Duckling Ugly

It wasn't just him, either. I found imperfections in everything and everybody at school. This boy had bad breath, that girl had bad hair, this one's fat, and that one's got an odd-shaped head. Was it just my imagination, or were all those things getting a little bit worse each day?

I even saw it in my family. Since when did Vance's eyes look so beady, and his two front teeth look so big? Since when did Dad's cheeks look so sunken in? And Momma's hair?had it always been so thin?

People didn't change like that, I told myself. It was all in my head. Could it be that I was surrounded by so much beauty in De Leon that the rest of the world paled by comparison?

I went out with Marshall four more times, making sure I con­trolled how far things went on every date. Then, after the last one, I heard the words that every girl longs to hear.

'I love you, Linda,' Marshall said, and I knew that he meant it. I don't know if he had ever even said that to Marisol.

I broke up with him the next day without explanation. He was devastated.

Now, with Marisol and Marshall taken care of, I turned my at­tentions to Gerardo. I thought that maybe he was keeping his distance, thinking I was really interested in Marshall. I made it clear around school that I was now available, and although every other boy in school began fighting to carry my books or sit with me at lunch, Gerardo wasn't one of them.

There were times I caught him watching me, though. During classes we had together, he would steal a peek, then look the other way and not look at me again for the rest of the period. I would squeeze my way into his lunch table, and within a minute, he would excuse himself and go sit somewhere else. Winning him over should have been easy, but now I realized this was trick­ier than vengeance.

When I started finding love letters shoved into the vent of my locker, I thought for sure they were from Gerardo?that he had finally come around. But no, those letters were all from Marshall, professing his undying love, hoping beyond hope to win me back. I sent his letters back to him with his spelling corrected.

Most popular. Most attractive. Most desirable. I was all of those things, but it simply wasn't enough. Well, if I could strip Marisol of her beauty, then I could strip Gerardo of his resis­tance. I knew I could!

I caught up with him one day after school walking home, and I matched his pace, even though he was trying to walk faster.

'I thought you were going to call me.'

'What for?' he said. 'It looks like you've got all the boys you can handle.'

I shrugged. 'I'm still waiting for the right one.'

'Well, good luck finding him.'

He took a shortcut through a weedy yard and into an alley. I followed. 'You've been avoiding me, and you know it,' I told him. 'I just want to know why.'

'Because I don't think you're good for me,' he said. 'In fact, I don't think you're good for anyone.' That was Gerardo, all right. Always honest.

'I don't know what you mean.'

'Yeah, you do. You toyed with Marshall, and now he's even more of a blithering idiot than he was before. You did something to Marisol, too, didn't you? I can't prove it, and I don't know what it was you did?but you did something that's keeping her out of school.'

'Gerardo,' I said, still forcing sweetness into my voice, 'you make me sound like a monster.'

'Yeah,' he said, 'the Flock's Rest Monster.'

I pursed my lips, keeping my mouth shut. He looked at me then, for the first time in our whole conversation.

'Yeah, I know who you are, Cara. Maybe no one else does, but I do, so you can drop the act.'

At first I was going to deny it?but what good would that have done? I took a deep breath and let it out. 'When did you find out?'

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a little slip of pa­per, handing it to me. It was the phone number I had writ­ten down for him on my first day back. Like an idiot, I had written 'Cara' instead of 'Linda.'

'At first I didn't believe it,' Gerardo said. 'But the more I watched you, the more I realized who you were. You knew too many things about too many people.'

Okay, I thought, it was time to change strategies now. No more deceit. It was time for honesty. 'I can tell you how it hap­pened?how I changed.'

'I don't want to know.' He hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder and picked up his pace again. 'Everything about you scares me, Cara. The way you look, the way you act...' I wasn't expecting to hear that?not from him. 'You got yourself a whole school to play with,' he told me. 'So go find yourself a guy who can only see your face, and not the rest.'

'Why are you treating me like this? I'm still the same person I was before.'

He shook his head. 'No, you're not. You were just ugly on the outside before. But your inside and outside kind of switched places, didn't they?'

His words were like a brutal slap. I wanted to strike back, but I held my temper because I knew it would chase him away. In­stead I turned on my newfound charm. 'You could be dating the most beautiful girl in Flock's Rest,' I said to him. 'Doesn't that mean anything to you?'

'How long before you spit me out like you spat out Marshall?'

'You're not Marshall,' I told him. 'I would never do that to you.'

Suddenly I heard a twang of metal, and Gerardo's lip began to bleed.

He put his hand up to his lip and took it away, seeing the blood on his fingers. The blood had now spread across his braces. The wire on his top teeth had sprung and was sticking out at a weird angle. One of those teeth was turned funny. Just one?like it had fought so powerfully against the wire trying to hold it in place that the wire busted.

With his hand held to his mouth, he said, 'You see, Cara? Nothing good happens when you're around.'

And he hurried across the street to get away from me.

What does it take to turn a heart black? One too many cruel tricks? One too many rejections? Or maybe it's something we do to ourselves. Evil people never think of themselves as evil. Maybe because they still remember themselves as good?or perhaps they see a future self resting peacefully in a time and place of goodness. A place where they can repent for all the awful things they did to get there.

I can't say exactly where I was, or what I was on the inside. All I knew was that I was stunning to the eye, and it blinded me to so many things. After that day, I took to brooding about Gerardo, the way that Marshall brooded about me, and feeling more and more miserable about how things had turned out. I didn't notice that fewer and fewer boys were wanting to sit with me at lunch, and that fewer and fewer girls wanted to talk with me after school. I did start to notice other things, though.

Flock's Rest had never been the most beautiful town in the world, but it wasn't an eyesore, either. Or at least I had never seen it that way. Just as with people, I was seeing our town through completely different eyes. Eyes that had known the sim­ple, perfect beauty of De Leon.

I had been home for about six weeks when I really became aware of it. Driving in the car with Momma one day, I spent some time looking?really looking at the state of our town. Lawns were patchy and yellow, and the paint on the houses wasn't just peeling, it was fading like someone had come in the middle of the night and robbed the color. The houses themselves had a weariness to them. Their windows looked like old eyes. Their porches seemed like mouths hung open in exhaustion. Every building in town sagged under its own weight, as if it was just longing to crumble to the ground.

'Momma,' I asked, 'has Flock's Rest always looked this bad?'

'Well, honey,' she said, 'a town gets old.'

It was more than that, though. I pointed out a garden we passed. 'Just look at that!' I remembered that garden?it used to be all full of rosebushes, but now it was half-dead, and the few hardy plants still alive looked like the weeds that pop up in a highway divider.

Momma shrugged. 'It's just the time of year, dear. Even though we're not in a snow zone, not all that many things grow in the winter. And besides, maybe the owner likes it growing wild.'

I would have argued, but just then we hit a pothole that nearly ejected me from the car and completely rattled my thoughts. Seemed to me there were more ruined roads in town, too.