Duckling Ugly Read online

  Duckling Ugly

  Нил Шустерман

  Cara is so ugly that mirrors would rather break than show her reflection. not even her own parents can deny her ugliness, and nothing can make up for the cruelty of her schoolmates. Tormented and tortured by the shallow people of Flock's Rest, Cara has a miserable life. Then she receives a shimmering note from some exotic place suggesting that there's more to her than meets the eye. Cara wonders if her destiny has something to do with her recurring dreams of beautiful green valley where the people are so accepting that her ugliness doesn't matter. Soon, Cara discovers that her valley of dreams is real. It's a place where the ugliest of ducklings can become swans. A swan, however, can have a serious taste for revenge...deadly revenge.

  Neal Shusterman

  Duckling Ugly

  Dark Fusion, book 3

  I am not one of the beautiful people.

  Some people are born with everything― looks, personality, brains. Any combination of two can usually get you by. You might not be much to look at, but if you're a fun person and are smart, you'll be fine. If you're beautiful and personable, you could have oatmeal between your ears and no one would care much. But these natural laws that govern the social uni­verse all fall apart when your looks are like a black hole. That's me: a freakish blip in time and space―a singularity of ugliness. An ugularity―and no matter how smart I am, no matter how friendly or funny, it doesn't matter. All that's good about me gets sucked in and crushed into nothing when the world looks at me.

  This is what the world sees when it dares to look:

  A pair of sewer-shade eyes two sizes too big for my face; a weak chin with a spidery mole. Hair like brown weed-whacked crabgrass, and a flat chest over shapeless hips. It's worse when I smile, because my brother got all the good teeth. Braces were always out of the question.

  As I once overheard my dentist say to his assis­tant, "Braces on that girl would be like lipstick on a horse."

  The word is ugly. Oh, there are other words for it. Words like plain, you know? Like vanilla. But if I were ice cream, I'm sure I'd be broccoli- or cabbage-flavored.

  I could have accepted my fate, doomed to be an ugularity for my entire life, but then one day I was given the chance to trade in this face for all time. Who wouldn't choose that if they could? No matter how unspeakable the consequences...

  Part one

  Ugularity

  1

  To the bone

  I will always remember the lights, stark and hot, shining on me from every angle. They exposed my face for the whole world to see. Being onstage in front of hundreds of people should have been a high point of my life, but those lights . . . I felt naked beneath them. My pores had opened―I could feel sweat running down my face, coursing around zits and moles like boulders in a river, then pouring down my neck, to soak the collar of my blouse. I knew even before we began that things were going to go wrong.

  "Contestant number thirteen," the head judge said, his voice booming into the microphone. "Cara DeFido."

  I stood up. There were hundreds of people in the audience. I couldn't see them, but I did hear whispers. I tried to make my­self believe they weren't whispering about me.

  "Spell the word unprepossessing."

  That's an easy one, I thought. There was a little tittering from certain members of the audience when he said the word, but I didn't let it get to me.

  "Unprepossessing." I said. "U-N-P-R-E-P-O-S-S-E-S-S-I-N-G. Unprepossessing."

  "That's correct."

  There was some halfhearted applause as I sat back down.

  Everyone's good at something. I can spell. I guess it's just an inborn ability―something to do with the way my brain is wired. It's the kind of skill that goes unnoticed except at spelling bees. Kids can win thousands of dollars at the national level. "There's a market for every skill," my dad says, "even the weird ones." So once a year I get to go up onstage for the county spelling bee, and I always win it. I never go on to the state or national spelling bees, though. I could, but I don't. Those bigger contests are tele­vised; I got my reasons for not getting in front of cameras.

  As I sat there and waited for my next turn, the word I had just spelled stuck in my throat like a pill, just dissolving there, tasting bitter.

  Unprepossessing.

