Duckling Ugly

by Нил Шустерман

  When I stepped inside the door, Momma was standing there, holding the phone and looking a bit ill herself.

  "Yes," she said. "I understand. Our prayers will be with them."

  "Prayers?" I asked. "Who are we praying for?"

  "Sit down, honey."

  It's never a good thing when one of your parents tells you to sit down. Especially in that deeply understanding tone of voice. I did as I was told.

  "I'm afraid something awful has happened," Momma told me. Then she took my hands in hers. "It's Marshall Astor," she said. "He's had a horrible accident."

  21

  Consumption

  The whole story came over the phone line in bits and pieces that night from neighbors and family friends. I sifted the truth out of rumor and exaggeration, and had a pretty good idea what hap­pened.

  Marshall Astor had taken his mother's car out for a joyride. He went speeding on bald tires and lost control on a bridge, halfway across the river―the same bridge where his father had gone sailing off into oblivion. The county, however, had rein­forced the guardrails after his father's accident, so instead of crashing into the river, Marshall ended up with a smashed front end, a deployed air bag, and an unspecified number of broken bones. Although everyone called it an "accident," and a "coinci­dence" that it happened to be on the same bridge, I don't think there was anything accidental about it. . . And I don't think Marshall ever once lost control of that car.

  I went to visit him the next evening, after he got home from the hospital. I wasn't sure what to expect from him, but I knew that I had to go.

  His mother looked at me with frightened, distrustful eyes― like she might have looked at me when I was still ugly.

  "Come in," she said. "Let me tell Marshall you're here."

  I waited in the living room until Marshall rolled out in a wheelchair a few moments later. He had black eyes from the punch of the air bag against his face. Both of his ankles were in casts. The impact had broken them.

  "Hi, Linda."

  "Hi, Marshall."

  As sweet as revenge had felt a few weeks before, it felt empty now. Empty and dark. Just by looking at him, I knew that I was really the one who had driven him off the bridge. He was in love. People in love do desperate things. My own responsibility in this was almost impossible to bear, because no matter how black my heart had become, it was still beating. No matter how deep a coma my conscience was in, it couldn't ignore this.

  We sat there for a long time, not saying anything. I tried to look everywhere in the room but at him, and yet I kept being drawn back to his gaze.

  "Why did you do it, Linda?" he finally said. "I loved you. Why did you do what you did?"

  I thought about all the answers I could give him―or, more accurately, all the ways I could worm out of answering him. "It's complicated," I could tell him―or "We weren't right for each other." But I knew I owed him far more than an excuse.

  "Why, Linda?" he asked again. And so I told him.

  "Because my name isn't Linda. It's Cara."

  His face went through a whole series of emotions. Disbelief, denial, and finally acceptance. All in about five seconds.

  "Cara DeFido," he said, and repeated it, maybe just to make sure he heard himself right. "Cara DeFido."

  I nodded. "I'm sorry." It was lame to say it now, but still, I had to do it.

  As I watched him, I saw his face going red. He began to bite his lower lip, and tears began to flow from his eyes. Not just flow, but gush. "You had a good time that night, didn't you?"

  "What?"

  "The homecoming dance. I promised you'd have a good time, and you did, right? At least until I puked in the punch bowl."

  He laughed the tiniest bit through his tears.

  "I did have a good time," I admitted. "I wish I hadn't ruined it."

  Marshall tried to wipe away his tears, but he didn't have much luck, because they just kept on coming. "I agreed to do it be­cause of the car," he said. "I guess that makes me a creep."

  I tried to put myself in his place. If someone offered me a car to go on a date with Tuddie―with Aaron―a few years ago, would I have done it? Even if I was the most popular girl in school? When it comes down to it, who wouldn't?

  "I'm no one to judge," I told him.

  "For what it's worth, I had a good time that night, too," he said. "I wasn't expecting to, but I did."

  By now he had gotten his tears under control. He moved his legs and grimaced slightly. So I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small piece of paper. A paper that was woven from strands of swan gossamer.

  "Here," I said, handing it to him. "Tear this in half, and slide a piece of it inside both of your casts," I said. "It will help you heal."

  He rubbed it between his fingers. "Feels nice," he said. "What does 'find the answers' mean?"

  "Nothing," I told him. "Nothing at all."

  As I walked home from Marshall's that night, I felt dizzy, weak, and feverish. My head pounded, and it took all my strength just to make it home. Harmony had warned me of this. Why hadn't I listened?

  "Did you see Marshall?" Momma asked as I came in. "How was he? Is he all right?"

  "He'll be fine," I told her.

  Then she took a good look at me. "Cara, are you feeling all right? You're not looking yourself."

