends, but had never been asked out on a date. She spent most of her spare time writing poetry and dreaming of a “knight in shining armor” that would see how beautiful she was inside, and overlook her rotund exterior. She was sick of being told that she had such a pretty face; if only she could lose weight, she’d be a knockout. Easier said than done. Obesity seemed to run in her family. Her older sister, Lucy, was nearly anorexic, which was the only reason she stayed so thin. Of course, her mother didn’t know that Lucy knew how to make herself throw up so she wouldn’t gain weight. Her mother was drunk most of the time, anyway, since her father had left them for another younger, thinner, beautiful woman.
Metropolis University, 1988
Valedictorian Lois Lane had just finished her rousing keynote speech. She might not be the “hottest” girl in her graduating class, but she was definitely the brightest and most articulate. Her internship at the Daily Planet had resulted in her being offered a full-time position as a junior reporter. She still winced at the memory of one of her journalism professors telling her that only thin, beautiful people made it to broadcast reporting, so it was clear to him that the print media was her only calling. Nonetheless, a position at the Daily Planet, the premiere newspaper in all of the United States, was something to be proud of.
After the ceremony was over, her mother, Lucy, who was now a flight attendant for a major east coast airline, and her father and stepmother, took her to the Lexor for a celebration dinner. She had to admit that her mother was really making an attempt to stay sober and hold herself together in front of her father’s “trophy prize” wife. If only she could make it through the entire evening without passing out….
Lucy, who was sitting next to her, was examining the menu for their “low fat” options. She pointed a couple of diet choices out to Lois as a hint.
“You know, I’m proud of you, Lo, I really am. But you can’t make it in the corporate world unless you’re fit and thin. You don’t want to get passed up for promotions that you deserve because you’re fat!” Lucy had never been very compassionate about Lois’ struggle with food, because she had found her own way to deal with their genetic disposition to gain weight, so she tended to look down on Lois was not getting her own handle on it.
Lois, stubborn as ever, spat back, “It’s my celebration dinner and I’m gonna eat what I want. I can always start a diet tomorrow, Luce! This is *my* night!”
Lucy rolled her eyes at her sister. “You’re never gonna change, Lois. I only want you to be happy. Whatever.”
Ellen Lane noticed her girls whispering back and forth and suspected Lucy was bugging Lois about her weight again. Ellen herself had gained fifty pounds since giving birth to her daughters and had never been able to shed the weight after Lois was born. She blamed her husband leaving her on her appearance, and had started drinking to drown her emotional sorrow. Her ex-husband, Sam Lane, sent her a healthy alimony check each month, which allowed her to stay home and feel sorry for herself most of the time. While she was proud of both of her daughters, her heart went out to Lois. So bright, such beautiful, dark eyes, and such a wonderful smile. Why did men have to be so shallow? The poor girl had hardly had one date throughout high school and college. But Ellen knew that her Lois had a bright future ahead of her at the Daily Planet and perhaps she’d meet an older man who would appreciate her mind and personality. Yeah, who was she kidding? Her own husband left her for a glam queen. Well, she and Lois would always have each other….
Metropolis, Daily Planet, 1992
“There is NO WAY that I’m signing this, Lois! I’m not sending my best reporter out to the jungles of Africa. It’s too dangerous. You’re just going to have to track down leads from here,” Perry yelled.
“Chief, c’mon. This has 'Kerth Award' written all over it,” Lois argued back. “If I was a guy, you’d let me go. Don’t be a male chauvinist! Besides, no one ever goes after girls like me, I may as well be invisible. It’ll be perfect.” <Sometimes, being fat can be an advantage> she reasoned. “I’ll be fine. This is my big chance, Perry. Being there in the thick of things is the only way we’re going to break this story, and you know it!”
Perry, taken aback by Lois’ rant, started walking away, not wanting to say something he would later regret. Lois’ low self-esteem always seemed to rear its ugly head, and he hated when she used it to win an argument with him. But still, *was* he being a chauvinist? If Claude had wanted to go, would he have authorized the travel voucher? He had to mull it over and decide what his own rationale was for saying no.
“Chief! I’m not through arguing with you about this!” Lois persisted, yelling at her boss’ retreating figure.
Perry stopped and turned around briefly. “Lois, I’ll take your comments under advisement and we’ll talk about this later.”
Lois sighed loudly in frustration as Perry slammed his office door. <Case closed for now>, she thought. She headed back to her workstation where several notes had been posted on her monitor to return calls to various sources she had left messages with.
Claude Michaud, her very attractive coworker, came over and sat down on the empty chair adjacent to her desk. “Hey, Lois, Not going too well talking Perry into sending you to the Congo on that gun-running story, huh?”
“Claude, don’t worry. I know Perry. He’ll realize I’m right. By this time next week, I’m going to be on a plane to Africa and we’ll be scooping all the other papers in the United States!”
“Maybe he’d say yes if we went together?” Claude asked. “I’d be willing to split the by-line with you. You’d be ‘on top’, so to speak, of course.”
