Duckling Ugly

by Neal Shusterman

  Then she was gone, the wormy cup was gone, and I was alone, surrounded by Abuelo’s many mirrors, reflecting my beautiful face.

  One mirror wasn’t beautiful, though. One mirror showed me the ugly girl I had once been. This dream mirror held that awful reflection and was strong enough not to break. Then a second mirror showed my old face, and a third. Soon half the mirrors showed me as I once was, while the other half showed what I looked like now. Slowly I walked toward one of the offensive mirrors, and with each step, I felt hotter and hotter, my fever growing—more than just fever, I felt anger as I looked at that horrible face.

  “How dare you come back!” I told it. “After all I’ve been through, how dare you show your ugly face around here.”

  “There are worse things than being ugly,” the nasty reflection said, but I wasn’t going to listen to a thing it said. It had no control over me.

  “I’m stronger than you!” I told it.

  It didn’t answer me—it just waited to see if I truly was. And so I closed my eyes and reached to the core of myself, pulling up all the strength I could muster.

  It wasn’t enough. I could feel myself losing the battle. I knew I had to pull strength from somewhere else, but how could I? Suddenly the answer came to me.

  “I am not ugly!” I declared out loud. “Not inside, not out.” And I began to summon strength from beyond myself.

  “B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L.”

  Spells and spelling. Words. My words. They had the power.

  “R-A-V-I-S-H-I-N-G.”

  I could feel strength coming to me now. I was drawing it from the room around me!

  “S-P-L-E-N-D-I-F-E-R-O-U-S.”

  Beyond the room, I was tapping into the earth itself.

  “G-L-O-R-I-O-U-S.”

  It felt like flood waters spilling into an empty vessel.

  “G-R-A-C-E-F-U-L.”

  A powerful energy filled me, and when I was full to the brim, I opened my eyes. Then I spelled my final word to my hideous reflections.

  “D—”

  I pushed the ugliness away with all the force of my soul, and—

  “I—”

  —one by one those mirrors changed, until every face I saw was a face of absolute beauty.

  “E!”

  A beautiful face everywhere I looked. I had killed the ugliness. I had won! I had won!

  I woke to the grating sound of my alarm clock, and turned it off. It was morning, and my fever was gone. There was a stench in the air, though. It was faint, it was foul, and I couldn’t quite place it.

  I got out of bed and did what I always did since the day I’d gotten back. I caught my gaze in my mirror, tossed my hair until it fell into perfect place, smiled that million-dollar smile. I thought about the dream. No cup of worms for me! I had beaten the illness, Marshall would recover, I would get over Gerardo. Things would be fine. I went out to join my family for breakfast.

  The smell was worse in the rest of the house, reminding me of the roadkill that had once filled my room. “What is that god-awful stench?” I asked as I walked into the kitchen.

  “What stench, dear?” Momma said.

  She was at the sink, washing dishes, and Vance had his nose in the refrigerator. Only Dad was sitting down, the paper open wide in front of him.

  So I sat down across from him, and when Dad lowered the newspaper, what I saw made me scream.

  At the sound, Momma dropped a glass, and it crashed on the floor.

  “Cara! What in God’s name?”

  Exactly what I thought. What in God’s name? Because the face before me was not the one I’d known yesterday. My father’s teeth, always a little bit yellow, were practically green now, and twisted in his head like tilted tombstones in a forgotten graveyard. His nose hooked miserably to one side. And he had a Neanderthal ridge on his forehead.

  I looked at Momma for an explanation, but what I saw there was even worse. Hollow gray cheeks, eyes too close and sunk deep in their sockets, a dangling piece of skin on her neck like a turkey, and tufts of blond hair so thin you could see her pink peeling scalp.

  I gasped and put my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming again.

  Nothing more rancid than ruined destiny.

  “Honey, you don’t look right,” said Momma. “Have you still got a fever?”

  I could only shake my head. How could I begin to explain?

