Duckling Ugly

by Neal Shusterman

  He left me at my door, I let him give me a good night kiss, and I accepted his apologies graciously. I didn’t tell him that his weren’t the kisses I wanted.

  There was something different about Marshall now. Maybe it was just that I was seeing through new eyes, but he didn’t seem quite as good-looking to me anymore.

  It wasn’t just him, either. I found imperfections in everything and everybody at school. This boy had bad breath, that girl had bad hair, this one’s fat, and that one’s got an odd-shaped head. Was it just my imagination, or were all those things getting a little bit worse each day?

  I even saw it in my family. Since when did Vance’s eyes look so beady, and his two front teeth look so big? Since when did Dad’s cheeks look so sunken in? And Momma’s hair—had it always been so thin?

  People didn’t change like that, I told myself. It was all in my head. Could it be that I was surrounded by so much beauty in De León that the rest of the world paled by comparison?

  I went out with Marshall four more times, making sure I controlled how far things went on every date. Then, after the last one, I heard the words that every girl longs to hear.

  “I love you, Linda,” Marshall said, and I knew that he meant it. I don’t know if he had ever even said that to Marisol.

  I broke up with him the next day without explanation. He was devastated.

  Now, with Marisol and Marshall taken care of, I turned my attentions to Gerardo. I thought that maybe he was keeping his distance, thinking I was really interested in Marshall. I made it clear around school that I was now available, and although every other boy in school began fighting to carry my books or sit with me at lunch, Gerardo wasn’t one of them.

  There were times I caught him watching me, though. During classes we had together, he would steal a peek, then look the other way and not look at me again for the rest of the period. I would squeeze my way into his lunch table, and within a minute, he would excuse himself and go sit somewhere else. Winning him over should have been easy, but now I realized this was trickier than vengeance.

  When I started finding love letters shoved into the vent of my locker, I thought for sure they were from Gerardo—that he had finally come around. But no, those letters were all from Marshall, professing his undying love, hoping beyond hope to win me back. I sent his letters back to him with his spelling corrected.

  Most popular. Most attractive. Most desirable. I was all of those things, but it simply wasn’t enough. Well, if I could strip Marisol of her beauty, then I could strip Gerardo of his resistance. I knew I could!

  I caught up with him one day after school walking home, and I matched his pace, even though he was trying to walk faster.

  “I thought you were going to call me.”

  “What for?” he said. “It looks like you’ve got all the boys you can handle.”

  I shrugged. “I’m still waiting for the right one.”

  “Well, good luck finding him.”

  He took a shortcut through a weedy yard and into an alley. I followed. “You’ve been avoiding me, and you know it,” I told him. “I just want to know why.”

  “Because I don’t think you’re good for me,” he said. “In fact, I don’t think you’re good for anyone.” That was Gerardo, all right. Always honest.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yeah, you do. You toyed with Marshall, and now he’s even more of a blithering idiot than he was before. You did something to Marisol, too, didn’t you? I can’t prove it, and I don’t know what it was you did—but you did something that’s keeping her out of school.”

  “Gerardo,” I said, still forcing sweetness into my voice, “you make me sound like a monster.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “the Flock’s Rest Monster.”

  I pursed my lips, keeping my mouth shut. He looked at me then, for the first time in our whole conversation.

  “Yeah, I know who you are, Cara. Maybe no one else does, but I do, so you can drop the act.”

  At first I was going to deny it—but what good would that have done? I took a deep breath and let it out. “When did you find out?”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a little slip of paper, handing it to me. It was the phone number I had written down for him on my first day back. Like an idiot, I had written “Cara” instead of “Linda.”

  “At first I didn’t believe it,” Gerardo said. “But the more I watched you, the more I realized who you were. You knew too many things about too many people.”

  Okay, I thought, it was time to change strategies now. No more deceit. It was time for honesty. “I can tell you how it happened—how I changed.”

  “I don’t want to know.” He hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder and picked up his pace again. “Everything about you scares me, Cara. The way you look, the way you act…” I wasn’t expecting to hear that—not from him. “You got yourself a whole school to play with,” he told me. “So go find yourself a guy who can only see your face, and not the rest.”

  “Why are you treating me like this? I’m still the same person I was before.”

  He shook his head. “No, you’re not. You were just ugly on the outside before. But your inside and outside kind of switched places, didn’t they?”

  His words were like a brutal slap. I wanted to strike back, but I held my temper because I knew it would chase him away. Instead I turned on my newfound charm. “You could be dating the most beautiful girl in Flock’s Rest,” I said to him. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “How long before you spit me out like you spat out Marshall?”

  “You’re not Marshall,” I told him. “I would never do that to you.”

  Suddenly I heard a twang of metal, and Gerardo’s lip began to bleed.

  He put his hand up to his lip and took it away, seeing the blood on his fingers. The blood had now spread across his braces. The wire on his top teeth had sprung and was sticking out at a weird angle. One of those teeth was turned funny. Just one—like it had fought so powerfully against the wire trying to hold it in place that the wire busted.

  With his hand held to his mouth, he said, “You see, Cara? Nothing good happens when you’re around.”

