Duckling Ugly

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 Leon, 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.'

Her words left a mark on my mind just as black as the ink stain I had left on her blouse. I wanted to scream, but it came out as a weak warble. I ran for the nearest exit?but as I neared the doors, the school security guard stepped in my way. He scowled at me with a face that was little more than a bloated pus­tule. 'Where do you think you're going?' he said. 'Get to class.'

With every exit guarded, I was trapped within this pageant of monstrosities.

How do you judge beauty? They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that's not true. Beauty is in the spirit of the world in which you live. It's where your world tells you it is?the be­holder has no choice in the matter... and if your world finds beauty in the black pit of ugliness, then that's where your beauty lies. Ugly is the new pretty. The thought followed me through the rest of that horrible day. For the people of Flock's Rest, it wasn't just their faces and bodies that had changed, but the yardstick by which they judged.

At lunch, I found myself at a table alone. Sure, there were others there to start with, but bit by bit they drifted away. Every­thing was back to the way it had been before. I was the only beautiful girl in town?and yet I was alone, untouchable, while all around me kids with the faces of ghouls laughed and enjoyed themselves,

I was so lost in my thoughts, I hadn't realized someone had sat down at the table?and when I looked up, there was Gerardo in the mercy seat.

'Hi,' he said.

Gerardo hadn't been spared. He was just as repulsive as every­one else. I didn't want to accept that I had done this to him. 'Things didn't turn out the way I wanted.'

'They never do,' he said.

'You do see what's happened, don't you? No one else seems to notice?but you must see it.'

And then he shrugged. 'Yeah. You get used to it, though.'

'Used to it? But how do you get used to this?' I grabbed his ear that looked more like a cauliflower. 'And this?' I grabbed his chin, which stuck out unevenly from his face.

He smacked my hand away. 'Some things give a face charac­ter, all right? I don't expect you to understand that. Your face is just creamy smooth. No character to it. All right, I'll admit it: I thought that new face of yours was pretty for a while?but now when I look at you, it doesn't do a thing for me. It's like looking at a bowl of sugar. Sure, it's sweet. But it's got no flavor.'

'Why'd you come over here, Gerardo?'

'To warn you,' he said. He looked to the door of the cafete­ria, and now when I glanced around, I could see that most of the kids had cleared out, even though the bell hadn't rung. 'They're planning something,' he told me. 'I thought you should know. And I wanted you to know that I had nothing to do with it.'

'But you're not going to stop it, either.'

He shook his head. 'No, I'm not.'

Then he took my hand and gently placed into my palm a sliver of broken glass. It was the piece of the mirror