Duckling Ugly
Authors: Neal Shusterman
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.
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…
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| Dark Fusion: Red Rider’s Hood | Neal Shusterman |
| Dreamland | Sarah Dessen |
| Inventing Elliot | Graham Gardner |
| The Outsiders | S. E. Hinton |
| Postcards from No Man’s Land | Aidan Chambers |
| Prep | Jake Coburn |
| The Shadow Club | Neal Shusterman |
| The Shadow Club Rising | Neal Shusterman |
| Stormbreaker | Anthony Horowitz |
| That Was Then, This Is Now | S. E. Hinton |
| The Unseen part 1: It Begins | Richie Tankersley Cusick |
| The Unseen part 2: Rest in Peace | Richie Tankersley Cusick |
SPEAK
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First published in the United States of America by Dutton Children’s Books, divisions of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2006
Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2007
Copyright © 2006 by Neal Shusterman
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THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE
D
UTTON EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Shusterman, Neal.
Duckling ugly / Neal Shusterman.
p. cm.
Summary: When sixteen-year-old Cara, a girl ugly enough to break mirrors, is drawn to a place where everyone can be beautiful, her deepest desire is to return home to say goodbye—and get revenge.
[1. Ugliness—Fiction. 2. Beauty, Personal—Fiction. 3. Revenge—Fiction. 4. Supernatural—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S55987Du2006 [Fic]—dc22 2005010661
ebook ISBN 978-1-101-66050-8
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
Part One
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….
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.