  And he hurried across the street to get away from me.

  What does it take to turn a heart black? One too many cruel tricks? One too many rejections? Or maybe it’s something we do to ourselves. Evil people never think of themselves as evil. Maybe because they still remember themselves as good—or perhaps they see a future self resting peacefully in a time and place of goodness. A place where they can repent for all the awful things they did to get there.

  I can’t say exactly where I was, or what I was on the inside. All I knew was that I was stunning to the eye, and it blinded me to so many things. After that day, I took to brooding about Gerardo, the way that Marshall brooded about me, and feeling more and more miserable about how things had turned out. I didn’t notice that fewer and fewer boys were wanting to sit with me at lunch, and that fewer and fewer girls wanted to talk with me after school. I did start to notice other things, though.

  Flock’s Rest had never been the most beautiful town in the world, but it wasn’t an eyesore, either. Or at least I had never seen it that way. Just as with people, I was seeing our town through completely different eyes. Eyes that had known the simple, perfect beauty of De León.

  I had been home for about six weeks when I really became aware of it. Driving in the car with Momma one day, I spent some time looking—really looking at the state of our town. Lawns were patchy and yellow, and the paint on the houses wasn’t just peeling, it was fading like someone had come in the middle of the night and robbed the color. The houses themselves had a weariness to them. Their windows looked like old eyes. Their porches seemed like mouths hung open in exhaustion. Every building in town sagged under its own weight, as if it was just longing to crumble to the ground.

  “Momma,” I asked, “has Flock’s Rest always looked this bad?”<
br />
  “Well, honey,” she said, “a town gets old.”

  It was more than that, though. I pointed out a garden we passed. “Just look at that!” I remembered that garden—it used to be all full of rosebushes, but now it was half-dead, and the few hardy plants still alive looked like the weeds that pop up in a highway divider.

  Momma shrugged. “It’s just the time of year, dear. Even though we’re not in a snow zone, not all that many things grow in the winter. And besides, maybe the owner likes it growing wild.”

  I would have argued, but just then we hit a pothole that nearly ejected me from the car and completely rattled my thoughts. Seemed to me there were more ruined roads in town, too.

  I looked at the barren gray streets and sad, sallow faces around me, day after day, and I began to long once more for that place of color and light. That valley more beautiful than a painting. Because I might have been the queen of Flock’s Rest, but I couldn’t imagine a life where there was no beauty to see except for my own reflection.

  On Valentine’s Day, I walked home from school alone, just as I had in the days when I was ugly. I had begun to feel sick halfway through school that day, but I had become so good at denial, I told myself it was nothing and believed it.

  When I came through the gate of our trailer park, I had to do a quick double take to make sure I was in the right place. Our park, which wasn’t too attractive a place to begin with, had fallen into the realm of utter squalor. The lawn blight sweeping through town seemed to have begun here. It had killed much of the grass, but no one cared. They were as untroubled as my mother was with her window boxes, which now grew nothing but mildew and toadstools.

  When I stepped inside the door, Momma was standing there, holding the phone and looking a bit ill herself.

  “Yes,” she said. “I understand. Our prayers will be with them.”

  “Prayers?” I asked. “Who are we praying for?”

  “Sit down, honey.”

  It’s never a good thing when one of your parents tells you to sit down. Especially in that deeply understanding tone of voice. I did as I was told.

  “I’m afraid something awful has happened,” Momma told me. Then she took my hands in hers. “It’s Marshall Astor,” she said. “He’s had a horrible accident.”

  21

  Consumption

  The whole story came over the phone line in bits and pieces that night from neighbors and family friends. I sifted the truth out of rumor and exaggeration, and had a pretty good idea what happened.

  Marshall Astor had taken his mother’s car out for a joyride. He went speeding on bald tires and lost control on a bridge, halfway across the river—the same bridge where his father had gone sailing off into oblivion. The county, however, had reinforced the guardrails after his father’s accident, so instead of crashing into the river, Marshall ended up with a smashed front end, a deployed air bag, and an unspecified number of broken bones. Although everyone called it an “accident,” and a “coincidence” that it happened to be on the same bridge, I don’t think there was anything accidental about it…And I don’t think Marshall ever once lost control of that car.

  I went to visit him the next evening, after he got home from the hospital. I wasn’t sure what to expect from him, but I knew that I had to go.

  His mother looked at me with frightened, distrustful eyes—like she might have looked at me when I was still ugly.

  “Come in,” she said. “Let me tell Marshall you’re here.”

  I waited in the living room until Marshall rolled out in a wheelchair a few moments later. He had black eyes from the punch of the air bag against his face. Both of his ankles were in casts. The impact had broken them.

  “Hi, Linda.”

  “Hi, Marshall.”

  As sweet as revenge had felt a few weeks before, it felt empty now. Empty and dark. Just by looking at him, I knew that I was really the one who had driven him off the bridge. He was in love. People in love do desperate things. My own responsibility in this was almost impossible to bear, because no matter how black my heart had become, it was still beating. No matter how deep a coma my conscience was in, it couldn’t ignore this.

