Нил Шустерман - Duckling Ugly

"Welcome to De León," said Aaron. Then he took my hand without any of the hesitation a boy usually has when taking the hand of a girl, and he led me down into the valley.

My body ached as I walked, but I was so focused on the sights it didn't matter. At the first house we passed, a couple in their twenties was sitting on a porch swing, sipping lemonade, and they waved to us. Their clothes were the same shade of white as Aaron's, which I now knew were soft as velvet, pure as satin. I looked down at what I was wearing. They had taken away my shredded gown and given me a white dress as well, but it wasn't made of the same material as their clothes. What I wore was cot­ton, but their clothes made the purest cotton look as ugly as a potato sack.

The couple came forward. "Good morning, Aaron," the man said. "Hello, Cara. It's good to have you here."

I looked at Aaron, gaping. "But... how does he know my name?"

"Shhh," Aaron said gently. "Just take it in. Enjoy it."

Then the couple clipped some flowers from their beautiful garden and threw them in the path in front of us. I tried to walk around them, but Aaron wouldn't let me. "No," he said. "Walk over them. Crush the petals beneath your feet so their fragrance fills the air."

And so I did.

At every house we passed, people stopped whatever they were doing to say hello, and to throw flowers in our path. One woman came running out of her house to give me a gentle hug. "I'm so glad you pulled through," she said. "My name is Harmony."

Harmony was beautiful―perhaps Momma's age, but without the world-weariness that weighed on my mother's face. In fact, everyone here was beautiful. It wasn't a plastic, fake beauty, like fashion models, or like Marisol. Nothing so skin-deep. Like my ugliness, their beauty went to the bone.

"I tended to your wounds, and Aaron and I took turns sitting with you," Harmony told me. I could still feel those wounds from the greenhouse glass, which had cut me in so many places. I looked at the long gash on my arm. There was no bandage, even though the wound was still red and a bit swollen. It had been stitched closed by sutures so fine I could barely see them. In fact, all my wounds had been sewed the same way.

"I did all the work," Harmony said proudly. "Ninety-five stitches in all."

"Harmony's our seamstress here," Aaron said.

The fact that I was sewn up by a seamstress didn't sit well with me. "No offense, but... aren't there any doctors here?"

Neither of them answered right away. Then Harmony said, "We get by without."

I wanted to ask how―or more importantly, why ―but Aaron gently urged me forward along the path.

Along the way, more flowers were tossed at my feet by smiling residents of the valley, and the perfume of the crushed petals filled the air around me. I began to realize that this was part of some ritual. It made me think of a punishment I heard about from the olden days. When a soldier was found guilty of some criminal act, the other men formed two lines and the offender had to pass between them, while the other men beat him with their fists, or with sticks, or with whatever they wanted to use. It was called a gauntlet, and "running the gauntlet" left a man bro­ken in more ways than one. Well, this was an anti-gauntlet, and the men and women on either side of the road delivered pleasure rather than pain, offering me good wishes and flowers before my feet. I had never felt so accepted in my life.

You might think such a thing would feel good, but you have to understand I wasn't used to acceptance. It felt strange. It was, in its own way, terrifying, and by the time I had come to the far end of the path, my hands and legs were shaking as if the men and women had beaten me.

Aaron put his hand around my waist to give me support as we passed the last of the homes, as if he understood exactly how I felt.

At the end of the path loomed a mansion―the last structure before the walls of the valley closed in. The double doors were wide open and inviting. I hesitated. Experience told me that sometimes the most inviting places are just to lure you to some­thing awful. I tried to sense deceit or hidden intentions in Aaron. Either there were none, or my intuition was broken.

"Come on," Aaron said, gently easing me forward. "He's waiting for you."

"Who's waiting for me?"

Aaron smiled. "We just call him Abuelo. " Grandfather.

The mansion had dozens of rooms. Through the open doors I saw a library, a sunroom, and a huge kitchen. Music poured from the entrance of a grand salon, harpsichord and violin. There was joyous laughter everywhere, and then it occurred to me that with all the voices I heard, both in the valley and in here, I had not heard a single child. It seemed Aaron and I were the youngest ones here. With so many happy couples, shouldn't there be chil­dren? I thought to ask Aaron, but the thought was blasted out of my mind by the sight before me as we neared the center of the mansion.

There was a wide marble staircase, leading up to a closed ma­hogany door adorned in gold. This was the only door I had seen in the entire mansion that wasn't open.

Aaron stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

"Don't be afraid," Aaron said. "Go on. He's expecting you."

I could feel my heart pounding against my ribs, and I thought for sure it would burst halfway up, and I'd tumble back down the stairs. Still, I forced myself forward until I was at the top of the stairs, then I reached for the golden knob on the huge mahogany door and leaned against the door with all my weight.

The door slowly creaked open, and I slipped through the gap into a huge oval ballroom. There were no windows, only a sky­light, just like in the tiny room where I had first woken up. The walls here, however, weren't white. They were painted black, and on every wall there were dozens of picture frames―rectangular, square, oval―and every single one of them was covered by the same soft white cloth everyone's clothes were made of. I won­dered what artwork could be so precious that no one was al­lowed to see it.

"Finalmente!" said a voice both gentle and rough.

He sat on a soft padded settee at the far end of the room, in the shaft of light brought in by the skylight.

"Vengas aqui, mi hija." When I didn't move, he sighed, and re­sorted to English. "Come here, my child."

I approached across the black marble floor, cold beneath my bare feet.

The old man had a glow about him that had nothing to do with the light of the sun. It was an inner radiance. He was truly old―perhaps as old as poor Miss Leticia had been―but the vi­tality in his eyes was like that of a man in his twenties.

"Did you enjoy your pascua de florida? Your feast of flowers? I can still smell the blossoms on your feet."

"It was . . . uh . . . interesting."

"Forgive me," he said. "I am a man in love with ceremony."

Now that I was just a few feet away, I could see that his skin was marred by deep wrinkles, but that didn't lessen how hand­some he was. Looking at his face was like looking at an ancient oak in the first days of summer―lined and wizened, and yet as gloriously green as a sapling.

But when he looked at me, clearly he saw something differ­ent. He saw my ugliness.

"Ah! That face, that face!" he said. "So many tears your face has drawn from you, verdad?"

"My face is my business," I told him.

"This is true. But you are here, so that makes it my business as well." Then he gestured all around him. "For you, I have cov­ered all my mirrors."

So, it wasn't artwork on the walls around us.

He narrowed his keen eyes and took in the features of my face. "Hmm," he said. " Que feo . What Aaron says is true. You are very, very ugly―but do not think you are special in this. You are not the first, you are not the last. And I have seen uglier."