Duckling Ugly

by Нил Шустерман

  "There," I said. "All better now."

  We kept on walking. The feeling of fury I had taken to bed was leaving me with each step down the stone path, and although this growing contentment felt wonderful, I fought to hold on to my anger. I owned that anger. I had earned it, and I didn't want to lose it.

  I woke up standing in the northwest corner of my room.

  7

  Breaking a swet

  It turns out I was wrong about Gerardo Sanchez.

  I had thought he'd be just a one-lunch-stand, but he came back. Oh, he didn't come back to the mercy seat right away, but about a week later. The letter was in my pocket. I had carried it in a pocket since the day I had received it, and no matter how much I fiddled with it, it never got wrinkled or worn. I was so pleased that Gerardo actually came back to sit with me, I was going to show it to him―tell him about it, and ask him what he thought it meant―but I stopped myself. Two visits to the mercy seat wasn't enough to earn that kind of trust. And besides, Marisol might be watching. The thought of her coming by and snatching the note from my hands was enough to keep it in my pocket.

  "So who are you trying to impress today?" I asked when Ger­ardo sat down.

  "No one," he told me.

  "Nikki Smith still doesn't think you're sensitive enough?"

  "Yeah, she does," he said. "We're going out now. Been to the movies and everything."

  "Goody for you."

  There was an awkward silence, but not as bad as the first time he had sat there. "So," he asked, "what do you think's in this burger?"

  I lifted my bun to reveal a gray slab beneath a sickly pickle slice. "Kangaroo," I said.

  "Yeah, you can tell by the way the burgers bounce."

  I looked at his plate. He wasn't touching the burger, but he had already eaten his brownie, so I gave him mine. "There. Two for the price of one."

  "Thanks."

  "Are you gonna tell me why you're sitting here?"

  "Okay," he said, "here's the deal. If I hang out at tables with other girls, Nikki gets jealous. And if I go sit at a table with my friends, Nikki gets suspicious, thinking I'm talking about her and stuff. But she doesn't care if I sit with you. She thinks I'm being noble or something."

  "Why don't you just hang out with Nikki?"

  "Hey," Gerardo said, "I really like her. But it's not like I want to be around her all the time."

  I knew what he meant. Nikki Smith was an okay girl, but she was also a chatterbox, and the worst kind: the kind that insisted that you respond to her chatter. She would not accept the typical "yeah . . . yeah . . . uh-huh" kind of responses that a person could usually get away with. Nikki required an in-depth analysis of every pointless thing she said, to prove you were actually listening.

  "So anyway," Gerardo said, "sitting with you is like my only safe zone. Nikki doesn't get jealous because she knows there's nothing going on, and my friends don't care because it's not like I'm sitting with their enemies."

  "So I'm like Switzerland," I told him.

  "Huh?"

  "I'm like Switzerland; I'm neutral territory."

  "Yeah. Yeah, that's it."

  "Only thing is," I reminded him, "Switzerland is beautiful."

  "Well, to be honest, if you were beautiful, I wouldn't be sit­ting here with you right now, so there's something to be said for being the dog-faced girl."

  I picked up my spoon and flung some peas at him, but I couldn't help but smile, because for once, someone was laughing with me, not at me.

  Gerardo didn't sit with me every day after that―only when he couldn't stomach being around Nikki, which was often enough. He told Nikki he felt bad for me. He told his friends I was doing his homework for him. Neither was true. The truth was, he sat with me because he wanted to.

  "I like you," he said one day. "Not in the way guys like girls, because to me you're not a girl."

  I'd be lying if I said that it didn't hurt, but the hurt didn't come anywhere close to how good it felt to have him say "I like you" and know that he meant it. I could live with all the uninten­tional insensitivity in the world because of the unintentional honesty that came with it.

  Gerardo would tell me things about himself that he couldn't tell anyone else, because unlike other kids in school, I didn't have a network of friends to gossip with. In turn, I'd tell him things, too.

