I opened my door to the fading smell of fried chicken. Dinner was over, but I knew there would be a plate in the fridge for me. My chicken would have its skin peeled off, because Momma had heard that oily foods make acne worse, so what she serves me always has the flavor and consistency of hospital food.
Mom was in her bedroom, probably reading a self-help book; Vance was in his room listening to music so loud I could hear which song was playing in his earphones; and Dad was in the living room, drinking a beer and watching RetroToob, the cable network devoted completely to old, goofy TV shows he grew up with.
I quietly closed my door again, not hungry for dinner or family time. Instead I turned to face my dresser and played the game I played every night. It's called Does Cara Have the Nerve? See, there's this big old mirror attached to my dresser. I've never actually looked into it because it's covered with a sheet, just like most of the other mirrors in our house. I hear in some places it's a custom to cover mirrors with a sheet when you're in mourning, and I wonder sometimes if my parents are in mourning for the beautiful daughter they never had. Anyway, my momma won't let me get rid of the mirror because it's part of a set. So, just to tick her off, I glued a bunch of ugly things on the sheet covering the mirror: a baboon's butt, a dentist's image of advanced tooth decay, plastic vomit. Momma says I have a twisted sense of humor, but at least I have one.
My heart was racing that night, though, because I thought that this might be the night I win the game. This could be the day I actually defied her, and everyone else in this hateful town, by tempting fate and looking into that mirror.
I took a step closer to the dresser. My conversation with Miss Leticia had made me feel strong, purposeful. That's a good word, P-U-R-P-O-S-E-F-U-L. Spelling it even made me feel more so. I reached up my hand, and took another step closer. D-E-T-E-R-M-I-N-E-D.
My words gave me power. They made me feel that I could change the way things had always been. That I could pull off the sheet, look myself in the face, and the mirror would hold the reflection, just like it did for other people. For normal people. My fingertips were against the sheet now. V-I-C-T-O-R-I-O-U-S.
But who was I kidding? I knew what would happen. The mirror would see me and shatter, just like every mirror. A-G-O-N-I-Z-I-N-G.
And then I would have to explain to Mom and Dad exactly what had possessed me to destroy this lovely piece of furniture. A-B-O-R-T.
In the end, my courage failed me. My words failed me. I pulled my hand back from the sheet and let it be. The game was lost. Tonight was not the night―but I refused to feel miserable about it. Mom with her helpless self-help books, and Dad with his TV nostalgia, had misery wallowing down to an art―but I refused to join them . . . because, as Miss Leticia had said, I have a destiny.
I just had to figure out what it was.
4
The mercy seat
That night―the night before I received the mysterious letter―I had a dream.
It was a driving dream―I'd had a lot of those since Mom had taught me to drive a few months before. I was behind the wheel of her big old pink Caddie, and we were driving down a highway, heading out of Flock's Rest.
"Just keep your eyes on your destination," Mom said, which didn't make sense, because I couldn't see my destination, but people don't talk sense in dreams―especially your parents.
We crossed over the river where Marshall's dad went the way of the Titanic and out onto a long stretch of highway.
We kept passing Dad's old, faded billboards―just like we always do in real life. WE TREAT YOU RIGHT-O AT DEFIDO, said one. BUY AT DEFIDO: SOLID CARS FROM SOLID TIMES, said another.
Those signs were put up at a time when everyone thought our family was riding a wave to better places, but instead we wiped out. Dad's biggest consolation was that the billboard company that rented the signs went out of business before his car lots began to fail―and so all those advertisements for DeFido Motors were still up. Sure they were fading and peeling, but anywhere you drove in the county, you could still see my dad's smiling face looking down on you, along with some car he had once tried to sell.
"The clock broke during my fifteen minutes of fame," Dad would say every time we passed one of those old billboards.
In the dream, though, we came up on the billboards much more often than in real life. The next one featured Mom's Cadillac. I remembered seeing it before on one of the roads heading north out of town.
"Look, there's us!" Mom said in the dream. "Wave hello!"
We passed the billboard, and then I heard a different voice beside me. A younger voice.
"Shouldn't you be getting home?" the voice said. "Everyone's waiting for you."
I turned to see a boy about my age sitting next to me in the car, where my mother had been. I couldn't quite see his face― all I could see were his eyes. They were beautiful. A shade of blue that couldn't exist anywhere but in a dream.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Better keep your eyes on the road," he said gently, but I couldn't look away from him.
"Mom, she's doing it again!"
I woke up from the dream to find myself standing in the corner of my room. The northwest corner, to be exact. As I stepped away from the corner and turned toward Vance, I could feel a stiffness in my legs that told me I had been standing there for hours.
"I haven't been doing anything," I told him. "I... I just thought I saw a spider, that's all."
"Yeah, sure," said Vance, shaking his head and walking away.
I wasn't lying when I'd told Miss Leticia I didn't sleepwalk― because I don't actually walk, I just stand. I'm a sleep-stander. Always in the same corner, too―and I often wondered if there was no wall there, would I still stand in the same spot, or would I be a walker after all?
