Нил Шустерман: Duckling Ugly

I could feel strength coming to me now. I was drawing it from the room around me!

"S-P-L-E-N-D-I-F-E-R-O-U-S."

Beyond the room, I was tapping into the earth itself.

"G-L-O-R-I-O-U-S."

It felt like flood waters spilling into an empty vessel. "G-R-A-C-E-F-U-L."

A powerful energy filled me, and when I was full to the brim, I opened my eyes. Then I spelled my final word to my hideous reflections.

"D ―"

I pushed the ugliness away with all the force of my soul, and―

"I―" —one by one those mirrors changed, until every face I saw was a face of absolute beauty.

"E!"

A beautiful face everywhere I looked. I had killed the ugliness. I had won! I had won!

I woke to the grating sound of my alarm clock, and turned it off. It was morning, and my fever was gone. There was a stench in the air, though. It was faint, it was foul, and I couldn't quite place it. I got out of bed and did what I always did since the day I'd gotten back. I caught my gaze in my mirror, tossed my hair until it fell into perfect place, smiled that million-dollar smile. I thought about the dream. No cup of worms for me! I had beaten the illness, Marshall would recover, I would get over Gerardo. Things would be fine. I went out to join my family for breakfast.

The smell was worse in the rest of the house, reminding me of the roadkill that had once filled my room. "What is that god­awful stench?" I asked as I walked into the kitchen.

"What stench, dear?" Momma said.

She was at the sink, washing dishes, and Vance had his nose in the refrigerator. Only Dad was sitting down, the paper open wide in front of him.

So I sat down across from him, and when Dad lowered the newspaper, what I saw made me scream.

At the sound, Momma dropped a glass, and it crashed on the floor.

"Cara! What in God's name?"

Exactly what I thought. What in God's name? Because the face before me was not the one I'd known yesterday. My father's teeth, always a little bit yellow, were practically green now, and twisted in his head like tilted tombstones in a forgotten grave­yard. His nose hooked miserably to one side. And he had a Ne­anderthal ridge on his forehead.

I looked at Momma for an explanation, but what I saw there was even worse. Hollow gray cheeks, eyes too close and sunk deep in their sockets, a dangling piece of skin on her neck like a turkey, and tufts of blond hair so thin you could see her pink peeling scalp.

I gasped and put my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming again.

Nothing more rancid than ruined destiny.

"Honey, you don't look right," said Momma. "Have you still got a fever?"

I could only shake my head. How could I begin to explain?

When Vance turned to me, I wasn't looking at my brother. What stared back at me from the fridge looked more like a rat than a human being. Those front teeth of his that had always had the slightest of overbites now stuck so far out of his mouth he couldn't get his lips around them.

"What's up with her?"

"Look at yourselves!" I shouted. "Don't you see?"

Momma turned to Dad. She squinted her sunken eyes and said, "Honey, you really should shave before you go off to the car lot."

"Shave?" I said. "Shave?!"

I stood up, and the chair behind me fell over.

"You gonna eat that waffle?" said the rat boy in my brother's clothes.

I bolted out of there, running through a trailer park twice as decrepit as it had been the day before. What was it that kept them from seeing the change in one another? I couldn't explain it any more than I could explain the transformational power of the fountain. Then I thought of my dad, and his old TV shows. Strange hair, ugly clothes, weird talk, all of which had been per­fectly normal in a certain time and place.

Is that what had happened just now? Did my parents and my brother come to see this new ugliness as normal, instantly getting used to it, just as they had gotten so used to that horrible stench that filled the air?

That stench!

I was out of the trailer park now, and in a neighborhood of once-beautiful homes. But now the well-tended yards were choked with weeds, and the pavement was cracked and pushing up at awk­ward angles. The homes had a sagging sadness that nothing short of a bulldozer could repair. The smell kept growing stronger, and now a buzzing sound filled the air as well.

Then, when I rounded a corner, I saw where the sound and the smell were coming from.

Vista View Cemetery.

There were flowers on the hillside of Vista View. Miss Leticia's roses and ferns had all dried up and died . . . but one flower had gone to seed. What was it Miss Leticia had said? That the sweet and the rancid both have their place in the world? But what hap­pens when the sweetness is drained away?

Now covering the hill were dozens upon dozens of corpse flowers. Big, huge, brown petals around oozing stalks. I recog­nized the buzzing as the sound of a million flies, swarming around the massive blooms, practically blackening the sky.

I covered my nose, my mouth; I tried not to breathe. I turned in the other direction, running away from it, but there were fresh seedlings in every yard―maybe only six inches tall now, but growing. According to Miss Leticia, the foul plant took three years to bloom―but ugliness now had its own timetable. The way scar tissue filled a wound, something had to fill the space left when what little beauty this town had had was sucked away.

Sucked away by me.

It began with Marisol. I had taken her looks by force, so it happened in an instant―but the rest of the town had faded slowly―too slowly for me to really see at first. I was too busy looking in the mirror to notice. Then came the illness―and I now understood the vision I had had during my fevered dream. Harmony had warned me, but I hadn't understood.

Consumption.

What a perfect name for this strange illness―because in the throes of fever, something was most definitely consumed. The fire of beauty now burns within you, Abuelo had told me. It was a fire . . . and like every fire, it needed to be fueled. There in De León, the fountain didn't just give us beauty, it fueled it. The water was in the grass, in the trees, in the very air of the valley. But once I left, the flame of beauty had to find its fuel elsewhere. I suppose if my will had been weaker, the flame would have died. My face would have sagged, my ugliness would have returned. But that didn't happen. I was strong, and my beauty was predatory. And so in the depth of my fever, I began to steal beauty around me, con­suming it like a wildfire in the wind. Consuming it like . . . a black hole. My face now truly was a black hole, draining away the beauty of anything that came too close.

Just how far did this go? Was it just the neighborhood around the trailer park―or did it go farther? There was only one way to find out.

I ignored the awful stench and unsightly visions around me, and I stumbled my way across the jagged, root-cracked pavement of my ruined town until I reached school.

The beige bricks of Flock's Rest High had gone black, as though they'd been covered in soot. Grime filled the corners of every window. The flagpole leaned like the mast of a sunken ship, and the flag that waved there was tattered and twisted.

If I'd had any doubts, they were gone as I walked through the halls of my school. Every face I saw was grotesque and stomach churning, and I wondered if after today there would be any mir­rors left intact in town. Then I came around a bank of lockers and found myself staring into the bulging eyes of the one person I never wanted to see again.