  One day he asked me the big question―the one he'd proba­bly been dying to ask since that first day he took the mercy seat.

  "I know it's just a stupid rumor," he began, "and I know it couldn't possibly be true ..."I saw how hard it was for him, so I made it easier by guessing the question myself.

  "You want to know if my face breaks mirrors."

  "You know what? Forget I asked," he said. "It's just a stupid thing people say―"

  "It's true."

  I don't think he was expecting that. He just stared at me, probably wondering if I was joking.

  "Water's the only place I can see my reflection," I told him, "and even then, the water goes cloudy in a second."

  "No way."

  "Think about it," I told him. "The whole idea of ugly people breaking mirrors had to come from somewhere, didn't it? I'm sure it's pretty rare, but there must have been other people in history who did it."

  I told him about how, when I was a baby, my father had to take out the rearview and side mirrors in our cars, because I couldn't help but look in them. "They don't have to do it any­more, since now I know better."

  "That's wild!"

  I guess he was right. It didn't seem wild to me, though. It's amaz­ing the things you grow used to. "There was this one professor at the community college who tried to do a study of it," I told Gerardo. "He thought he could find some kind of scientific explanation."

  "So did he?"

  "Well, my mother and me went to his laboratory when I was eight. He hooked me up to wires, and computers and stuff. Then he had his assistants bring in mirrors of all shapes and sizes, on the other side of this Plexiglas barrier, and had video cameras recording the results. I looked into each of those mirrors, and I'll tell you, you couldn't have destroyed those mirrors more completely if you'd taken a hammer to them."

  "Wow," was all Gerardo could say.

  "In the end, the joke was on him," I said. "He couldn't get any of the results on film because the lenses of the cameras blew up, too. I wasn't sad about it, though. In some weird way, it felt like I had won. It's like I had beaten science! Anyway, as we were leaving, I saw the professor guzzle a few swigs of whiskey from a flask, and I heard him say to his workers, 'That girl is so ugly, the mirrors don't just break, they break a sweat.'"

  Gerardo laughed nervously, still not sure whether or not to entirely believe it.

  So I leaned closer to him and whispered, "I'll show you if you want..."

  He found me after the last bell had rung and the school was be­ginning to clear out. In his hand he had a little round makeup compact―the kind that flipped open with a mirror in the top half. He looked around at the crowds of kids going through their lockers and filtering out of school.

  "Not here," he said. "Come on." He checked several class­rooms, but they were either locked or there were teachers in­side. Then he tugged on the door of the janitor's closet, and it swung wide. We checked to make sure no one was looking and stepped in, closing the door behind us. The room was cramped and smelled of Pine-Sol. I giggled. The janitor's closet was a no­torious makeout spot. "Bet you never thought you'd be in the janitor's closet with me," I said.

  "Don't gross me out," Gerardo answered. "So are you ready?"

  "You may want to cover your eyes."

  He didn't. Instead he held the little compact at arm's length and flipped it open. "Okay, what do I do now?"

  "Just angle it toward me so I can see it."

  He shifted it until I caught my reflection. The compact hummed for a second, like a cell phone set on vibrate, and the glass fractured into a hundred pieces. Some pieces stayed in the little round fra
me, some flew out. I felt a piece hit my blouse, then I heard it tinkle to the ground.

  Gerardo just stared at the compact still clutched in his hand. "That," he said, "was the coolest thing I've ever seen."

  Then he tilted his hand slightly. A piece of glass was sticking out of his wrist.

  "Oh, crap!" He dropped the compact and reached for the glass with his other hand, grimacing as he pulled it out. It hadn't hit a major vein or anything. Just a couple of drops of blood spilled out. He put his wrist to his mouth to suck the blood off. When he looked at it again, it had already stopped bleeding. He looked at the half-inch sliver of glass in his other hand.

  "You know what?" he said. "I'm going to keep this."

  "What for?"

  "Evidence," he said. "Evidence that Cara DeFido's got some kind of magic."

  "Yeah, ugly magic," I said.

