Нил Шустерман: Duckling Ugly

"The word is collusion," I told her. "C-O-L-L-U-S-I-O-N."

She pursed her pretty lips angrily. Marisol hated when I spelled things for her. She had her reasons. "Here," she said. "Spell this." She raised her hand, about to flip me her favorite gesture, but before she could, I grabbed her wrist, spun her around, and wrenched her arm behind her back.

She bleated in pain, then counterattacked, stomping on my foot with her heel almost hard enough to break bones. When she pulled free, she swung her arm and hit me in the face so hard I saw stars, like in a cartoon.

I didn't want to let Marisol win, but hitting her back would just turn this into a catfight, and that simply wasn't my style. Then I realized I had a weapon that could strike at her little so­cialite heart. Thank goodness I had just come from art class.

I reached into my backpack and, with the dexterity of a gunslinger, took out a little bottle of drawing ink, spun off the cap, and dumped the entire thing down the front of Marisol's pretty pink designer blouse. It soaked in and spread like black blood from a wound.

She just stood there, her hands out stiff, little clicks coming from her throat instead of words.

"There," I said. "Now your outside's as black as your inside."

As I walked away she finally found her voice again, and called me every name her limited vocabulary had to offer. "You're gonna pay for this!" she yelled. "You wait and see! You're gonna pay!"

My breakfast table at home might have had every seat filled, but my lunch table at school was always empty. Some other schools have all these open-air spaces where you can go to eat lunch un­der a tree or something like that. They have places where you can be alone without bringing attention to the fact. We didn't have those kinds of spaces. Our cafeteria had nothing but tables for ten. Even on the occasions when I started out at a table with other kids, they always migrated elsewhere, and my table for ten became a table for one.

I would take my time eating, hogging that table for as long as I possibly could. I figured if they're not gonna sit with me, let the other tables be as cramped and uncomfortable as possible. Serves them all right.

The spot directly across from me was what I liked to call "the mercy seat." That's from the Bible. It's what they called the lid on the Arc of the Covenant, which held the Ten Command­ments. The Israelite high priest would make offerings to God there. My mercy seat was a little bit different, though. See, every once in a while, someone would come and sit across the table from me. They did it out of guilt, and to feel better about them­selves. They'd sit down, exchange a few awkward words with me, then go off feeling like they'd done a kind deed. They had treated the Flock's Rest Monster with a godly kind of mercy. I used to like it when people sat there, until I realized no one ever came more than once.

It had been a while since anyone had sat in the mercy seat―a month, maybe more―so I was surprised when someone came over. Today's guest was Gerardo Sanchez.

"Hey," he said as he sat down with his tray.

I just kept on eating.

"So what do you think this is?" he asked, pointing to the lumpy white stuff slithering all over an English muffin on his plate.

"Creamed gopher," I suggested. "The Tuesday special."

He chuckled. "Yeah, probably." Then he sat there in an un­comfortable silence that irked me.

"So, like, why do you sit here all by yourself?" he finally asked.

I liked his direct approach, so I answered him. "I don't sit all by myself. I just sit. Being all by myself, that's other people's idea." More silence, and so I said, "Are you gonna ask me to the homecoming dance?"

The look on his face was worth the price of admission and then some. It made me laugh out loud suddenly, and some creamed gopher came out of my nose. Seeing that made him laugh. I wiped the stuff off.

"So you weren't serious?"

"Hey," I said, "I'm serious if you are."

"Nah," he said with a certainty that left no room for doubt.

When it came to looks, Gerardo was no Marshall Astor, but he wasn't bad-looking, either. He had dark, decent hair; a body that was a little bit scrawny, but not at all mealy. His teeth had once been crooked, but braces were taking care of that. All in all, Gerardo was an average-looking guy, and from what I could see, he always had the attention of a few average-looking girls. It didn't take long for me to figure out what he was doing in the mercy seat.

"So which girl are you trying to impress?" I asked.

He gave me that openmouthed, shrug-shouldered I-don't-know-what-you-mean expression, and so I gave him that tilt-headed, cross-armed, I-ain't-buying-it look.

A moment more, and he caved. "Nikki Smith," he said with a sigh. "She thinks I'm not sensitive. I figured coming over here and talking to you might make her think different." He looked at me for another second, then began to get up. "I'm sorry," he said. "It was dumb."

On another day I might have let him go, but today I was feel­ing vulnerable. Although I had gotten used to being alone, some days were better than others when it came to accepting it.

"Don't leave yet," I whispered to him. "If you really want to make it stick, you have to sit here with me until the bell rings. She'll really be impressed by that."

He took on a cornered-animal look.

"Yeah, I know, sitting with me for all of lunch is a fate worse than death."

"Well, not worse," he answered, and he made himself com­fortable in the mercy seat again.

"So, are you?" I asked.

"Am I what?"

"You said you wanted to show Nikki that you're sensitive. Are you?"

"I don't know. I guess." He thought about it. "I'm not insen­sitive . . . or at least I'm not insensitive on purpose."

"Well, that's better than nothing, I guess."

"Why do girls always want sensitive guys anyway?"

"They don't want their feelings hurt," I told him. "They fig­ure a sensitive guy won't hurt their feelings, even if he breaks up with them." I noticed that Gerardo had eaten his dessert first, so I spooned my Jell-O onto his plate. A reward for taking the mercy seat. "Of course, I've got no feelings left to hurt. An in­sensitive guy would be fine with me, as long as I got to smack him if he got too insensitive."

He laughed at that, then leaned a bit closer. "So tell me, be­cause I gotta know―how come you and Marisol hate each other so much?"

"Isn't it obvious?" I said. "Look at her, look at me."

Gerardo shook his head. "No―it's more than that. It's like you two have got... what's it called... a vendetta." Good word, I thought. V-E-N-D-E-T-T-A.

"She sat next to me in science class in seventh grade." And that was all I told him. I didn't tell Gerardo how she got by in science by copying answers from the boys she flirted with― there were always one or two within cheating distance. That par­ticular semester she got seated in a corner with just me next to her and Buford Brainard in front of her―a kid who had all of his brains in his name, and none in his head.

So Marisol had a choice: Either she could study for the tests or cheat from me. You can guess which she chose. Up till then, Marisol's nastiness was limited to the occasional cruel jab to keep me in my place. After all, her circle was so far above mine, most of the time she didn't see me. However, things did not go well for either of us that semester, and our general feeling of dis­like bloomed into something vicious.

"If you want to know why we hate each other, ask her to spell mitochondria ," I told Gerardo.

"Huh?"

"Mitochondria . Ask her to spell it."

"What'll she do if I ask?"

"Probably claw your eyes out."