  I was afraid to think about what that meant. "I'm fine!" I pushed my way past her, went into my room, and tried to lock the door behind me, but this was one day that Momma wasn't giving me my privacy.

  "Honey," she said, "what happened to Marshall isn't your fault. He's a troubled boy."

  "He's a shallow boy," I told her. "He wasn't troubled until I came along to trouble him."

  Momma smiled slightly. "Don't give yourself that much credit, dear. You may be beautifrd now, but you're not Helen of Troy."

  I lay down on my bed and thought about that. The face that launched a thousand ships. A woman who brought two empires into bloody battle. I wondered if Helen of Troy had been to the fountain herself.

  "Momma," I asked, "did you like me more before? Has being beautiful made me horrible?"

  "I love you the same either way."

  I found it both comforting and unsettling. It was good to know I was loved before, but now I wanted to be loved more.

  Momma sat down beside me and touched her hand to my forehead. "Cara, you're burning up."

  "It's just exhaustion," I told her. "I'll sleep it off."

  She looked doubtful, but she let me be, promising to check in on me during the night.

  My body was aching, and I knew that whatever this illness was, it wasn't something that anyone could do anything about. I closed my eyes and felt myself falling into a troubled, fevered sleep, from which I was afraid I'd never wake up.

  When I finally opened my eyes, I was in Abuelo's mansion, standing in his grand reflectorium―but Abuelo wasn't there. I was alone. Then I heard an unexpected voice.

  I will make it my business to be there when your destiny comes calling.

  It was Miss Leticia! I turned to see her right in the center of the room, seated at her little garden table, with a pot of tea.

  "Come, child," she said. "Tea's waiting. Drink it before it gets cold."

  "But... but you're dead."

  Miss Leticia laughed and laughed. "Not so dead that we can't have a nice visit."

  I sat across from her, knowing that this had to be a dream, but also knowing I wouldn't awake until we had had our little visit.

  She poured a single cup of tea, but it was clear as water, and when I looked into the cup, it was swirling with colors, like the northern lights.

  "Hurry," she said. "Drink your destiny before it's too late."

  I picked up the cup and looked down into it, but the water was gone. Instead it was full of mud. Mud swarming with worms. I tried to drop the cup, but my hands wouldn't move.

  Miss Leticia sighed. "My, my, my," she said. "Will you look at that. Nothing more rancid than ruined destiny Y'still gotta
drink it, though―and the longer you wait, the worse it'll get."

  Then she was gone, the wormy cup was gone, and I was alone, surrounded by Abuelo's many mirrors, reflecting my beautiful face.

  One mirror wasn't beautiful, though. One mirror showed me the ugly girl I had once been. This dream mirror held that awful reflection and was strong enough not to break. Then a second mir­ror showed my old face, and a third. Soon half the mirrors showed me as I once was, while the other half showed what I looked like now. Slowly I walked toward one of the offensive mirrors, and with each step, I felt hotter and hotter, my fever growing―more than just fever, I felt anger as I looked at that horrible face.

  "How dare you come back!" I told it. "After all I've been through, how dare you show your ugly face around here."

  "There are worse things than being ugly," the nasty reflection said, but I wasn't going to listen to a thing it said. It had no con­trol over me.

  "I'm stronger than you!" I told it.

  It didn't answer me―it just waited to see if I truly was. And so I closed my eyes and reached to the core of myself, pulling up all the strength I could muster.

  It wasn't enough. I could feel myself losing the battle. I knew I had to pull strength from somewhere else, but how could I? Suddenly the answer came to me.

  "I am not ugly!" I declared out loud. "Not inside, not out." And I began to summon strength from beyond myself. "B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L."

  Spells and spelling. Words. My words. They had the power. "R-A-V-I-S-H-I-N-G."

  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.

  22

  Gauntlet of grunge

  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.

  Marisol Yeager.

  Her exile hadn't lasted long. She was back with her friends, laughing, talking, smiling with teeth so gray they could have been made of asphalt. When she saw me, she became quiet. They all became quiet.

  "Well, look who's here," she said. "The Flock's Rest Monster."

  Her clothes, which had always been so pretty, were a wild mishmash of colors and textures.

  "I'm sorry," I told Marisol. I never thought I'd say that to her. And even if I said it, I never thought I'd mean it. I looked at the freak show of faces all around me. "I'm sorry. This is not what I wanted. I never meant to make you all so . . . so . . . ugly."

  They looked at me and at one another, not understanding what I was talking about―except for Marisol. She knew who I was; she knew what I had done. Maybe she couldn't explain it, but she knew.

  "Hasn't anyone told you?" she said, with a nasty gray-mouthed smile. "Ugly is the new pretty."