Thinking about it had never yielded much, so I just accepted it as one more weird thing about me. It wasn't until much later that I began to get truly curious about it and think there might be a reason for it. But on that morning, I was as clueless as ever.
With the dream quickly fading, I dressed and went out into the kitchen. Things were back to normal, as if the spelling bee had never happened. We sat at the breakfast table, with silence punctuated by cereal crunches and "pass-the-milks," as usual.
A few years back, Momma had gotten it into her head that a healthy day begins with a family breakfast, so the four of us always sat down together in the morning, even on the days it would make us late for school.
"The occasional tardy is acceptable," Momma would say. "Starting your morning without quality time is not."
You have to understand, my momma had gone to college for two reasons. One, to get a degree in psychology. Two, to catch a successful husband destined for great things. In the end, she got neither.
At breakfast that morning, I could see Vance looking back and forth between Mom and Dad, and I could tell he was waiting for the right time to talk about something. Finally, when Dad started to push his chair back, getting ready to leave, Vance blurted it out.
"I've been thinking..." he began.
"That's new," I said.
Usually Vance would sneer at me when I said something like that, but he didn't. Whatever his mind was wrapped up in, it was wrapped up completely. He started biting his lower lip, making his slightly buckteeth stick out like Chuck E. Cheese.
"Thinking about what?" Dad said.
"About school and stuff. I figure, being that I'm in eighth grade and all, and that I'll be starting high school next year and all... I was thinking maybe I might wanna go to that Catholic high school."
"We're not Catholic," Momma reminded him calmly.
"Well, you don't have to be," Vance said. "St. Matthew's takes all types, just as long as your grades are good enough, and mine are."
"I'm not paying for a private high school," Dad said. "Nothing wrong with a public education."
By now I could tell Vance was getting antsy.
"All right, then, not St. Matthew's. Wha
t about Billington High?"
"That's twenty miles away," said Dad.
"Yeah, but their football team's ten times better than Flock's Rest High."
That caught Dad's attention. Now Momma was the one getting nervous. "You fixing to play football?"
"What if I am?" said Vance.
Dad looked at him like he'd just stepped into the Twilight Zone. That's because Vance was about as athletic as an end table. He was the star of the middle-school chess team, and I always joked with him that the only sports injury he'd ever get was carpal tunnel from lifting heavy queens. No, Vance was not fixing to play football. I knew what this was about, even if my parents did not.
"Vance just doesn't want to go to the same school as me," I announced. "He doesn't want to be the kid brother of the Flock's Rest Monster."
Vance looked down into his Apple Jacks. "That's not true," he said, but by the way he said it, you could tell it was.
"Tell you what," said Dad. "If you go out for a sport this year, make the team, and stay on that team for the whole season, I'll make sure you go to whatever high school you want, no questions asked."
"Yes, sir," said Vance. It was the first time I'd ever heard him call my dad "sir" outside of a spanking or grounding. He continued to stare into his Apple Jacks, probably pondering the chances that he would actually succeed.
Both Dad and Vance left that morning without ever meeting my eye . . . but what surprised me was that Momma wouldn't look at me, either.
Our school is an old brick building, with a gym that smells like sweat and varnish and a cafeteria that smells faintly of Clorox and beef gravy. It was built way back when schools were institutions, like hospitals and insane asylums. At recess I saw Marisol Yeager lingering in a downstairs hallway, surrounded by her clique of socialites. I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of seeing me try to avoid her. I walked right past her, and she stepped in front of me.
"After last night, I'd think you'd be too ashamed to show your face in school," she said, her mouth working up and down with her usual wad of chewing gum.
I held back a smirk. I had seen Marshall limping up the steps into school this morning. It was my guess that he wouldn't tell anyone what had happened last night, because it would incriminate him as the graveyard vandal. Marisol, however, was not smart enough to keep her mouth shut.
"Don't you think I know that you and that old witch were working together?" she said. "You two are, like, in collision with each other."
"The word is collusion," I told her. "C-O-L-L-U-S-I-O-N."
She pursed her pretty lips angrily. Marisol hated when I spelled things for her. She had her reasons. "Here," she said. "Spell this." She raised her hand, about to flip me her favorite gesture, but before she could, I grabbed her wrist, spun her around, and wrenched her arm behind her back.
She bleated in pain, then counterattacked, stomping on my foot with her heel almost hard enough to break bones. When she pulled free, she swung her arm and hit me in the face so hard I saw stars, like in a cartoon.
I didn't want to let Marisol win, but hitting her back would just turn this into a catfight, and that simply wasn't my style. Then I realized I had a weapon that could strike at her little socialite heart. Thank goodness I had just come from art class.
I reached into my backpack and, with the dexterity of a gunslinger, took out a little bottle of drawing ink, spun off the cap, and dumped the entire thing down the front of Marisol's pretty pink designer blouse. It soaked in and spread like black blood from a wound.
She just stood there, her hands out stiff, little clicks coming from her throat instead of words.
"There," I said. "Now your outside's as black as your inside."
As I walked away she finally found her voice again, and called me every name her limited vocabulary had to offer. "You're gonna pay for this!" she yelled. "You wait and see! You're gonna pay!"
