Duckling Ugly

by Neal Shusterman

I hesitated. First, because it was an odd question, and second, because I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to answer. “No,” I finally said.

  “All right, then. I had thought that maybe the place you was seeing is real, and maybe it was calling to you. That happens, you know.”

  I was going to tell her about the problem I had with mirrors and cameras, but I stopped myself—maybe because I was afraid to hear what she might say.

  “You talk about being so ugly,” Miss Leticia said. “I wish I could see you to tell you that you’re not. But all I see these days are shadows, like I’m lookin’ through a shower curtain.”

  “That’s all right,” I told her softly. “If you saw me, you probably wouldn’t even let me in here.”

  She laughed at that. “Is that how little you think of me?”

  I didn’t answer her. I knew now that Miss Leticia was a great soul, but there were some things I didn’t think even a great soul could stand.

  “Come here, Cara. I want to show you something.”

  Then Miss Leticia took my hand and led me through the greenhouse to a far corner. We pushed our way through a row of dense, lacy ferns to see the strangest growing thing I’d ever seen.

  It was a pod, about three feet high, with a fat stalk pushing its way out of the top.

  “Now tell me what you think this is,” Miss Leticia said with a smirk.

  “I have no idea.”

  “It comes from the rain forests of Sumatra. That stalk will grow six feet before it opens up into a flower. Take a deep whiff.”

  I did, but all I could smell were the sweet blooms growing elsewhere in the greenhouse.

  “I don’t smell it.”

  “No, not yet, but you will.” She reached over and gently brushed her hand along the smooth stalk like it was a beloved pet. “I’ve been nursing this one for years, and this is the first time it’s going to bloom. The Titan Arum, it’s called…but some folks call it the Corpse Flower. You know why?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s called that,” she told me, “because when it blooms, it smells like the rotting dead.”

  I shuddered at the thought. “I guess the cemetery’s the perfect place for it, then,” I said nervously. Why on Earth, with all the wonderful-smelling plants she had, would she choose to grow this thing?

  She must have read my mind because she said, “Oh, the scent of roses and gardenias is fine, but everyone needs a break from all that cloying perfume. Now and again I treasure the scent of something…other.”

  I took in another breath, trying to imagine what the flower would smell like once it bloomed, but I guess my imagination wasn’t pungent enough.

  “The beautiful and the terrible, the sweet and the rancid—it’s all part of God’s glory and has its reason to be,” Miss Leticia said. “Just like you, Cara.”

  Suddenly she grabbed my wrists so tightly I could feel her nails cutting into my skin. “You have a destiny, child,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t.”

  Then she looked at me, and I swear she could see me through the deadness of her cataracts. “You came to me in your dark time, confiding in me, and that binds us,” she said. “And so I will make it my business to be there when your destiny comes calling.”

  All the way home, I felt the sting of Miss Leticia’s nails. I knew her nail marks would be in my forearms for days—but I didn’t mind.

  You have a destiny, she had said. Those marks were a reminder.

  Miss Leticia was weird, but she was wise in a way few people could understand. Whether she knew things or just suspected things, I didn’t know—but then, to a person with intuition, suspicion had to count for something. No one had ever suggested I had a place and a purpose in the world. My parents, who on their best days saw life as an inconvenience, had never—could never—make me feel the way Miss Leticia had in the short time I had known her.

  It was around 9:30 at night when I climbed back through my bedroom window. My parents were always respectful of my privacy, so I don’t think they even knew I’d been gone. They probably just thought I’d wallowed myself to sleep—as if self-pity was some kind of narcotic.

  Well, okay, maybe I did feel a little sorry for myself, but that never made me want to wallow in misery. It just made me mad. It made me want to do something about it, if only I could find the right thing to do. The satisfying thing to do.

  I opened my door to the fading smell of fried chicken. Dinner was over, but I knew there would be a plate in the fridge for me. My chicken would have its skin peeled off, because Momma had heard that oily foods make acne worse, so what she serves me always has the flavor and consistency of hospital food.

  Mom was in her bedroom, probably reading a self-help book; Vance was in his room listening to music so loud I could hear which song was playing in his earphones; and Dad was in the living room, drinking a beer and watching RetroToob, the cable network devoted completely to old, goofy TV shows he grew up with.

  I quietly closed my door again, not hungry for dinner or family time. Instead I turned to face my dresser and played the game I played every night. It’s called Does Cara Have the Nerve? See, there’s this big old mirror attached to my dresser. I’ve never actually looked into it because it’s covered with a sheet, just like most of the other mirrors in our house. I hear in some places it’s a custom to cover mirrors with a sheet when you’re in mourning, and I wonder sometimes if my parents are in mourning for the beautiful daughter they never had. Anyway, my momma won’t let me get rid of the mirror because it’s part of a set. So, just to tick her off, I glued a bunch of ugly things on the sheet covering the mirror: a baboon’s butt, a dentist’s image of advanced tooth decay, plastic vomit. Momma says I have a twisted sense of humor, but at least I have one.

  My heart was racing that night, though, because I thought that this might be the night I win the game. This could be the day I actually defied her, and everyone else in this hateful town, by tempting fate and looking into that mirror.

  I took a step closer to the dresser. My conversation with Miss Leticia had made me feel strong, purposeful. That’s a good word, P-U-R-P-O-S-E-F-U-L. Spelling it even made me feel more so. I reached up my hand, and took another step closer.

  D-E-T-E-R-M-I-N-E-D.

  My words gave me power. They made me feel that I could change the way things had always been. That I could pull off the sheet, look myself in the face, and the mirror would hold the reflection, just like it did for other people. For normal people. My fingertips were against the sheet now.

  V-I-C-T-O-R-I-O-U-S.

  But who was I kidding? I knew what would happen. The mirror would see me and shatter, just like every mirror.

  A-G-O-N-I-Z-I-N-G.

  And then I would have to explain to Mom and Dad exactly what had possessed me to destroy this lovely piece of furniture.

  A-B-O-R-T.

  In the end, my courage failed me. My words failed me. I pulled my hand back from the sheet and let it be. The game was lost. Tonight was not the night—but I refused to feel miserable about it. Mom with her helpless self-help books, and Dad with his TV nostalgia, had misery wallowing down to an art—but I refused to join them…because, as Miss Leticia had said, I have a destiny.

  I just had to figure out what it was.

  4

  The Mercy Seat

  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 bi
llboards—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.”

  “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.