Duckling Ugly (6 page)

He used to try to hang out with me when we were still in grade school, thinking we had something in common. I tried to be nice to him—I really did—but the truth was, I hated him as much as I hated the beautiful people like Marshall or Marisol. Maybe I hated Tuddie more, because he saw us as kindred spirits—as if ugliness loved company the way misery did. Well, I could live with my own face, but I didn’t have to live with his. Eventually, I started ignoring him, giving him the cold shoulder, trying to be anywhere he wasn’t. Still, he’d always find me—and then people started calling me Tug. “That Ugly Girl,” which to me was far worse than any of the other nicknames folks gave me. “The Flock’s Rest Monster”—at least that had
identity
to it. “That Ugly Girl” did not.

Finally, I snapped. I pushed that boy away—told him to crawl back under whatever rock he crawled out from, and never come out again.

And so he did.

One day he just disappeared. Some say his daddy put him out of his misery. Others say he ran away to join a freak show. Ralphy
Sherman said he got sold into slavery in Madagascar. Whatever the truth was, Tuddie was gone, and I was glad for it. Once he was gone, they stopped calling me Tug and went back to calling me the Flock’s Rest Monster, which was fine by me. Better a solitary monster by choice than a pathetic pair of repulsives.

But with each step I walked that afternoon, there came another memory of Tuddie’s tragic, festering face, and my own sense of despair began to deepen. Looking at him was the closest I could come to looking in a mirror. His sorry fate, whatever it was, couldn’t be much different from what mine would eventually be.

By the time I got home, I was feeling lower than low. The last thing I expected was to find my destiny waiting on the kitchen table.

“
S
omething came in the mail for you, honey,” Momma said the second I got home. She left it for me on the kitchen table, all by itself, so I couldn’t miss it when I came in. It was a little white square right in the center of the big brown circle of the table.

The letter was addressed in a sweeping handwriting I couldn’t imitate even if I had the finest brush. The words were like wispy clouds blowing across a windswept sky.

Miss Cara DeFido.

My name had never looked so beautiful.

“Who on earth do you think it’s from?”

I just shrugged. I think Momma was more curious than I was about it. Who with such handwriting would be writing to me?

I picked up the creamy white envelope. The paper must have been expensive, soft to the touch, like velvet. I flipped it over to see who it was from, but there was no name, just an address: 1 Via del Caldero, in a city named De León.

I tried to rip the envelope open, but it wouldn’t tear. I tried to peel it back from where it had been sealed, but the glue held tight.

Momma handed me her fancy letter opener. Carefully, I inserted it into the corner and slit it across. The paper resisted for
a moment, then cut with no noise, as if I was cutting through a living membrane. I shivered.

“Go on, go on, see what’s inside,” Momma said.

I reached in and pulled out the letter. It was on the same creamy white paper. There were no marks or letterhead to reveal the sender—and only three words on the page, written in the same sweeping handwriting.

“Well, what is it?” asked Momma impatiently. “Is it a letter from someone we know? Is it an invitation?”

I held the page out of her sight.

“It’s none of your business,” I told her. When she realized I was serious, she huffed and left the room. Mom’s curiosity would have her stewing all afternoon, but I didn’t care. This, I knew, was a personal message, not meant for anyone’s eyes but mine.

I sat down at the table and took a few deep breaths. I was getting light-headed, and my fingers were getting cold. An inexplicable excitement was being pumped through my veins. I looked at the smooth white note once more.

Three words. That’s all. No signature, no explanation.

Those three words were a challenge, and deep in my heart, I knew it was nothing so simple or easy as a spelling bee. This was the challenge of my life.

I moved my index finger across the page, feeling its velvety smoothness, and traced the letters with my fingertip.

FIND THE ANSWERS

The three simple words that changed my life forever.

Miss Leticia’s greenhouse was different during the daytime than it was at night, but it was just as beautiful. When I got there, the sun was shining through the great glass dome of its center section, casting lines across everything like the bars of a cell. I could now see the tops of the trees in the dome. To me, it was a reminder that this enclosed oasis was nothing but captured beauty. A false reality to be sure, yet easy to lose oneself in, as Miss Leticia had been lost all these years.

Today she was tending to lilies of the valley, blooming around a little indoor pond. Her hands were covered with dirt.

“They’re beautiful,” I told her, and then I felt bad, because I knew she couldn’t really see them.

“Beautiful, yes,” she said, “but poisonous as a cobra. Let me go wash my hands, and I’ll make us some tea.”

When she came back, I told her all about the letter.

“What do you think it means?” I asked.

Miss Leticia held the letter in her withered hands. She moved her fingers across its surface, as if it were Braille.

“My, my,” she said. “This is a fine weave. Not quite paper, not quite cloth—something else.” She smelled it, but I already knew it had no scent. I’m sure all she could smell was the rich aroma of all of her blooming flowers. Her prize corpse flower had not yet opened, so everything still smelled sweet and calming, like the flavor of her tea.

“Do you think it’s for real?” I asked. “Or do you think it’s a joke?”

“Jokes don’t come on paper like this. Give me the envelope.”

I put it into her hands. She rubbed her thumb on the corners.

“No stamp? Is there a postmark?”

“No.”