  When Vance turned to me, I wasn’t looking at my brother. What stared back at me from the fridge looked more like a rat than a human being. Those front teeth of his that had always had the slightest of overbites now stuck so far out of his mouth he couldn’t get his lips around them.

  “What’s up with her?”

  “Look at yourselves!” I shouted. “Don’t you see?”

  Momma turned to Dad. She squinted her sunken eyes and said, “Honey, you really should shave before you go off to the car lot.”

  “Shave?” I said. “Shave?!”

  I stood up, and the chair behind me fell over.

  “You gonna eat that waffle?” said the rat boy in my brother’s clothes.

  I bolted out of there, running through a trailer park twice as decrepit as it had been the day before. What was it that kept them from seeing the change in one another? I couldn’t explain it any more than I could explain the transformational power of the fountain. Then I thought of my dad, and his old TV shows. Strange hair, ugly clothes, weird talk, all of which had been perfectly normal in a certain time and place.

  Is that what had happened just now? Did my parents and my brother come to see this new ugliness as normal, instantly getting used to it, just as they had gotten so used to that horrible stench that filled the air?

  That stench!

  I was out of the trailer park now, and in a neighborhood of once-beautiful homes. But now the well-tended yards were choked with weeds, and the pavement was cracked and pushing up at awkward angles. The homes had a sagging sadness that nothing short of a bulldozer could repair. The smell kept growing stronger, and now a buzzing sound filled the air as well.

  Then, when I rounded a corner, I saw where the sound and the smell were coming from.

  Vista View Cemetery.

  There were flowers on the hillside of Vista View. Miss Leticia’s roses and ferns had all dried up and died…but one flower had gone to seed. What was it Miss Leticia had said? That the sweet and the rancid both have their place in the world? But what happens when the sweetness is drained away?

  Now covering the hill were dozens upon dozens of corpse flowers. Big, huge, brown petals around oozing stalks. I recognized the buzzing as the sound of a million flies, swarming around the massive blooms, practically blackening the sky.

  I covered my nose, my mouth; I tried not to breathe. I turned in the other direction, running away from it, but there were fresh seedlings in every yard—maybe only six inches tall now, but growing. According to Miss Leticia, the foul plant took three years to bloom—but ugliness now had its own timetable. The way scar tissue filled a wound, something had to fill the space left when what little beauty this town had had was sucked away.

  Sucked away by me.

  It began with Marisol. I had taken her looks by force, so it happened in an instant—but the rest of the town had faded slowly—too slowly for me to really see at first. I was too busy looking in the mirror to notice. Then came the illness—and I now understood the vision I had had during my fevered dream. Harmony had warned me, but I hadn’t understood.

  Consumption.

  What a perfect name for this strange illness—because in the throes of fever, something was most definitely consumed. The fire of beauty now burns within you, Abuelo had told me. It was a fire…and like every fire, it needed to be fueled. There in De León, the fountain didn’t just give us beauty, it fueled it. The water was in the grass, in the trees, in the very air of the valley. But once I left, the flame of beauty had to find its fuel elsewhere. I suppose if my will had been weaker, the flame would have died. My face would have sag
ged, my ugliness would have returned. But that didn’t happen. I was strong, and my beauty was predatory. And so in the depth of my fever, I began to steal beauty around me, consuming it like a wildfire in the wind. Consuming it like…a black hole. My face now truly was a black hole, draining away the beauty of anything that came too close.

  Just how far did this go? Was it just the neighborhood around the trailer park—or did it go farther? There was only one way to find out.

  I ignored the awful stench and unsightly visions around me, and I stumbled my way across the jagged, root-cracked pavement of my ruined town until I reached school.

  22

  Gauntlet of Grunge

  The beige bricks of Flock’s Rest High had gone black, as though they’d been covered in soot. Grime filled the corners of every window. The flagpole leaned like the mast of a sunken ship, and the flag that waved there was tattered and twisted.