“Claude, you’re such slime, you never give up, do you? You already stole one story from me. I’m not falling for that crap again!” she replied. She thought back to the time, three years ago, when she was a neophyte reporter, that he had asked her out on a date. She had been so excited. She called Lucy and her mother and told them that it had finally happened – a “hot” man showed some interest in her! She had rushed out and bought a new, sexy outfit at the “Plus Size” store. When he asked her where she wanted to go, she told him the Lexor. How satisfying it would be to return to the place she had argued with her sister about her dinner selections on her graduation night - with her handsome coworker?
During dinner, Claude was attentive. He asked her all about how she came to be a reporter, and complimented her on her aggressive, “leave no stones unturned” investigative writing style. After several glasses of wine, she began to share with him some of the stories she was working on. Maybe if she showed him she trusted him, she reasoned, he would ask her out again. He was so attractive. She never thought that a guy like him would show any interest in her. Even though her mother and her sister had warned her about dating a coworker, she was too elated about his interest in her to pay them any mind. That would soon come back and bite her in the a$$, of course.
He had walked her to her apartment door at the end of the evening, and given her a kiss that made her head spin. He told her that he had had *such* a wonderful time, and that he would see her at work tomorrow. That they would keep the date “just between them”; their nosy coworkers didn’t need to know that they had shared a lovely evening getting to know each other better. She fell for his lines and invited him in for a nightcap, but he declined, stating that he wanted to be a gentleman, and didn’t “trust himself” to stay that way if he spent any more time with her. Lois went to bed fantasizing about a relationship with Claude and reliving how wonderful the date had been. For the first time in many years, she felt sexy and attractive, and fell asleep with a smile on her face.
The next day, she was dismayed to find out that Claude had called out sick. When she questioned Perry about it, trying to be subtle so he wouldn’t know she had been out with him the evening before, he declined to give her any information except “Lois, he just said he was feeling under the weather and he’d be in tomorrow”. Lois was pretty sure that Perry knew more than he was saying, but knew her boss well enough to realize that further prying would be completely pointless.
Well, three days later, when *her* story broke on the front page with Claude Michaud’s byline, it became obvious that Claude had gone undercover (with Perry’s permission) and was able to wrap up a story that she had been working on for months. It turned out that the local men’s club was a front for organized crime. Lois’ source, Bobby Bigmouth, had given her a few a leads on the story, but she hadn’t been able to confirm anything solid.
Lois stormed over to Claude’s desk. “How *dare* you use me that way?” she spit out, trying to keep her voice low so her coworkers wouldn’t know the sordid details of their one and only date. “I thought you were different! You- you *bastard*!”
Claude looked at Lois sheepishly. “Hey Lane, you should know better than to spill your guts about a story you’re working on. It’s fair game out there. I would expect no less from you if I gave you info about something I was working on.”
Lois felt her eyes welling up and turned away from Claude so he wouldn’t be aware of just how much he had gotten to her. Her mother and sister had been right! Damn them! She should have known better. Of *course* Claude wouldn’t be interested in her! What had she been thinking?
“I’m going to Perry with this! You haven’t heard the end of this yet!” she retorted to Claude, who was sitting there with a smug look on his face.
When she stormed into Perry’s office to confront him about Claude stealing *her* story, and faking three sick days, her boss simply said that Claude had told him that he would ‘have the front page’ if he could have several days to go undercover, and he had authorized it.
“Lois, I didn’t know it was your story. When Claude tells me he can get me front page, well, he’s got the reputation to back that up. And, since you’re not a guy, how would you have been able to go undercover at a men’s club, anyway?”
“That’s not the point, Perry! My by-line should have been on that story. He wouldn’t have known about it if it wasn’t for me!”
Perry shot her a fatherly glance. “Lois, since when do you spill your guts to a fellow reporter about a story that you’re working on? What’s really going on here?”
Perry would remember that as the one and only time that Lois Lane didn’t have a comeback line.
“Forget it, Perry. I’ll chalk it up to experience,” she replied, sulking out of the office. She became a near-recluse at the office for about four months after that, not talking to any of her coworkers, who ended up hearing the "enhanced to make him look good" details of the date from Claude, anyway. She was the laughing-stock of the office for months afterwards. She buried herself in her stories, got the front page several times to redeem herself in their eyes, and went home and ate too much chocolate to make herself feel better. The whole episode caused her to gain another twenty pounds.
The flashback caused Lois to spit out at Claude, “Let me tell you, I learned a hard lesson that day, and even if I have to finance this trip myself, there is no way you’re going to steal this one from me, Michaud! I'm a lot more ‘street-smart’ about womanizers like you now!”
Claude Michaud was probably one of the shallowest individuals in all of Metropolis. He knew he was devastatingly attractive to women, he had worked his way through high school, college, and most of his jobs by getting people to do things for him. The fact that he had used a fellow (overweight) coworker who already suffered from low self-esteem to get a front page story was just ‘par-for-the-Claude-course’. He didn’t have a shred of regret about it.
As he stood up, he flashed Lois one of those smiles that still got to her, damn it! “Ok, Lane, without me, the only way you’re going to get that story is to take a leave of absence and pay for it yourself! Good luck!”
