Duckling Ugly

by Нил Шустерман

  Marisol followed me before class started. She was trying to keep me from seeing her, but I knew she was there, so when the bell rang, I ducked into the girls' bathroom, knowing she would follow. Let her think she had cornered me.

  Sure enough, she came in about ten seconds later. It was just the two of us in there, and Marisol had a look in her eyes that was as murderous as any I'd ever seen.

  "Good morning, Marisol," I said brightly. "Having yourself a good day?"

  Her hair was unkempt, a little straggly, like she hadn't been using her salon-approved conditioner. I guess she had more things to worry about now than just her hair.

  "You listen and you listen good," said Marisol. "I know you are not who you say you are, 'cause I've been checking with folks I know, and there's no Linda DeFido from Billington High."

  I calmly dipped my hands under the faucet and washed my face. Was that a zit I saw trying to come through on my left cheek? No―it couldn't be.

  "You're right, Marisol," I told her.

  "So you had better tell me who you really are."

  I smiled and took my time. "Don't you know? I'm the girl who just stole away your boyfriend and made a fool out of you. Your reign as the queen of Flock's Rest High is over."

  Then the fury in Marisol's eyes took a strange turn. "You know," she said, "we don't have to be enemies." It was the same expression she had on that day in seventh grade when she had asked me to take the fall for her cheating ways. "People don't un­derstand girls like us," Marisol said. "Not really. Why spend all our time tearing each other down when we could share everything?"

  "I don't share anything with you, and I never will." I started to move toward her slowly, and she backed away until she hit the tile wall. She was still angry, yes, but fear was taking over.

  "You still don't recognize me, do you? Maybe because you never really looked at me."

  "I don't understand," said Marisol.

  "You don't? Well, let me spell it out for you. G-R-O-T-E-S-Q-U-E."

  And I saw in her eyes the moment she figured it out.

  "No! It's impossible ... Cara?"

  Her face began to stretch in horror and disbelief. I took an­other step closer.

  "A-B-O-M-I-N-A-B-L-E."

  She couldn't speak now. Her throat had closed up; she could barely breathe.

  I grabbed her by her pretty little sweater, pushing her hard against the wall. And that's when things, as strange as they were, went to a whole new level, as I spelled one more word for her, looking her dead in the eyes.

  "M―"

  The color of her eyes went from bright blue to a muddy gray.

  "O―"

  Acne began to rupture forth from her skin like the earth pushing up mountains.

  "N―”

  Her earlobes drooped, and one whole ear started to sink lower than the other.

  "S―"

  Her strawberry blond hair with the pretty highlights lost its sheen and started to tangle.

  "T―"

  Her pouty little lips drooped and cracked.

  "E―"

  Her teeth began to fade to a sickly shade of gray.

  "R!"

  I let go of her, and stepped back to look at her transforma­tion. I should have been horrified, but all I could feel was satis­faction as deep as the Caldero cavern.

  "My, my, Marisol―you're as ugly as ... roadkill!"

  Marisol reached up, feeling the change as she touched her face, and she screamed. "What did you do?" she wailed. "What did you do to me?!" Even her voice had changed. It was the raspy screech of a hag.

  She caught her reflection in the mirror, but only for an instant before the mirror shattered. Then she ran into a stall to hide, sobbing, as if it was the end of the world.

  I stepped gently over the broken glass, feeling it crackle be­neath the soles of my shoes, and I picked up a mirror shard from the ground, catching a bit of my own reflection in it.

  There was no zit on my cheek―not even a red spot. I must have been wrong. My complexion was creamy pure.

  I was filled with absolute contentment as I strode out of that restroom. That was the moment I knew that I wasn't going back to De León. Not tonight, not tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. No matter what I had promised―no matter how much I would miss Aaron, what I had now in Flock's Rest was worth the cost.

  Harmony had been wrong. She said there would be no place for me in my old life, but I now knew otherwise. In De León, I was one face in a crowd of beautiful people, but here I was the star. And I was going to enjoy it.

  20

  Uglifications

  Sometimes you make decisions that you know are wrong, but you make them anyway. When you're a little kid you think, Should I hit my brother and make him cry, even though I know I'm going to get in trouble for it? But the force of your will wrestles down the sense in your head and you do it anyway.

  When you get older, the situations aren't quite as simple, and although you tend to have more sense, you tend to be more will­ful as well. Sometimes that sense wins out, and other times you set yourself up for a world of suffering.

  My parents seemed happy that I had chosen to stay, although I think they, like Vance, would have been relieved if I didn't. It wasn't so hard making the transition to being Linda DeFido. My father knew a guy who knew a guy who could make all the com­puters in the world believe you were Marilyn Monroe, if that's what you wanted. He even managed to get fictional records transferred over from Billington High, with grades not quite as high as my real ones. Like that mattered now.

  As for what happened to Marisol, I didn't understand at the time how I had "uglified" her. I thought that maybe it was like Miss Leticia had once said: Spells and spelling weren't all that different―maybe I had a little bit of witch in me after all. Maybe the fountain had brought it out.

  She stayed in that bathroom stall all day long. The counselor couldn't get her out. The principal couldn't get her out. In the end, her parents came and her daddy kicked the door open.

  I wasn't there to see the commotion when they saw what she looked like. All I know is they rushed her off to the hospital. The rumor was that she had come down with some rare disfiguring disease, like acute leprosy or something.

  I had my date with Marshall that Saturday. He talked about himself, bragging mostly. I made up stuff about my fictional life as Linda DeFido.

  He walked me home, his arm around my shoulder.

  "I'd like to spend more time with you," he said. "Marisol wasn't right for me. I mean, I feel bad about her getting sick and all, but, hey, I've got my own life, right?"

  He smiled at me. There was a gentle look in his eyes. Was Marshall Astor falling in love with me? I wondered. How deeply would he have to fall until I could effectively break his heart? I thought about that painful night at the homecoming dance. True, a lot of what had happened was my own fault, but I still couldn't wait to make him feel as miserable as I had felt when I ran out that night. Maybe then he'd have a glimpse of what it had been like to be me.

  "Sure, Marshall," I said, gently rubbing his arm. "I'd like to see you again."

  The moment became awkward, and he looked off―and pointed at the window boxes. The ones that held my mom's marigolds.

  "Someone oughta water those," he said.

  I looked at them. They had completely lost their petals. They were all stem and seedpod―twisted leggy things with little round black heads.

  "I guess everything around here can't be as beautiful as you," Marshall said. Then he left me at my front door with a kiss that didn't make him puke.

  "Was that Marshall Astor?" Momma asked as I stepped in.

  "Yes. And Dad didn't even have to give him a free car to go out with me."

  Dad grumbled from his spot on the sofa.

  "First that boy Gerardo . . . and now Marshall," Momma said. "Exactly which one are you dating?"

  "Both of them," I told her. "Any of them. All of them." And why not? I could date as many boys as I wanted
. I'd earned that right. And if me seeing Marshall would make Gerardo jealous, all the better.

  "Oh, by the way," I told Momma, "you need to replace your marigolds."

  She wrinkled her brows. "Replace them? Why? They were fine this morning."

  Gerardo never called me. Even though he had my number― even though I made it clear that I wanted him to call, he never did. It was just plain frustrating. Marshall asked me out again, though―and so I agreed to go to the movies with him, if for no other reason than to spite Gerardo.

  At the movie, Marshall held me a little too close, tried to go a little too far, and I slapped him a little too hard. After that, he acted like a scolded puppy for the rest of the night.

  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?"

  "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.