Duckling Ugly (5 page)

“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.

“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
in
sensitive…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.”

“No thanks, I’ll pass.”

Then Gerardo looked at me—and not just a sneaky sideways glance. I get those kinds of glances all the time—people stealing a look like they might check out a circus freak. This look from Gerardo wasn’t one of those, though. His eyes scanned my face, taking in all my features.

“You know, there’s stuff they can do for a person’s face these days,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Surgery and stuff. I saw this one show—they took a guy who was like the Elephant Man and made him look halfway decent. Not that you’re the Elephant Man or anything.”

He was right; he wasn’t insensitive on purpose, just by accident. I could respect that. “Yeah, right, surgery,” I said. “Maybe if my parents win the lottery.”

“I guess that kind of thing costs an arm and a leg, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They charge an arm and a leg, and all they give you is a face. Pound for pound, not a very good trade, is it?”

“Guess not,” he said. “But there’s gotta be some guys around who’d go for a girl…like you.”

Normally, I’d be insulted by this conversation. But Gerardo was saying it like he cared about the answer.

Suddenly Gerardo snapped his fingers. “Hey, what about that one kid, uh…” He looked up, trying to remember his name. “Started with a
T.
Tad. Todd.”

“Tud,” I said, miserably. “And that wasn’t his name, it was a nickname.”

“Yeah, whatever happened to him?”

“Gone,” I said, and offered nothing more.

“Too bad, you two coulda been a pair.”

Any inroads Gerardo had made with me were now gone. I turned my attention to my plate and didn’t look up. I just scarfed down my creamed gopher.

“What? Did I say something wrong?” Gerardo asked.

I could tell him, but the telling would require an explanation, and I just didn’t feel like it. “You can go now,” I said. “Time off for good behavior. I’m sure Nikki will be satisfied.”

“Nope, the bell hasn’t rung.”

I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

I didn’t say another word to him.

Finally, the bell rang, he got up and left, and I knew, like all the others who had come for their own selfish reasons, he would never grace the mercy seat again.

Tud. Tuddie. A kid I hadn’t thought about for more than two years, and hoped never to think about again. You could say I had
blocked out his memory, but that afternoon, thanks to Gerardo, Tuddie was all I could think about as I walked home.

Tuddie was as ugly as me—maybe uglier, if you can imagine such a thing. He had ears that stuck out like fleshy funnels, a crooked underbite like a badly bred bulldog, pasty skin, and sad, sagging eyes. Like me, there was no actual physical deformity to him, he just had an unnatural case of butt-ugliness. I couldn’t even remember what his real name was. Everyone just called him Tud, which was short for “That Ugly Dude.”