A vision of herself at age fifteen, trying on different clothes to make herself look thinner and sexier haunted her as she simultaneously tried to block out Claude's hurtful words. Finding herself at the top of the emotional rollercoaster she rode quite often, she needed to get out of the office before the downgrade began.
She intercomed Perry, trying to keep her voice even so he wouldn’t know how upset she felt.
“What?” bellowed Perry. “I told you, Lane, we’ll talk about this later!”
Lois took a deep breath. “Chief, something personal at home came up. I need to take the rest of the day off. Okay?”
“Fine. We’ll talk about this again tomorrow morning, after the staff meeting.”
“Okay. Thanks, Chief.”
"Don't call me 'Chief'!" And Lois, is everything OK?"
Lois swallowed hard. "I think so. Thanks, Perry."
Grabbing her notes and her personal belongings, taking more home with her than she usually did, Lois headed straight for the elevator.
That was the day that Lois Lane disappeared.
The Daily Planet, 1997
Clark Kent fidgeted in his chair, unable to focus on anything since he had come back from the “other” earth, pretending that he was Lois Lane’s husband while the other Clark was missing in the time stream. Being with her like that was just too much for him. Besides being beautiful, she had a …quality… an …aura…about her that just felt so right. Why had *his* Lois disappeared back in 1992? Was she really dead? It was soooo unfair.
He had asked Mayor White for an employee picture of her but was told that it had been erased from their computer’s hard drive when she had been declared legally dead. It was obvious that Perry White had, despite his hard shell exterior, loved her like his own daughter. He felt very guilty that his last full conversation with her had been an argument, and that if he had only given her permission to travel to Africa to go after her story, he would have been better able to keep tabs on her.
Speculation was that Lois had decided to take off to investigate the gun-running story in Brazzaville, Congo. This was fueled by Claude Michaud’s last conversation with her. However, there were no records of her flying with any of the major airlines, and her apartment had been left undisturbed. No signs of a break-in. At the time, her family said she did not communicate with them prior to her disappearance and she had left no good-bye notes. While her purse and her work notes were missing, she had not packed any clothes. She had simply disappeared off the face of the earth after that last day at the Daily Planet.
Perry had determined that there had been no family crisis; that Lois had needed to take a “mental health” afternoon and be by herself. Lois was a great reporter, but sometimes she would have a meltdown and after taking some time to cope and recharge, she would come back to work the next day and be a shining star for several more months with no issues at all. It was Lois’ pattern; Perry understood that and considered it to be a small price to pay to have such a great investigative reporter on staff!
Clark surmised that Lois was probably the only woman in the world he knew that hated to be photographed. Why? She was so beautiful! The only picture he had been able to find of her was her valedictory address at Metropolis University from 1988. It was a poor, grainy, newspaper picture of her giving the impassioned speech outside at the football stadium where the ceremony had been held. The podium hid her voluptuous figure, and the blurriness made her look bloated. The worst picture he had even seen. <You can’t tell how gorgeous she is at all from this picture>, he had said to himself.
He still thought it strange that when the *other* Clark’s Lois had come to town, hardly anyone recognized her. Even Perry, who had given her a big hug, had made mention that she must have had a hard time in the Congo, she was so “emaciated” looking. What did Perry mean by that? In Clark’s eyes, Lois was “just right”. Claude, who was such a blatant jerk most of the time, had made some sexist remark about “if she looked like that when I dated her, I might have asked her to marry me!”
No one seemed to want to tell Clark much about “his” Lois, except that she was a great investigative reporter and a really hard worker. She wasn’t close to anyone. Her mother had died of alcoholism in 1994. After Lois had gone missing, she literally drank herself to death. Her older sister Lucy had tragically died in a plane crash in 1995, and her father and his second wife had recently moved to California where he was doctor to the “rich and famous”.
Clark had flown out there to meet Dr. Lane and was surprised to find out that he was even shallower than the “other” Lois’ father had been. He didn’t have a picture of his missing, probably dead, daughter in his wallet, but he had several of her older sister, Lucy. Clark had to admit that Lucy had been a very beautiful blonde, if you liked that type, but she didn’t share the look of passion that radiated from Lois’ dark, fiery eyes.
He had also been amazed when Dr. Lane told him that Lois didn’t seem to be the type of woman he’d be remotely interested in. When Clark asked him if he had a family photo album, he admitted that his ex-wife kept all of the pictures after their divorce, and when she had passed, he had hired someone to come clean out her apartment. Somehow, all of the family pictures had been destroyed in the process. Clark left California feeling frustrated with Lois’ obviously dysfunctional family. It sure didn’t seem as if Lois received any kind of emotional backing from her family at all. His heart beat with compassion for her.
A Superman disaster on the newsroom monitor awoke Clark from his day-dreaming. He flew out “his” window that James Olsen had made for him after his public debut, spinning into his Superman garb when he was aloft and above the clouds. Focusing his attention on the matter at hand – a dike in New Orleans was about to give way, flooding the entire city – took his mind off the person he considered to be his one true love, Lois Lane.
TBC..Saturdays, Tuesdays and Thursdays...