My breakfast table at home might have had every seat filled, but my lunch table at school was always empty. Some other schools have all these open-air spaces where you can go to eat lunch under a tree or something like that. They have places where you can be alone without bringing attention to the fact. We didn't have those kinds of spaces. Our cafeteria had nothing but tables for ten. Even on the occasions when I started out at a table with other kids, they always migrated elsewhere, and my table for ten became a table for one.
I would take my time eating, hogging that table for as long as I possibly could. I figured if they're not gonna sit with me, let the other tables be as cramped and uncomfortable as possible. Serves them all right.
The spot directly across from me was what I liked to call "the mercy seat." That's from the Bible. It's what they called the lid on the Arc of the Covenant, which held the Ten Commandments. The Israelite high priest would make offerings to God there. My mercy seat was a little bit different, though. See, every once in a while, someone would come and sit across the table from me. They did it out of guilt, and to feel better about themselves. They'd sit down, exchange a few awkward words with me, then go off feeling like they'd done a kind deed. They had treated the Flock's Rest Monster with a godly kind of mercy. I used to like it when people sat there, until I realized no one ever came more than once.
It had been a while since anyone had sat in the mercy seat―a month, maybe more―so I was surprised when someone came over. Today's guest was Gerardo Sanchez.
"Hey," he said as he sat down with his tray.
I just kept on eating.
"So what do you think this is?" he asked, pointing to the lumpy white stuff slithering all over an English muffin on his plate.
"Creamed gopher," I suggested. "The Tuesday special."
He chuckled. "Yeah, probably." Then he sat there in an uncomfortable silence that irked me.
"So, like, why do you sit here all by yourself?" he finally asked.
I liked his direct approach, so I answered him. "I don't sit all by myself. I just sit. Being all by myself, that's other people's idea." More silence, and so I said, "Are you gonna ask me to the homecoming dance?"
The look on his face was worth the price of admission and then some. It made me laugh out loud suddenly, and some creamed gopher came out of my nose. Seeing that made him laugh. I wiped the stuff off.
"So you weren't serious?"
"Hey," I said, "I'm serious if you are."
"Nah," he said with a certainty that left no room for doubt.
When it came to looks, Gerardo was no Marshall Astor, but he wasn't bad-looking, either. He had dark, decent hair; a body that was a little bit scrawny, but not at all mealy. His teeth had once been crooked, but braces were taking care of that. All in all, Gerardo was an average-looking guy, and from what I could see, he always had the attention of a few average-looking girls. It didn't take long for me to figure out what he was doing in the mercy seat.
"So which girl are you trying to impress?" I asked.
He gave me that openmouthed, shrug-shouldered I-don't-know-what-you-mean expression, and so I gave him that tilt-headed, cross-armed, I-ain't-buying-it look.
A moment more, and he caved. "Nikki Smith," he said with a sigh. "She thinks I'm not sensitive. I figured coming over here and talking to you might make her think different." He looked at me for another second, then began to get up. "I'm sorry," he said. "It was dumb."
On another day I might have let him go, but today I was feeling vulnerable. Although I had gotten used to being alone, some days were better than others when it came to accepting it.
"Don't leave yet," I whispered to him. "If you really want to make it stick, you have to sit here with me until the bell rings. She'll really be impressed by that."
He took on a cornered-animal look.
"Yeah, I know, sitting with me for all of lunch is a fate worse than death."
"Well, not worse," he answered, and he made himself comfortable in the mercy seat again.
"So, are you?" I asked.
"Am I what?"
"You said you wanted to show Nikki that you're sensitive. Are you?"
"I don't know. I guess." He thought about it. "I'm not insensitive . . . or at least I'm not insensitive on purpose."
"Well, that's better than nothing, I guess."
"Why do girls always want sensitive guys anyway?"
"They don't want their feelings hurt," I told him. "They figure a sensitive guy won't hurt their feelings, even if he breaks up with them." I noticed that Gerardo had eaten his dessert first, so I spooned my Jell-O onto his plate. A reward for taking the mercy seat. "Of course, I've got no feelings left to hurt. An insensitive guy would be fine with me, as long as I got to smack him if he got too insensitive."
He laughed at that, then leaned a bit closer. "So tell me, because I gotta know―how come you and Marisol hate each other so much?"
"Isn't it obvious?" I said. "Look at her, look at me."
Gerardo shook his head. "No―it's more than that. It's like you two have got... what's it called... a vendetta." Good word, I thought. V-E-N-D-E-T-T-A.
"She sat next to me in science class in seventh grade." And that was all I told him. I didn't tell Gerardo how she got by in science by copying answers from the boys she flirted with― there were always one or two within cheating distance. That particular semester she got seated in a corner with just me next to her and Buford Brainard in front of her―a kid who had all of his brains in his name, and none in his head.
So Marisol had a choice: Either she could study for the tests or cheat from me. You can guess which she chose. Up till then, Marisol's nastiness was limited to the occasional cruel jab to keep me in my place. After all, her circle was so far above mine, most of the time she didn't see me. However, things did not go well for either of us that semester, and our general feeling of dislike bloomed into something vicious.
Duckling Ugly Page 3