  If I’d had any doubts, they were gone as I walked through the halls of my school. Every face I saw was grotesque and stomach churning, and I wondered if after today there would be any mirrors left intact in town. Then I came around a bank of lockers and found myself staring into the bulging eyes of the one person I never wanted to see again.

  Marisol Yeager.

  Her exile hadn’t lasted long. She was back with her friends, laughing, talking, smiling with teeth so gray they could have been made of asphalt. When she saw me, she became quiet. They all became quiet.

  “Well, look who’s here,” she said. “The Flock’s Rest Monster.”

  Her clothes, which had always been so pretty, were a wild mishmash of colors and textures.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Marisol. I never thought I’d say that to her. And even if I said it, I never thought I’d mean it. I looked at the freak show of faces all around me. “I’m sorry. This is not what I wanted. I never meant to make you all so…so…ugly.”

  They looked at me and at one another, not understanding what I was talking about—except for Marisol. She knew who I was; she knew what I had done. Maybe she couldn’t explain it, but she knew.

  “Hasn’t anyone told you?” she said, with a nasty gray-mouthed smile. “Ugly is the new pretty.”

  Her words left a mark on my mind just as black as the ink stain I had left on her blouse. I wanted to scream, but it came out as a weak warble. I ran for the nearest exit—but as I neared the doors, the school security guard stepped in my way. He scowled at me with a face that was little more than a bloated pustule. “Where do you think you’re going?” he said. “Get to class.”

  With every exit guarded, I was trapped within this pageant of monstrosities.

  How do you judge beauty? They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that’s not true. Beauty is in the spirit of the world in which you live. It’s where your world tells you it is—the beholder has no choice in the matter…and if your world finds beauty in the black pit of ugliness, then that’s where your beauty lies. Ugly is the new pretty. The thought followed me through the rest of that horrible day. For the people of Flock’s Rest, it wasn’t just their faces and bodies that had changed, but the yardstick by which they judged.

  At lunch, I found myself at a table alone. Sure, there were others there to start with, but bit by bit they drifted away. Everything was back to the way it had been before. I was the only beautiful girl in town—and yet I was alone, untouchable, while all around me kids with the faces of ghouls laughed and enjoyed themselves.

  I was so lost in my thoughts, I hadn’t realized someone had sat down at the table—and when I looked up, there was Gerardo in the mercy seat.

  “Hi,” he said.

  Gerardo hadn’t been spared. He was just as repulsive as everyone else. I didn’t want to accept that I had done this to him. “Things didn’t turn out the way I wanted.”

  “They never do,” he said.

  “You do see what’s happened, don’t you? No one else seems to notice—but you must see it.”

  And then he shrugged. “Yeah. You get used to it, though.”

  “Used to it? But how do you get used to this?” I grabbed his ear that looked more like a cauliflower. “And this?” I grabbed his chin, which stuck out unevenly from his face.

  He smacked my hand away. “Some things give a face character, all right? I don’t expect you to understand that. Your face is just creamy smooth. No character to it. All right, I’ll admit it: I thought that new face of yours was pretty for a while—but now when I look at you, it doesn’t do a thing for me. It’s like looking at a bowl of sugar. Sure, it’s sweet. But it’s got no flavor.”

  “Why’d you come over here, Gerardo?”

  “To warn you,” he said. He looked to the door of the cafeteria, and now when I glanced around, I could see that most of the kids had cleared out, even though the bell hadn’t rung. “They’re planning something,” he told me. “I thought you should know. And I wanted you to know that I had nothing to do with it.”

  “But you’re not going to stop it, either.”

  He shook his head. “No, I’m not.”

  Then he took my hand and gently placed into my palm a sliver of broken glass. It was the piece of the mirror I had broken for him. The piece he said he would keep forever.

  “Good-bye, Cara.”

  When I stepped out of the cafeteria, I was faced with a gathering of dozens of kids. They stood on either side of the hallway, waiting for me to pass between them. At the far end was the exit, wide open and waiting, with no guard or teachers in sight.