  It was another one of those nice words for "ugly." Even nicer than plain. It was just a coincidence that the judge's computer came up with that word for me to spell, but still it bothered me. Momma would have called it ironic. The Almighty showing He's got Himself a sense of humor. I'm sure that's what she was thinking out there in the audience.

  Well, she's not me. The contests she went out for when she was my age were beauty contests, not spelling bees. She was pos­sessing, pre possessing―there was no "un" about it.

  "Contestant thirteen," the judge's voice boomed.

  In the previous round, there had been five more eliminations. Only six of us remained. I stood up and felt the searing spotlight on me again.

  The judge looked at the word that had been thrown up on his computer screen, and he hesitated. He glanced at the judge next to him, who only shrugged. He took a deep breath and turned to me.

  "Please spell abomination."

  Some gasps of surprise from the audience. A few snickers.

  The heat I felt in my ears, then cheeks had nothing to do with the lights. I knew I was going blotchy red. I tried to tell myself it was just coincidence again, but deep down I knew it wasn't. This word was too easy. The other kids were getting words like cairn­gorm and pneumonectomy. Whether this was the Almighty having a major laugh or something other, I couldn't figure out yet.

  "Abomination," I said. "A-B-O-M-I-N-A-T-I-O-N. Abomina­tion."

  "Correct."

  I sat back down and looked at the crack-nail toes sticking through the tips of my sandals.

  There's that old joke: "Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone." But they're wrong―because with me it goes deeper than the bone. It goes right to the marrow. I once over­heard our pastor say to one of the other parishioners that looking at me was enough to question your belief in God. Momma over­heard it, too, so we left that church and found another.

  Four more contestants were disqualified, one after another. It was down to me and some brainiac who kept nervously cracking his knuckles.

  "Contestant thirteen," came the booming voice.

  I stood.

  When the judge looked at the computer screen this time, he took his time. He called all the other judges over. They con­ferred, then sat down again, looking back and forth to one another. When the head judge got on the microphone, he didn't offer me a word to spell. He offered me his apologies.

  "I'm sorry, Miss DeFido . . . but the rules are very strict," he said. "We have no choice but to give you the word that comes up on the screen. You understand?"

  I nodded.

  "There's nothing we can do about it."

  I nodded.

  He took a deep breath and said, "Please spell... grotesque."

  And this time there was unrestrained laughter in the audi­ence; the chuckling, twittering voices of students, and parents, too. This was no accident. Somewhere out there, I knew, there was one kid, or two, or a whole gaggle of them who were secretly gloating over having somehow pulled this prank.

  I knew what I had to do. Holding my head as high as I could manage, I spelled the word.

  "Grotesque," I said. "G-0. . .w I leaned closer to the micro­phone. "T-0..." I grabbed the microphone stand like a rock star. "H-E...I looked out over all those people in the audi­ence. "L-L. Grotesque."

  Silence from the judges. Silence from the audience.

  Finally, the head judge leaned toward his microphone. "Uh... I'
m sorry," he said. "That is incorrect."

  Then, in the front row, a newspaper photographer stood up and brought his camera to his eye.

  Go on, take my picture, I thought. Go on. I dare you.

  And I smiled for him, as wide as I could, stretching my lips over my terrible teeth.

  The lens shattered with such force the entire camera fell to pieces.

  People nearby shielded their eyes from the flying shrapnel, and the photographer, his hands and face bloody, stood for a mo­ment staring in shock, then raced down the aisle in pain.

  "Cheese," I said.

  Then I took off the number 13 sticking to my shirt and left.

  My mother found me walking by the side of the road ten minutes later. She pulled up in her classic pink Cadillac―the kind they got sticking out of the roof of the Hard Rock Cafe. It has wings like the Batmobile and funky bullet-shaped taillights. Everyone knows when Momma drives down the street. When she saw me, she slowed down, matching my pace.

  "Cara DeFido, you get yourself into this car."

  "Give me one good reason."

  "Because it's a twenty-mile walk back to Flock's Rest."

