Duckling Ugly

by Neal Shusterman

  I wasn’t a master artist or anything, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t draw for others. I did it because of how it made me feel. I could lose myself in those brushstrokes—and as my brother had so rudely guessed, that’s exactly what I did when I got home from the spelling bee.

  My favorite subject to draw was “Nowhere Valley,” or at least that’s what I called it. You see, there are two places I like to go when the outside world becomes too cruel. Nowhere Valley is one of them. It exists only in my head: a hidden place of rolling hills covered in hundreds of shades of green. I imagine myself walking along a meandering stone path, breathing in the smells of wildflowers and orange blossoms. People wave to me from their pastel-colored houses as I pass, and I wave back. I hear voices filled with joyous laughter, not mocking laughter. Sometimes I see the valley in my dreams, but more often I see it in my daydreams. My simple brush drawings can almost capture the essence of the place. I wouldn’t dare add color, because there’s no pigment in the world that could do justice to what I see in my mind. Adding color would be sacrilege—like colorizing a classic old movie.

  Today, however, my heart was not in my brush. No matter how I drew the hills and paths, my imaginary valley gave me no comfort. So I rinsed off my brush, capped the ink, and decided to visit that second place I go to when life gets the better of me. It was the only place I knew where the residents didn’t care how ugly you were. That’s because they were dead.

  “Vista View” has to be the worst name ever given to a cemetery. First of all, the word vista already means “view” in Spanish, so the name is really “View View.” And second, when you’re six feet under, you’ve got no view, except for maybe your own toes, so pointing out the beautiful view is kind of insulting to the dead, don’t you think?

  Vista View hasn’t always been a cemetery. Back in the day, it was a botanical garden—the most beautiful in the state. Winding trails and beautiful trees and flowers from all over the world filled the place. Our town of Flock’s Rest got its name because of Vista View. Flocks of all kinds of birds would make their trek over the mountains and be drawn to the lush greenery of the botanical garden, where they’d fill the trees and ponds, making a racket that could be heard for miles. The woman who owned the place entertained bird-watchers in her little white house on a hill, smack in the middle.

  But then the place went bankrupt. An undertaking conglomerate bought it and decided it was a fine place to plant people instead of trees. Now rich people from all over bury their loved ones there, paying more for a little burial plot than most people pay for homes. The beautiful trees and stuff are still there—only now those winding paths are all lined with gravestones. As for the old woman, they let her stay on in her house, but I don’t know if I’d want to live in the middle of dead people, no matter how nice the view-view was.

  I told my parents I was taking a nap, then I locked my bedroom door and climbed out of the window. I was careful to slip out the back way of our mobile-home park so they wouldn’t see me. Let my parents think I was brooding in my bed, wallowing in self-pity. They didn’t need to know everything I did.

  It was dusk when I got there. It was the time of day when the colors of the earth bow out and let the colors of the sky take over. This was my favorite time of day, because shadows get long, and with a face like mine, shadows are your friend.

  There was a strange smell in the graveyard today. Something chemical that I couldn’t place at first. Then, when I heard the metallic rattle followed by a long smooth hisssss, I knew what that smell was. Spray paint.

  I heard their voices just in time and ducked behind a tall gravestone. Cautiously, I peered out of the shadows to see them.

  Marshall Astor shook the spray can in his hand, then dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s of something nasty he had sprayed on a gravestone.

  Lately the gravestones had been smashed and defaced by kids too stupid to find something better to do with their time. I hated it, because spraying rudeness on tombstones was the opposite of what I did with brush and ink.

  I should have known Marshall Astor was the one who’d been doing it. And sitting right beside him on a little stone mourner’s bench was Marisol Yeager, his partner in crime. They were the undisputed king and queen of Flock’s Rest High. He was handsome, she was gorgeous, the world smiled on them, and they smiled right back. The way I see it, when you’ve got those kind of looks you have a choice: You can either use the brains God gave you, or you can skate through life on your looks and never let your brain develop much beyond dog intelligence. Marisol and Marshall had chosen the latter.