  We sat there for a long time, not saying anything. I tried to look everywhere in the room but at him, and yet I kept being drawn back to his gaze.

  “Why did you do it, Linda?” he finally said. “I loved you. Why did you do what you did?”

  I thought about all the answers I could give him—or, more accurately, all the ways I could worm out of answering him. “It’s complicated,” I could tell him—or “We weren’t right for each other.” But I knew I owed him far more than an excuse.

  “Why, Linda?” he asked again. And so I told him.

  “Because my name isn’t Linda. It’s Cara.”

  His face went through a whole series of emotions. Disbelief, denial, and finally acceptance. All in about five seconds.

  “Cara DeFido,” he said, and repeated it, maybe just to make sure he heard himself right. “Cara DeFido.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry.” It was lame to say it now, but still, I had to do it.

  As I watched him, I saw his face going red. He began to bite his lower lip, and tears began to flow from his eyes. Not just flow, but gush. “You had a good time that night, didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “The homecoming dance. I promised you’d have a good time, and you did, right? At least until I puked in the punch bowl.”

  He laughed the tiniest bit through his tears.

  “I did have a good time,” I admitted. “I wish I hadn’t ruined it.”

  Marshall tried to wipe away his tears, but he didn’t have much luck, because they just kept on coming. “I agreed to do it because of the car,” he said. “I guess that makes me a creep.”

  I tried to put myself in his place. If someone offered me a car to go on a date with Tuddie—with Aaron—a few years ago, would I have done it? Even if I was the most popular girl in school? When it comes down to it, who wouldn’t?

  “I’m no one to judge,” I told him.

  “For what it’s worth, I had a good time that night, too,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to, but I did.”

  By now he had gotten his tears under control. He moved his legs and grimaced slightly. So I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small piece of paper. A paper that was woven from strands of swan gossamer.

  “Here,” I said, handing it to him. “Tear this in half, and slide a piece of it inside both of your casts,” I said. “It will help you heal.”

  He rubbed it between his fingers. “Feels nice,” he said. “What does ‘find the answers’ mean?”

  “Nothing,” I told him. “Nothing at all.”

  As I walked home from Marshall’s that night, I felt dizzy, weak, and feverish. My head pounded, and it took all my strength just to make it home. Harmony had warned me of this. Why hadn’t I listened?

  “Did you see Marshall?” Momma asked as I came in. “How was he? Is he all right?”

  “He’ll be fine,” I told her.

  Then she took a good look at me. “Cara, are you feeling all right? You’re not looking yourself.”

  I was afraid to think about what that meant. “I’m fine!” I pushed my way past her, went into my room, and tried to lock the door behind me, but this was one day that Momma wasn’t giving me my privacy.

  “Honey,” she said, “what happened to Marshall isn’t your fault. He’s a troubled boy.”

  “He’s a shallow boy,” I told her. “He wasn’t troubled until I came along to trouble him.”

  Momma smiled slightly. “Don’t give yourself that much credit, dear. You may be beautiful now, but you’re not Helen of Troy.”

  I lay down on my bed and thought about that. The face that launched a thousand ships. A woman who brought two empires into bloody battle. I wondered if Helen of Troy had been to the fountain herself.

  “Momma,” I asked, “did you like me more before? Has being beautiful
made me horrible?”

  “I love you the same either way.”

  I found it both comforting and unsettling. It was good to know I was loved before, but now I wanted to be loved more.

  Momma sat down beside me and touched her hand to my forehead. “Cara, you’re burning up.”

  “It’s just exhaustion,” I told her. “I’ll sleep it off.”

  She looked doubtful, but she let me be, promising to check in on me during the night.

  My body was aching, and I knew that whatever this illness was, it wasn’t something that anyone could do anything about. I closed my eyes and felt myself falling into a troubled, fevered sleep, from which I was afraid I’d never wake up.

  When I finally opened my eyes, I was in Abuelo’s mansion, standing in his grand reflectorium—but Abuelo wasn’t there. I was alone. Then I heard an unexpected voice.

  I will make it my business to be there when your destiny comes calling.

  It was Miss Leticia! I turned to see her right in the center of the room, seated at her little garden table, with a pot of tea.

  “Come, child,” she said. “Tea’s waiting. Drink it before it gets cold.”

  “But…but you’re dead.”

  Miss Leticia laughed and laughed. “Not so dead that we can’t have a nice visit.”

  I sat across from her, knowing that this had to be a dream, but also knowing I wouldn’t awake until we had had our little visit.

  She poured a single cup of tea, but it was clear as water, and when I looked into the cup, it was swirling with colors, like the northern lights.

  “Hurry,” she said. “Drink your destiny before it’s too late.”

  I picked up the cup and looked down into it, but the water was gone. Instead it was full of mud. Mud swarming with worms. I tried to drop the cup, but my hands wouldn’t move.

  Miss Leticia sighed. “My, my, my,” she said. “Will you look at that. Nothing more rancid than ruined destiny. Y’still gotta drink it, though—and the longer you wait, the worse it’ll get.”