  "That's better than no magic at all." Then he shook his head. "There's got to be some reason for it," he said.

  Find the answers, I thought, and gently touched the pocket where the folded letter rested―but I kept the thought to myself.

  That was the day I started wondering if maybe Gerardo was one of the answers I was supposed to find.

  It wasn't just Nikki's compact mirror that broke that day. A bar­rier inside of me had broken as well―and Gerardo deciding to keep that little piece of glass made it even worse. I was feeling an emotion I had never allowed myself to feel for anyone. It was dangerous. The thing is, Gerardo acted real with me. He would act one way with his friends, another way with Nikki. But he didn't need to put up a front with me, because I was nothing to him. I guess, strangely, being nothing made me all the more im­portant―and although he began as nothing to me, too―just another short-time occupant of the mercy seat―that was chang­ing. Sure, he only sat with me once or twice a week, but on those days that he didn't, I began to feel a longing that would follow me through the rest of the day. All these years I'd kept my feel­ings for others covered as completely as the mirror in my room, but now that was changing.

  Part of me knew those feelings would eventually choke me. But when something takes root, you can't stop its growth. It wasn't any old thing that was growing, either. My feelings for Gerardo were just like Miss Leticia's corpse flower: all ripe and ready to blossom into something that Gerardo would surely find repulsive.

  8

  Into ugly

  The letter was just about burning a hole in my pocket. I could feel it there every minute of every day. Sometimes I could swear it was moving, rubbing itself against my leg to remind me it was there. Whenever Marisol walked by, giving me a sneer, in­stead of sneering back, I just reached into my pocket and brushed my fingertips across the smooth, soft paper. You have a destiny, that paper said. Marisol can torture you all she wants, however she wants. No amount of roadkill will ever take that away.

  I stopped by the library after school one day, to do some in­vestigating. I got on the Internet and searched for a town called De León. I found six of them, but all in different states, none in ours. So then I opened up the atlas―you know the one―it's so big that the library's got to have its own special stand for it. I searched every inch of our state on the map. No De León.

  It had been two weeks since I got the letter, and I was still no closer to figuring out who had sent it or why.

  I tried not to think too much about it, but the questions in my head just kept coming. How could somebody in some far-off place know what I needed to find? Have they been watching me? Should I be frightened? And what if, after all my searching, this was just another one of Marisol's stupid tricks, designed just to drive me crazy?

  I pulled out the note and looked at it again. No. Marisol did not have a sweeping handwriting like this. Her letters were all happy and round. She dotted her i's with hearts. And the paper―this wasn't the kind of paper you found in any stationery store. There was true magic in this note―I knew it in my heart, even if I didn't have any evidence. Yet.

  "Can I help you?" the librarian asked.

  "Huh?"

  "You seem a bit confused; I was wondering if I could help you."

  I looked around and found that I was standing in the quiet reading room, facing a blank wall. I hadn't even remembered walking there. I must have been wandering while looking at the note. It was just like the way I would wake up and find myself standing in the corner of my room. I had gotten used to that particular weirdness, but this was the first time I ever remem­bered wake-walking. I felt strangely unsettled and couldn't look that librarian in the eye.

  "I'm fine," I told her.

  She left, not all that sure that I was.

  I'm so stupid―it's just three words, I told myself. Why should three words have such control over me? It was like some sort of magic spell.

  Then I got to thinking about what Miss Leticia had said about words, letters having a magic to them when they were in the right order. Spells and spelling are one in the same. Spelling. Let­ters. The idea struck me at dinner one night so suddenly, I dropped my spoon right into my soup, and it splashed across the table, right into Vance's eye.

  "Hey!"

  "Excuse me." I got up, dinner suddenly forgotten, and went to my room, locking my door. My parents didn't question it, since I did it so often. Maybe they were glad to have me gone from the table. It was breakfast that Mom was determined to make a family meal. By the time dinner rolled around, she was too tired to care.