  “Ooh, this place is so spooky,” Marisol said. “I love it.”

  Marshall went on to another grave and shook his spray can, preparing for another round of vandalism.

  “Can I try?” Marisol asked.

  “Okay,” Marshall said. “But you got to think up something clever to write.”

  Marshall Astor was rumored to be distantly related to the famous Astors—you know, the rich ones who went down on the Titanic. If it was true, then some other distant cousins must have gotten all the money and class. Still, it had never stopped Marshall’s father from wearing the name like he was royalty—that is, until the day he had too much to drink, drove off a bridge into the river, and went down with the Buick.

  Marshall was half as smart and twice as useless as his father ever was—but he was strong, had a winning smile, and good hair in a stiff wind. Around here, that’s enough to make you mayor, which his father was until that fateful day.

  “How about this?” said Marisol, still pondering what to spray on the tombstone. “‘Why do I always wake up with dead hair.’ Get it? ‘Dead hair’?”

  Make that fly intelligence. Marisol had always been one of those baby beauty queens, with platinum blond hair that had probably been bleached from birth. Our hatred of each other was deeply ingrained, but I’ll get to that later.

  These two were the source of much misery around Flock’s Rest High. They were what I call master-means. Not master “minds,” because that would be giving them too much credit—but they did have a way of motivating other people to do their thinking for them.

  As Marisol sprayed her message on a nearby gravestone, I tried to figure out how I could get out of there without being noticed. It wasn’t dark enough yet to escape unseen, and I wasn’t quiet enough to slip away unheard. But maybe if I waited, the shadows would take over and I could scurry away before they started the make-out session that I knew was coming. Maybe the sound would startle them enough to make them leave and go swap saliva somewhere else, which was fine by me.

  But before I could plan a suitable getaway, Marisol came around the tombstone, looking for another one to spray, and saw me lurking there. She let out a scream that could wake the dead around us.

  I jumped back at that ear-piercing shriek, hitting a tree—but when I turned, I saw it wasn’t a tree at all. It was Marshall, who stood there like an oak.

  “Well, look what we have here,” he said. “Nothing to be scared of, Marisol. It’s just the Flock’s Rest Monster.”

  I grimaced at the nickname. It had been with me for as long as I could remember.

  My grimace must have looked like a wolf baring its teeth, because he said, “Look at that, I think it’s got rabies.”

  “What do you think you’re doing,” Marisol said, “spying on people?”

  “I wasn’t spying, I was just—”

  “You’re sick,” Marshall said.

  “No, no, what was the word?” Marisol said slowly. “She’s an…abomination!”

  That caught me off guard. Had they been there that day—or had they only heard? Or were they the master-means behind it?

  I lunged toward Marisol, wanting to rip that pretty skin off her face, but Marshall held me back and then tossed me against a gravestone so hard it almost toppled over. I felt the impact of that stone in every joint of my body.

  “Don’t you touch Marisol,” he said. “You ain’t got
a right to touch her. Or me. Or anybody.”

  I tried to get away, but he pushed me back against the stone again. “Where you going, piggy girl? Don’t you want to spy on us some more? Maybe I’ll get you a camera. Hey, will it break if you’re the one snapping the picture, too?”

  Then something swung out of nowhere and slammed against Marshall’s ear. He stumbled back.

  Suddenly there, in the half-light of day’s end, was a woman who had to be at least ninety years old, brandishing the blunt end of a pitchfork.

  I knew who it was right away. Most folks just called her “the crazy woman of Vista View” and left it at that, but I knew her name: Miss Leticia Radcliffe. She was the one who lived in the house. The one who didn’t leave when the place became a cemetery.

  “Hey!” yelled Marshall, holding his ear. “What are you, nuts?!”

