Нил Шустерман: Duckling Ugly

I told him about how, when I was a baby, my father had to take out the rearview and side mirrors in our cars, because I couldn't help but look in them. "They don't have to do it any­more, since now I know better."

"That's wild!"

I guess he was right. It didn't seem wild to me, though. It's amaz­ing the things you grow used to. "There was this one professor at the community college who tried to do a study of it," I told Gerardo. "He thought he could find some kind of scientific explanation."

"So did he?"

"Well, my mother and me went to his laboratory when I was eight. He hooked me up to wires, and computers and stuff. Then he had his assistants bring in mirrors of all shapes and sizes, on the other side of this Plexiglas barrier, and had video cameras recording the results. I looked into each of those mirrors, and I'll tell you, you couldn't have destroyed those mirrors more completely if you'd taken a hammer to them."

"Wow," was all Gerardo could say.

"In the end, the joke was on him," I said. "He couldn't get any of the results on film because the lenses of the cameras blew up, too. I wasn't sad about it, though. In some weird way, it felt like I had won. It's like I had beaten science! Anyway, as we were leaving, I saw the professor guzzle a few swigs of whiskey from a flask, and I heard him say to his workers, 'That girl is so ugly, the mirrors don't just break, they break a sweat.'"

Gerardo laughed nervously, still not sure whether or not to entirely believe it.

So I leaned closer to him and whispered, "I'll show you if you want..."

He found me after the last bell had rung and the school was be­ginning to clear out. In his hand he had a little round makeup compact―the kind that flipped open with a mirror in the top half. He looked around at the crowds of kids going through their lockers and filtering out of school.

"Not here," he said. "Come on." He checked several class­rooms, but they were either locked or there were teachers in­side. Then he tugged on the door of the janitor's closet, and it swung wide. We checked to make sure no one was looking and stepped in, closing the door behind us. The room was cramped and smelled of Pine-Sol. I giggled. The janitor's closet was a no­torious makeout spot. "Bet you never thought you'd be in the janitor's closet with me," I said.

"Don't gross me out," Gerardo answered. "So are you ready?"

"You may want to cover your eyes."

He didn't. Instead he held the little compact at arm's length and flipped it open. "Okay, what do I do now?"

"Just angle it toward me so I can see it."

He shifted it until I caught my reflection. The compact hummed for a second, like a cell phone set on vibrate, and the glass fractured into a hundred pieces. Some pieces stayed in the little round frame, some flew out. I felt a piece hit my blouse, then I heard it tinkle to the ground.

Gerardo just stared at the compact still clutched in his hand. "That," he said, "was the coolest thing I've ever seen."

Then he tilted his hand slightly. A piece of glass was sticking out of his wrist.

"Oh, crap!" He dropped the compact and reached for the glass with his other hand, grimacing as he pulled it out. It hadn't hit a major vein or anything. Just a couple of drops of blood spilled out. He put his wrist to his mouth to suck the blood off. When he looked at it again, it had already stopped bleeding. He looked at the half-inch sliver of glass in his other hand.

"You know what?" he said. "I'm going to keep this."

"What for?"

"Evidence," he said. "Evidence that Cara DeFido's got some kind of magic."

"Yeah, ugly magic," I said.

"That's better than no magic at all." Then he shook his head. "There's got to be some reason for it," he said.

Find the answers, I thought, and gently touched the pocket where the folded letter rested―but I kept the thought to myself.

That was the day I started wondering if maybe Gerardo was one of the answers I was supposed to find.

It wasn't just Nikki's compact mirror that broke that day. A bar­rier inside of me had broken as well―and Gerardo deciding to keep that little piece of glass made it even worse. I was feeling an emotion I had never allowed myself to feel for anyone. It was dangerous. The thing is, Gerardo acted real with me. He would act one way with his friends, another way with Nikki. But he didn't need to put up a front with me, because I was nothing to him. I guess, strangely, being nothing made me all the more im­portant―and although he began as nothing to me, too―just another short-time occupant of the mercy seat―that was chang­ing. Sure, he only sat with me once or twice a week, but on those days that he didn't, I began to feel a longing that would follow me through the rest of the day. All these years I'd kept my feel­ings for others covered as completely as the mirror in my room, but now that was changing.

Part of me knew those feelings would eventually choke me. But when something takes root, you can't stop its growth. It wasn't any old thing that was growing, either. My feelings for Gerardo were just like Miss Leticia's corpse flower: all ripe and ready to blossom into something that Gerardo would surely find repulsive.

The letter was just about burning a hole in my pocket. I could feel it there every minute of every day. Sometimes I could swear it was moving, rubbing itself against my leg to remind me it was there. Whenever Marisol walked by, giving me a sneer, in­stead of sneering back, I just reached into my pocket and brushed my fingertips across the smooth, soft paper. You have a destiny, that paper said. Marisol can torture you all she wants, however she wants. No amount of roadkill will ever take that away.

I stopped by the library after school one day, to do some in­vestigating. I got on the Internet and searched for a town called De León. I found six of them, but all in different states, none in ours. So then I opened up the atlas―you know the one―it's so big that the library's got to have its own special stand for it. I searched every inch of our state on the map. No De León.

It had been two weeks since I got the letter, and I was still no closer to figuring out who had sent it or why.

I tried not to think too much about it, but the questions in my head just kept coming. How could somebody in some far-off place know what I needed to find? Have they been watching me? Should I be frightened? And what if, after all my searching, this was just another one of Marisol's stupid tricks, designed just to drive me crazy?

I pulled out the note and looked at it again. No. Marisol did not have a sweeping handwriting like this. Her letters were all happy and round. She dotted her i's with hearts. And the paper―this wasn't the kind of paper you found in any stationery store. There was true magic in this note―I knew it in my heart, even if I didn't have any evidence. Yet.

"Can I help you?" the librarian asked.

"Huh?"

"You seem a bit confused; I was wondering if I could help you."

I looked around and found that I was standing in the quiet reading room, facing a blank wall. I hadn't even remembered walking there. I must have been wandering while looking at the note. It was just like the way I would wake up and find myself standing in the corner of my room. I had gotten used to that particular weirdness, but this was the first time I ever remem­bered wake-walking. I felt strangely unsettled and couldn't look that librarian in the eye.

"I'm fine," I told her.

She left, not all that sure that I was.

I'm so stupid―it's just three words , I told myself. Why should three words have such control over me? It was like some sort of magic spell.