Нил Шустерман: Duckling Ugly

"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.

When I stepped inside the door, Momma was standing there, holding the phone and looking a bit ill herself.

"Yes," she said. "I understand. Our prayers will be with them."

"Prayers?" I asked. "Who are we praying for?"

"Sit down, honey."

It's never a good thing when one of your parents tells you to sit down. Especially in that deeply understanding tone of voice. I did as I was told.

"I'm afraid something awful has happened," Momma told me. Then she took my hands in hers. "It's Marshall Astor," she said. "He's had a horrible accident."

The whole story came over the phone line in bits and pieces that night from neighbors and family friends. I sifted the truth out of rumor and exaggeration, and had a pretty good idea what hap­pened.

Marshall Astor had taken his mother's car out for a joyride. He went speeding on bald tires and lost control on a bridge, halfway across the river―the same bridge where his father had gone sailing off into oblivion. The county, however, had rein­forced the guardrails after his father's accident, so instead of crashing into the river, Marshall ended up with a smashed front end, a deployed air bag, and an unspecified number of broken bones. Although everyone called it an "accident," and a "coinci­dence" that it happened to be on the same bridge, I don't think there was anything accidental about it. . . And I don't think Marshall ever once lost control of that car.

I went to visit him the next evening, after he got home from the hospital. I wasn't sure what to expect from him, but I knew that I had to go.

His mother looked at me with frightened, distrustful eyes― like she might have looked at me when I was still ugly.