  “You stay back or I’ll swing it again. And next time I’ll use the business end.”

  And, just to make her point, she swung the blunt end one more time. It didn’t come anywhere near him. In fact, she wasn’t even facing him directly when she swung it, and I wondered why.

  “Marshall, let’s just go,” begged Marisol. “That witch’ll kill you soon as look at you.”

  But Marshall was not the kind of guy to back down from a fight, especially with a feeble old woman. He stepped forward, sticking his chest out.

  “You get outta here,” he said to Miss Leticia. “Go on back to your house. This ain’t none of your business.”

  “This used to be my land,” she said, “so I make everything that happens here my business. You leave this girl alone, and get out the way you came.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  Then Miss Leticia Radcliffe did the most wonderful, wicked, unbelievable thing I’d ever seen. She took that old pitchfork and jammed it right through the tip of Marshall’s left Nike!

  Marshall wailed in pain. “Ahhh, my toe!”

  Then the old woman leaned close to him and whispered, “Next time…it’ll be your heart.”

  She pulled out the pitchfork, and the fight blew out of Marshall like he was a balloon that had been popped. He took off with Marisol, limping and moaning all the way.

  When they were gone, Miss Leticia turned to me—and now I could see why she hadn’t looked right at Marshall when she had swung that pitchfork. Miss Leticia had cataracts as gray as an April storm. She could see enough to tell night from day, I guessed, but not a whole lot more. She must have known Vista View like the back of her hand, and she didn’t need to see much to know what was going on when she got there.

  She looked toward me, but not quite at me. “Now I’m just guessing, mind you—but from what that boy called you, I would say that you’re the DeFido girl.”

  “Cara,” I told her. “So you heard about the nickname.”

  “Oh, believe me, I’ve been called a whole lot worse than that.” She let loose a long, hearty laugh. “‘The Flock’s Rest Monster’ ain’t all that bad, considering. It sounds legendary. Dignified.”

  She planted the pitchfork firmly on a grave and took my hand. “You come on in. I’ll make us some tea.”

  3

  The Sweet and the Rancid

  Although I didn’t actually know her before that day, Miss Leticia had always been of interest to me. Maybe it was because she was an outcast in town, rumored to have killed her husband when he sold this land, which had been in her family for generations. That was long before I was born, but the rumors still hung like sheets on a clothesline, twisting more and more the longer they stayed in the wind.

  Her whole life now was spent in her cottage, and the huge greenhouse behind it that had once been the centerpiece of the botanical garden. It was a grand Victorian greenhouse, with a high crystalline dome, and smaller wings on either side.

  She didn’t take me to the cottage—instead she took me right to the greenhouse, which was even more spectacular inside than out. Strange black orchids grew from the dark soil, and up above hung carnivorous pitcher plants so big they could drown a rat. I took a deep whiff. Every inch of the place was alive with aromas. Turn your head and the scent would change to something else.

  “Being as I can’t quite see the things I grow anymore,” she told me, “I cultivate things that appeal to the other senses.” The greenhouse was full of flowers that not only smelled sweet, but were soft to touch as well. Some of the plants grew exotic berries that danced on your tongue when you tasted them. I could see Miss Leticia more clearly in the greenhouse lights now. She was a heavy woman, but she wore her weight well. She had skin like dark chocolate, and her hair was a mess of steel wool pulled into a bun.

  She led me to a little cast-iron table and chairs surrounded by staghorn ferns and lilies, but she walked a little too close and banged her shin against one of the chairs with a nasty clang. I grimaced, practically feeling it myself.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “Yep. It wasn’t me anyway—it was this thing.” She lifted her skirt a bit to reveal steel braces that ran up either side of her shin, practically up to her knee. She had them on both legs. “Metal on metal—that’s why it sounded so loud. I got steel rods in my back, too—and a pacemaker. Got a grandson calls me Nana Cyborg, on accounta all that metal.” She laughed so contagiously, I had to laugh, too. “Then, after all that, I got these cataracts in my eyes, and I said, ‘No more!’ There’ll be no more doctors touching this here body less’n it’s to pretty it up for my wake.” She laughed again. It seemed strange that she could joke so easily about dying, but then, when you’re as old as Miss Leticia, death stops being the enemy.