  I strode forward, and felt something soft and wet hit my shoulder. A rotten strawberry. Then something else hit my back. I looked down to see a moldy orange on the floor.

  In an instant, it became a storm. I was pelted from all angles by rotten fruit, rancid meat, and containers of sour milk that exploded on me like water balloons. Someone hurled a rotten melon, which burst painfully upon my chest—but I weathered this storm, walking forward, holding my head high against the gauntlet of grunge, until I finally reached the end of the hall, where their chief conspirator stood between me and the door.

  “You’ve never been one of us,” said Marisol. “You’ll never be one of us…and you don’t belong here.”

  She held in her hand an onion, spotted green from mildew, soft, slimy, and dripping. She hefted it in her hand, ready to hurl it at my face, but then she said, “You know what? I’m not gonna waste this on you.” And then she lifted the onion to her mouth and took a big, healthy bite.

  To this day, I can still smell that putrid onion on her breath when she said, “Get out.”

  23

  The Ugly Places

  Harmony had been right. Aaron had been right. There was no place for me in the outside world, and there were worse things than being ugly. I should have known what would happen when I left, but I was too headstrong to realize the truth. I doubted Flock’s Rest would ever return to the way it had been. Everyone there was cursed to the kind of ugliness that shattered mirrors.

  The true curse was not with them, however. I was the one cursed. I was a thief of beauty, and the only place I could ever live in peace was De León. The ghetto for those too beautiful for this world.

  For weeks, I had blocked out my thoughts of De León. I had chosen not to think about anything or anyone there, but now those thoughts and feelings came flooding back. I missed everyone—but most of all I missed Aaron. After all he had done for me, I had chosen to abandon him. That was as cruel as what I had done to Marshall. He didn’t deserve that! I didn’t know if he’d ever forgive me, but I knew once I’d made it back, I’d have an eternity to make it up to him.

  I didn’t feel the pull this time, as I had when I’d first left town, but I knew where to go. I walked, my feet aching in my shoes. By dusk, the wind had shifted and the smell of corpse flower faded. I walked until my feet were blistered. I didn’t get offered any rides. I didn’t look in the windows of any passing cars, for fear of the face I might see. I took a heavy coat from the coatrack in a roa
dside diner once night fell, and kept on walking well past midnight. I allowed myself only a few hours to sleep in the shelter of a sad, abandoned barn that looked even older and more abandoned at dawn.

  Just like Harmony, I was now wiser than when I left. Just like Harmony, I had gained that wisdom the hard way. Abuelo had accepted her back, hadn’t he? He would accept me back as well; I had to believe it, because it was the only thing that kept me going.

  A few hours later, I finally found what I was looking for. The fading billboard with my mother’s Cadillac and her smiling face, from the days when she and Dad were happy, and their lives were full of hope.

  DEFIDO MOTORS, WHERE FINS STAND FOR STATUS.

  My mere presence made the faint image fade into nothingness. Gray peeling paint against gray warping wood.

  The path behind the billboard was overgrown, but it was still there. I took that path, climbing the foothills until those hills got steeper and turned into mountains. They weren’t the kind of mountains you need heavy equipment to climb, but they were steep enough to make the process slow and exhausting. I was at the end of my endurance, but it wasn’t muscles that drove me now. It was the knowledge that soon I’d be among the beautiful people of De León. Soon I would be home.

  The air was colder and thinner the higher I climbed, until I saw in the distance, on a hill just a few miles away, a white stone building. I knew it was the monastery that Aaron had spoken of.

  Turn west when you see the monastery, he had said.

  I hiked through the night, stumbling, bruising, but never stopping. Scaling these treacherous hillsides in the dark was a dangerous thing. I could have slipped and broken my neck at any time, and put an end to my fragile eternessence—but I found I didn’t care. De León or death, I told myself with every step. De León or death.

  Then, finally, at dawn, I came to the valley. I knew, because I recognized the yellowed hillside and the bald spot where the monks picked up the weekly garbage.