  "So I'll hitchhike," I told her.

  "And who is it you think's gonna pick you up?"

  "Yeah," said my brother from the backseat. "One look at her and they'll break the land-speed record to get away."

  Momma turned around and tried to whack him, but her headrest got in the way. "You just shut that piehole, Vance," Momma said.

  "Hey, I'm just trying to help!"

  The way Momma saw it, she was the only one allowed to tell me how ugly I was, and she had no qualms about doing it. "Honey," she used to say when I was little, "you're as ugly as a duck­ling coming out of its shell." And then she would kiss all those ugly parts of my face.

  It might sound horrible, but you gotta understand, she said it out of love. Okay, maybe a little out of bitterness, too, but mostly out of love. See, my momma, she's smart enough to know there's some things the world doesn't forgive. The world can forgive you for being stupid. It can forgive you for being blind, for being deaf; it can even forgive you for being bad. This world doesn't forgive ugliness, though―and if Momma had pretended that I wasn't, it would have been a cruelty beyond measure, because how could I ever face the world without being prepared for the nastiness it would eventually kick back at me?

  I knew she couldn't be too mad at me for what I did at the spelling bee, because she had raised me not to take any guff for being ugly. Some kids need tough love―well, Momma raised me with ugly love.

  Even now I could see the love behind her stern face. I knew she wanted to jump out of that car, hug me, and make all the meanness in the world go away. But just as she wouldn't give me that hug, I wouldn't ask for it. We both understood that sympa­thy was one step above pity, and we would have none of that.

  "I don't like what happened in there any more than you do," Momma said, "but if you think I'm gonna let you walk home, you got something else coming!"

  "I swear, Momma, if you make me get in that car, I will look into your rearview mirror, and your side mirrors, too!"

  "So what?" said Momma. "I'll just buy new ones, and take it out of your allowance."

  "What allowance?"

  By now Momma's patience had worn as thin as her mascara. "Cara, I am not gonna say it again. Get in this car!"

  I looked at the road before me. It was straight, the ground was flat, and in the distance, I could see the mountains. Our town was at the base of those mountains. It was getting late in the afternoon, but I didn't care if it got dark. I could probably be home by midnight if I walked fast enough. Then I saw the bill­board about a hundred yards ahead, featuring my father's smiling face, before his hair went salt-and-pepper. It was one of the really old billboards back from the days when he had a dozen used-car lots around the county, instead of just one. DEFIDO MO­TORS, the billboard said. WE TREAT YOU RIGHT-O AT DEFIDO. The sign was faded, but it didn't stop his face from looking down on me. I wondered how many of these old billboards were on the road between here and home. I could bear a twenty-mile walk, but not the prospect of Dad glaring down at me ten times larger than life, over and over again.

  "Did you call Dad?" I asked Mom.

  "And tell him what? That you spelled a four-letter word?"

  "Technically," said Vance, "it was one four-letter word, and a couple of two-letter words."

  "I had every right to do it!"

  Mom didn't answer right away. She just kept that stern ex­pression, then said, "Maybe you did, but it doesn't mean I have to like it."

  Then another car passed, heading back toward Flock's Rest, and one of my classmates shouted out the window, "Hey, DeFido, wha'cha doing there? I don't see no sign that says COYOTE CROSSING!"

  There was laughter from the other kids in the car, and they peeled out.

  Momma pursed her lips and ignored it, the way she always taught me to ignore it―but I think it hurt her more than it hurt me.

  "If you walk, you'll have nothing but your own thoughts for company," she said. "And some evil company they'll be. The sooner we get you home, the sooner you can get your thoughts on something else."

  "Ah, she'll just go into her room and do some more of those stupid ink drawings," said Vance. Momma gave him her best dirty look, and he wilted like a fern in a frost.