“That means it was hand-delivered.”

“Someone must have just put it into our mailbox.”

“You said the town is De León?”

“Yes,” I told her. “And in our state, too.”

“I don’t know such a place.”

She handed me the letter and leaned back in her chair. As she crossed her ankles, I could hear the gentle clink of her leg braces touching each other. “I don’t know where the letter came from, but I can tell you this: Whoever sent it means for you to take it very seriously. They truly mean for you to find the answers.”

“How can I ‘find the answers’ when I don’t know the questions?”

And then Miss Leticia took my hands in hers. I flinched, thinking she might grip me with her nails again, but instead she rubbed my hands gently.

“You should start with just one. What do you think the most important question is?”

I didn’t answer her. Maybe because I was more afraid of knowing the question than the answer.

When I got home, Vance was fighting with Dad over the control of the living-room TV. Dad was, of course, watching RetroToob. An awful episode of the show
Nine Is Too Much,
about a huge family in the 1970s that apparently had an electronic laugh track following them wherever they went.

“How can you watch this garbage?” Vance said. “I mean, look at how they’re dressed—they look like clowns.”

I glanced at the TV. He was right. Striped pants and flowery shirts, all in colors that didn’t match, and everyone’s hair hung long in all the wrong places.

“When we were growing up,” Momma said patiently, “those were the fashions. At the time it looked good to us.”

Dad pointed his lecture finger at Vance. “You watch—when you have children, they’re going to laugh at the way you wore your pants, and the strange things you did to your hair.”

I walked past them, my hand in my pocket, still holding the mysterious note. I had no desire to be a part of the family festivities tonight.

“Honey, where have you been?” Mom asked, just noticing me.

“Out,” I answered, and went toward my room, to find that my door was closed. This wasn’t unusual in itself…but I did see something that gave me pause. There was some cloth wedged beneath my door. I recognized it as one of my sweatshirts. It was blocking the space under the door so no air could get through. Who had put it there?

I pushed open the door, and was attacked by a stench so foul, I fell back against the hallway wall.

“Oh, yuck!” I heard Vance say from the living room. “What
is
that reek?”

Holding my hand over my nose, I forced myself to enter my room. I saw it immediately. It was everywhere. Bloody masses of fur and rot tacked to my wall, all over my ink drawings.

Roadkill.

Opossums, raccoons, rabbits. It wasn’t just on the walls, but in my drawers, too, every single one. It was all over my clothes, and everything I owned.

This was a violation. A horrible, evil violation of one of the few places in the world I actually felt safe from the outside world. By now Vance and my parents were at the threshold. “Honey?”

I closed the door on them. I didn’t want them to see this. Roadkill in my dresser, roadkill in my closet. My clothes were ruined. Even if I could get out the smell, I’d never get out the stains. And it wasn’t over yet—because there was a lump beneath my covers. A large lump. As I approached it, I steeled myself for what I might find, and before I could change my mind, I pulled back the covers.

The coyote in my bed looked like it had met up with a semi. This coyote, however, had a dog tag around its neck. And the name on the tag said:
CARA DEFIDO.

I slipped out of my room, not letting my family see inside.

“Honey, what’s going on in there?” Momma asked, trying to peek around me. “What’s that awful smell?”

“Nothing,” I told her calmly. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Doesn’t seem like nothing to me,” Dad said.

“I said I’ll take care of it. Just get me some trash bags.”

Like the mysterious letter, this was my business. My problem. But unlike the letter, this was no mystery. This was Marisol.

I spent the rest of that day and halfway into the night in rubber gloves, disposing of the mess and scrubbing down my room. How had things come to this? One escalation after another…I
should have realized she’d get revenge for her ink-stained blouse—but this was beyond a single shot of ink thrown in the heat of anger. This was premeditated, and carefully planned. She had to know when no one would be home, and she’d need accomplices to do the dirtiest of the work. How could someone so beautiful be so mean-spirited? As I scraped up nasty bits of fur, I thought back to the one and only time Marisol had been nice to me. Even then she had had an agenda.

“Cara, I know we haven’t really been friends, but I think that can change.”

It was seventh grade. We had just gotten pink slips to go to the principal’s office. Something about cheating on a science test.

“The thing is,” Marisol said, “I was sick before the test.” She gave a little fake cough. “That’s why I couldn’t study. So I thought just this once I could borrow some answers from someone smart. Someone like you.”

Then she went on to give me this whole sob story about how she was once “framed” for cheating, and if she got caught this time, the punishment would be bad.

“So what do you want me to do about it?” I asked her.

“Well, Cara,” she said sweetly, “you’ve never been in trouble, so I figure if you admit to cheating off of me, they’ll go easy on you. You just look at them with those sad eyes—how can they help but feel pity?”

“And what do I get in return?” I asked.

“My friendship,” she said, “and a promise that one day I’ll pay back the favor.”

Ten minutes later, we were in the principal’s office, and the principal told us exactly what we expected to hear, in exactly the
tone of voice we expected to hear it. “Blah blah blah identical tests, blah blah blah zero tolerance.” And then he waited to hear our response.

“Well,” said Marisol, letting it all roll off her back, “I know nothing about this. Maybe Cara has something to say.”