Нил Шустерман: Duckling Ugly

That night―the night before I received the mysterious letter―I had a dream.

It was a driving dream―I'd had a lot of those since Mom had taught me to drive a few months before. I was behind the wheel of her big old pink Caddie, and we were driving down a highway, heading out of Flock's Rest.

"Just keep your eyes on your destination," Mom said, which didn't make sense, because I couldn't see my destination, but people don't talk sense in dreams―especially your parents.

We crossed over the river where Marshall's dad went the way of the Titanic and out onto a long stretch of highway.

We kept passing Dad's old, faded billboards―just like we al­ways do in real life. WE TREAT YOU RIGHT-O AT DEFIDO,said one. BUY AT DEFIDO: SOLID CARS FROM SOLID TIMES,said another.

Those signs were put up at a time when everyone thought our family was riding a wave to better places, but instead we wiped out. Dad's biggest consolation was that the billboard company that rented the signs went out of business before his car lots be­gan to fail―and so all those advertisements for DeFido Motors were still up. Sure they were fading and peeling, but anywhere you drove in the county, you could still see my dad's smiling face looking down on you, along with some car he had once tried to sell.

"The clock broke during my fifteen minutes of fame," Dad would say every time we passed one of those old billboards.

In the dream, though, we came up on the billboards much more often than in real life. The next one featured Mom's Cadil­lac. I remembered seeing it before on one of the roads heading north out of town.

"Look, there's us!" Mom said in the dream. "Wave hello!"

We passed the billboard, and then I heard a different voice beside me. A younger voice.

"Shouldn't you be getting home?" the voice said. "Everyone's waiting for you."

I turned to see a boy about my age sitting next to me in the car, where my mother had been. I couldn't quite see his face― all I could see were his eyes. They were beautiful. A shade of blue that couldn't exist anywhere but in a dream.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Better keep your eyes on the road," he said gently, but I couldn't look away from him.

"Mom, she's doing it again!"

I woke up from the dream to find myself standing in the cor­ner of my room. The northwest corner, to be exact. As I stepped away from the corner and turned toward Vance, I could feel a stiffness in my legs that told me I had been standing there for hours.

"I haven't been doing anything," I told him. "I... I just thought I saw a spider, that's all."

"Yeah, sure," said Vance, shaking his head and walking away.

I wasn't lying when I'd told Miss Leticia I didn't sleepwalk― because I don't actually walk, I just stand. I'm a sleep-stander. Always in the same corner, too―and I often wondered if there was no wall there, would I still stand in the same spot, or would I be a walker after all?

Thinking about it had never yielded much, so I just accepted it as one more weird thing about me. It wasn't until much later that I began to get truly curious about it and think there might be a reason for it. But on that morning, I was as clueless as ever.

With the dream quickly fading, I dressed and went out into the kitchen. Things were back to normal, as if the spelling bee had never happened. We sat at the breakfast table, with silence punctuated by cereal crunches and "pass-the-milks," as usual.

A few years back, Momma had gotten it into her head that a healthy day begins with a family breakfast, so the four of us al­ways sat down together in the morning, even on the days it would make us late for school.

"The occasional tardy is acceptable," Momma would say. "Starting your morning without quality time is not."

You have to understand, my momma had gone to college for two reasons. One, to get a degree in psychology. Two, to catch a successful husband destined for great things. In the end, she got neither.

At breakfast that morning, I could see Vance looking back and forth between Mom and Dad, and I could tell he was waiting for the right time to talk about something. Finally, when Dad started to push his chair back, getting ready to leave, Vance blurted it out.

"I've been thinking..." he began.

"That's new," I said.

Usually Vance would sneer at me when I said something like that, but he didn't. Whatever his mind was wrapped up in, it was wrapped up completely. He started biting his lower lip, making his slightly buckteeth stick out like Chuck E. Cheese.

"Thinking about what?" Dad said.

"About school and stuff. I figure, being that I'm in eighth grade and all, and that I'll be starting high school next year and all... I was thinking maybe I might wanna go to that Catholic high school."

"We're not Catholic," Momma reminded him calmly.

"Well, you don't have to be," Vance said. "St. Matthew's takes all types, just as long as your grades are good enough, and mine are."

"I'm not paying for a private high school," Dad said. "Noth­ing wrong with a public education."

By now I could tell Vance was getting antsy.

"All right, then, not St. Matthew's. What about Billington High?"

"That's twenty miles away," said Dad.

"Yeah, but their football team's ten times better than Flock's Rest High."

That caught Dad's attention. Now Momma was the one get­ting nervous. "You fixing to play football?"

"What if I am?" said Vance.

Dad looked at him like he'd just stepped into the Twilight Zone. That's because Vance was about as athletic as an end table. He was the star of the middle-school chess team, and I always joked with him that the only sports injury he'd ever get was carpal tunnel from lifting heavy queens. No, Vance was not fixing to play football. I knew what this was about, even if my parents did not.

"Vance just doesn't want to go to the same school as me," I announced. "He doesn't want to be the kid brother of the Flock's Rest Monster."

Vance looked down into his Apple Jacks. "That's not true," he said, but by the way he said it, you could tell it was.

"Tell you what," said Dad. "If you go out for a sport this year, make the team, and stay on that team for the whole season, I'll make sure you go to whatever high school you want, no questions asked."

"Yes, sir," said Vance. It was the first time I'd ever heard him call my dad "sir" outside of a spanking or grounding. He contin­ued to stare into his Apple Jacks, probably pondering the chances that he would actually succeed.

Both Dad and Vance left that morning without ever meeting my eye . . . but what surprised me was that Momma wouldn't look at me, either.

Our school is an old brick building, with a gym that smells like sweat and varnish and a cafeteria that smells faintly of Clorox and beef gravy. It was built way back when schools were institu­tions, like hospitals and insane asylums. At recess I saw Marisol Yeager lingering in a downstairs hallway, surrounded by her clique of socialites. I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of seeing me try to avoid her. I walked right past her, and she stepped in front of me.

"After last night, I'd think you'd be too ashamed to show your face in school," she said, her mouth working up and down with her usual wad of chewing gum.

I held back a smirk. I had seen Marshall limping up the steps into school this morning. It was my guess that he wouldn't tell anyone what had happened last night, because it would incrimi­nate him as the graveyard vandal. Marisol, however, was not smart enough to keep her mouth shut.

"Don't you think I know that you and that old witch were working together?" she said. "You two are, like, in collision with each other."