  In the end, I got into the car. Not because of the long walk, not even because of having to face my dad's billboards. It was that passing car that made me realize I couldn't make the walk... because I knew everyone riding back to Flock's Rest from the spelling bee would pass me, and I couldn't bear the thought of every single driver having something to say.

  2

  Master-means

  I touched the tip of the wolf-hair brush to the surface of the ink and watched as the ink slowly wicked up into the brush, until it shone wet and dark.

  At first I didn't know what had drawn me to Chinese ink painting. I didn't even know anyone Chinese. There was some­thing about the simplicity of it, and the feel of a single bamboo brush carving up the white void. It just felt right. Then I learned that the art form began as a way to write the complicated symbols of the language. It all made sense to me then. Ink drawing was the Chinese version of spelling! I even went as far as to learn the seven basic strokes of Chinese writing and use only those strokes in the things I drew, so it all had a mysterious Zen look about it.

  I wasn't a master artist or anything, but that didn't matter. I didn't draw for others. I did it because of how it made me feel. I could lose myself in those brushstrokes―and as my brother had so rudely guessed, that's exactly what I did when I got home from the spelling bee.

  My favorite subject to draw was "Nowhere Valley," or at least that's what I called it. You see, there are two places I like to go when the outside world becomes too cruel. Nowhere Valley is one of them. It exists only in my head: a hidden place of rolling hills covered in hundreds of shades of green. I imagine myself walking along a meandering stone path, breathing in the smells of wildflowers and orange blossoms. People wave to me from their pastel-colored houses as I pass, and I wave back. I hear voices filled with joyous laughter, not mocking laughter. Some­times I see the valley in my dreams, but more often I see it in my daydreams. My simple brush drawings can almost capture the essence of the place. I wouldn't dare add color, because there's no pigment in the world that could do justice to what I see in my mind. Adding color would be sacrilege―like colorizing a classic old movie.

  Today, however, my heart was not in my brush. No matter how I drew the hills and paths, my imaginary valley gave me no comfort. So I rinsed off my brush, capped the ink, and decided to visit that second place I go to when life gets the better of me. It was the only place I knew where the residents didn't care how ugly you were. That's because they were dead.

  "Vista View" has to be the worst name ever given to a cemetery. First of all, the word vista already means "view" in Spanish, so the name is really
"View View." And second, when you're six feet under, you've got no view, except for maybe your own toes, so pointing out the beautiful view is kind of insulting to the dead, don't you think?

  Vista View hasn't always been a cemetery. Back in the day, it was a botanical garden―the most beautiful in the state. Winding trails and beautiful trees and flowers from all over the world filled the place. Our town of Flock's Rest got its name because of Vista View. Flocks of all kinds of birds would make their trek over the mountains and be drawn to the lush greenery of the botanical garden, where they'd fill the trees and ponds, making a racket that could be heard for miles. The woman who owned the place entertained bird-watchers in her little white house on a hill, smack in the middle.

  But then the place went bankrupt. An undertaking conglom­erate bought it and decided it was a fine place to plant people in­stead of trees. Now rich people from all over bury their loved ones there, paying more for a little burial plot than most people pay for homes. The beautiful trees and stuff are still there―only now those winding paths are all lined with gravestones. As for the old woman, they let her stay on in her house, but I don't know if I'd want to live in the middle of dead people, no matter how nice the view-view was.

  I told my parents I was taking a nap, then I locked my bed­room door and climbed out of the window. I was careful to slip out the back way of our mobile-home park so they wouldn't see me. Let my parents think I was brooding in my bed, wallowing in self-pity. They didn't need to know everything I did.

  It was dusk when I got there. It was the time of day when the colors of the earth bow out and let the colors of the sky take over. This was my favorite time of day, because shadows get long, and with a face like mine, shadows are your friend.

  There was a strange smell in the graveyard today. Something chemical that I couldn't place at first. Then, when I heard the metallic rattle followed by a long smooth hisssss, I knew what that smell was. Spray paint.