  The second my door was locked, I went to my desk, pulled the note out of my pocket, and set it on my desk. Then I took out a piece of paper, my brush and ink. I let the tip of the brush soak in the silky blackness, then I closed my eyes, trying to feel a connection to the words. From my mind to my hand, to my fin­gers, to the tip of the brush. Then I opened my eyes and wrote in smooth simple strokes:

  FIND THE ANSWERS

  Even before I took the next step, I could sense I was onto something. It wasn't just the words, it was the letters. The letters and the spaces between. It was the spelling. It was the spell. I took the letters and began writing them down in different com­binations.

  FIND THE ANSWERS

  DITHERS IN WRENF

  STAINED WN FRESH

  TRAIN WEDNES SHF

  RAINS WHEN FEETS

  THERE WINS FANDS

  WHERE FINS STAND

  That gave me a moment's pause. "Where Fins Stand." It didn't make any sense, yet somehow it sounded familiar. I searched my mind for the meaning, but I couldn't grab anything from those words. Still, there was some connection.

  FIND THE ANSWERS

  WHERE FINS STAND. . .

  I shook my head to shake the thought loose and kept on play­ing with the letters, but no other combinations stood out in my mind. Eventually, I had to face the fact that I was on a wild-goose chase. As sure as I was that there was something hidden in those letters, logic told me to forget it. I closed the ink and crumpled the paper.

  As for what happened next, well, I should have been smart enough to see it coming―or at least to step out of the way before I was hit. But I was so obsessed with figuring out the note, I never saw all the forces around me coming together. It wasn't so much a conspiracy of things as it was separate events weaving themselves together into a net that snared me sure as an animal trap.

  The next day was a bad one. For one, all that time I'd been spending obsessing over the note kept me from studying, so I failed a math test. Then at lunch Gerardo spent the whole time talking about Nikki, and how good things were between the two of them. Well, they say bad news comes in threes―and when I got home on that day, I found my dad sitting on the sofa, across from none other than bad news number three: Marshall Astor, Marisol's boyfriend and accomplice in crime. My heart took a long, slow fall into my gut.

  "What's he doing here?"

  "Cara, honey," Dad said, standing up, "that's no way to talk to a guest."

  "That's no guest, that's vermin. I'll get the rat poison."

  Dad laughed nervously.
"She's got a biting sense of humor, doesn't she? You two talk. I got some, um, business I have to take care of." Dad was out of that house at light speed.

  I looked around, hoping Momma and Vance were there. Any­thing to keep me from being alone with Marshall, but they were nowhere to be found.

  "So what do you want?" I asked. His foot was no longer ban­daged, though he did still walk with a little bit of a limp. "If you want me to testify against Leticia Radcliffe, forget it."

  "What? Oh. No, I never told nobody about that." I saw his toes wiggle in the tip of his shoes. He grimaced, and that just made me smile. I didn't usually enjoy other people's pain, but for Marshall Astor, I'd make an exception.

  "Ruined your football season, I'll bet."

  He shrugged. "I couldn't play anyway. I was already on aca­demic probation."

  I crossed my arms, making it clear I was done with the small talk. "So what do you want?"

  "There's no point in beating around the bush," he said. "I'll just say it straight out. I'm asking you to the homecoming dance."

  It caught me so off guard I just laughed out loud.

  "I'm not making a joke," he said. "I'm serious."

  "You think I'm gonna fall for that? What are you gonna do, wait till I get all dressed up and pour a bucket of blood on me? Sorry, I saw that movie."

  "Nah, that's gross," he said. "I wouldn't do that."

  "Oh, but it's not too gross to fill someone's room with roadkill?"

  "I had nothing to do with that!" he said. Then he hesitated. "Well, okay, I did help Marisol scoop up the roadkill, but I didn't know what she was going to use it for."

  I just looked at him in disbelief.

  "I didn't!" he said. "I thought she had got it into her head that they needed a decent burial, or something. I didn't know she was gonna do what she did! I didn't find out until after."

  I wasn't sure who was more of a fool―him for saying some­thing like that, or me for actually believing him.