  “Now you just sit yourself down, and I’ll go get that tea,” she said. She went off into her cottage and returned a few minutes later with a tray.

  “It’s good to have a guest,” she told me. “No one comes around but my son and that horrible wife of his. And all they want to talk about is putting me in a home. But I tell them I got a home.”

  I breathed in the steam of her tea, then took a gentle sip. Although her cloudy gray eyes had been disturbing at first, after I’d been sitting and drinking with her for just a few minutes, any sense of discomfort faded away. “Now you tell me your troubles,” she said, “because my guess is you got no one else worth tellin’ em to.”

  “I just had a bad day, is all.” I didn’t say anything more, hoping I wouldn’t have to get into it—but Miss Leticia wasn’t going to let me off the hook.

  “Hmm,” she said when she realized I wasn’t talking. Then she rapped her knuckles against one of her leg braces. “These braces here give me support. I don’t mind, on account of I know my legs need it—otherwise they hurt something awful. I know you’re hurting as well. Ain’t no shame in needing a little support.” She took a long, slow sip of her tea. “Now, why don’t you tell me what happened that’s got you so upset?

  “Clammed up, are ya? Hmm. Must be a lot going on in that head of yours.”

  Then she smiled a little too mischievously for a woman of her age. “What could it hurt to let some steam out of that pressure cooker?”

  I sighed. “Well, I was in this spelling bee, and—”

  “Ah,” she interrupted, “I knew you were the type for casting spells!”

  “No, not casting spells,” I told her. “It’s about spelling words.”

  “Spells, spelling; it’s all the same,” she said. “Puttin’ letters in order is no different than puttin’ words in order. There’s a magic to both of them, true enough.”

  Though I knew the notion was crazy, it was exciting to think that something as ordinary as spelling could have a kind of power. Maybe there was more to me than offends the eye!

  When I told her about the words I’d been forced to spell, she pursed her lips and said, “My, my, my, what a place we live in. I think the people around this town are just unnaturally cruel.”

  “No,” I told her. “People are the same everywhere, whether it’s here in Flock’s Rest or in some other town. They
take one look at me, and they just can’t control the things they say and do.”

  Miss Leticia waved her hand. “Don’t you give no mind to the things people say. It’s just a whole lotta quacking from a whole lotta geese.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but what about the things they do?”

  Miss Leticia didn’t have a quick answer for that one. “All I can say about that is what goes around comes around. You may never get to see it, but those kids who played that evil trick on you today, they will get theirs. And if it’s not in this world, it will be in the next.”

  She said it with such certainty, it made me feel better. After that, I began talking about everything, as though a floodgate had opened inside of me. I went on and on about the things people said about me—to my face and behind my back. I told her about how most strangers treated me—as if touching me would somehow make them unclean. I even told her things about my parents that I’d never told anyone. Like how years ago, when my momma was sick, my dad had to take me to work with him. I spent a week with him on the car lots, and that was the week people stopped buying his cars.

  “Within a year, all of his lots, except for one, went out of business, and we had to move to a trailer park. We’ve been there ever since. He never said it out loud, but I know he blames me. He thinks my face cursed his business.”

  “Hmm,” said Miss Leticia. “Tell me, is your father an honest salesman?”

  “Not really,” I admitted. “His cars are mostly pieces of garbage.”

  “Well, then, his business deserved to be cursed.”

  I told her about my ink drawings, and the green valley I go to in my mind, where the people don’t seem to notice my face—and how the flowers of her greenhouse reminded me of the gardens I imagine there.

  “Tell me, child—do you sleepwalk?”