Duckling Ugly (16 page)

I didn’t like being ordered around like a dog, and I didn’t like being the center of attention. I felt the way I had beneath the lights at the spelling bee, but with the eyes of everyone in the room on me, I had no choice. I thought about the ritual of flowers when I first arrived, and wondered if some other ritual was in
store for me today. Was today the day I would be cast out? Had they grown tired of looking at me?

The old man put his hands onto my shoulders, like a real grandfather might, and looked into my eyes.

“Ah, my ugly one, my ugly one. Do you have any idea at all who I am?”

Although I had no idea, I was beginning to sense that the answer was not something I was prepared to hear. Not just because of the cunning twinkle in his eye, but because I chanced to look at the intravenous bag hanging beside him and noticed something I hadn’t noticed before. The clear water inside wasn’t entirely clear. It was swimming with faint colors like the northern lights.

“My given name is Juan,” Abuelo said. “My family name is Ponce de León.”

I rolled it over in my mind. Juan Ponce de León—one of the great Spanish explorers. “You’re one of his descendants?”

Abuelo slowly shook his head. “Think again.”

As I recalled, Juan Ponce de León had laid claim to Florida—but he was best known for his folly, which was searching all his life for something he never found.

Or had he?

I thought back to the mineral pool deep in the “Cauldron of Life.”

“The Fountain of Youth!” I said out loud.

It made the old man smile.

“You see,” he said, to all those assembled, “every schoolchild knows of me.”

“But that’s impossible! That would make you hundreds of years old…”

“Five hundred and forty-six—but who’s counting?” He laughed heartily. “Alas, I found the fountain too late in life to be eternally young. Instead I am eternally old. It could not restore me, only sustain me, keeping me at the same age I was when I first partook of its waters. But I am not bitter—for I have learned that youth is overrated. It is the fountain’s other gift—its
true
gift that I have come to value far more than youth.”

Now I was beginning to feel like the butt of an elaborate joke. “You expect me to believe this?”

“Believe what you like,” Abuelo said. “Believe that the moon is cheese, the world is flat, and that I am just a crazy old man.” Then he smiled, cupping my face in his hands. I wanted to back away, but I was transfixed by his eyes. “And now, my little mud hen, time for the unveiling.”

He turned and shouted, “Uncover them!”

Then people all around the room, standing close to the walls, turned and tore off the white satiny cloths that covered the mirrors. Suddenly light zigzagged in paths across the room from one mirror to another. Those mirrors were everywhere. There was nowhere I could look without seeing one. I closed my eyes and knelt on the floor, covering my face.

“Please don’t do this,” I said, my voice not much more than a whimper. “Don’t you know what will happen?”

But the old man gently helped me up and moved me toward the mirrors. I still couldn’t look at them.

“Come now, Cara,” he said. “These mirrors will not hate you. They want to love you. Every one of them. Look at yourself.”

I lifted my eyes to see my reflection, still believing that the mirror would shatter.

And the person I saw looking back was not me at all.

This face in the mirror—it could have been a relative: a sister I never had. The opposite of me. This reflection had my mother’s graceful cheekbones, my father’s soft eyes. A face with all the good genes that had been denied me was now peering at me through eyes that were perfectly shaped.

I reached up to touch my face. My skin was clear. No rashes, no pimples, no boils. Smooth and soft as the skin of a peach.

“You see?” said Abuelo. “The fire of beauty now burns within you.”

I looked around for an explanation, but all I could see was everyone smiling at me. Happy for me. And most of all, Aaron.

Abuelo, still holding my shoulders, stood behind me as we gazed into the mirror together.

“The fountain’s greatest gift is the gift of eternal beauty. There is a legend that the Angel of Death is beautiful, and she will never take the life of anyone more beautiful than she. This, I believe, is why we here in De León live forever. Not because the fountain makes us eternal, but because true beauty never dies.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off of myself. It was the first time I could truly look at my reflection. How could I be this beautiful creature?

Then I heard a gentle voice behind me. “I have something for you.” It was Harmony. I turned to see her unfolding a dress. Simple, clean, and, like all of their clothes, made from swan gossamer.

The old man stepped back, the women surrounded me, and there, within the cocoon of the women of De León, they took off my cotton dress and clothed me in the velvety white garments of the eternally beautiful. I felt like a bride.

Soon the band started up again, the room so much brighter now with all the mirrors. It seemed to be filled with a thousand people instead of just a hundred. Everyone danced in circles, catching their own gazes in the mirrors that had been covered since the day I arrived.

I danced with everyone who came for my hand, but mostly I danced with Aaron.

When the celebration was over, I walked back with him, arm in arm, down the winding path to my little cottage on the opposite end of the valley. Perhaps it was still the effect of the water, but I felt like I was hovering over the ground in a daze. I was myself, yet I was
not
myself, and it felt wonderful.

He left me at my door with a kiss. This was nothing like that awful kiss I had stolen from Marshall Astor on homecoming night. Aaron’s kiss was as perfect as he was. As we both were.

“You’re truly one of us now,” he said. “You always have been, you just didn’t know it.”

After he left, I closed the door, took off my beautiful dress, and slipped beneath the covers, for the first time feeling sheets against skin that wasn’t pocked like the surface of the moon—a moon that, for all I knew, really was made of cheese, because all the rules that had made up the world I knew were now in serious question. Life was suddenly magical and full of wonder.

Right here, right now is my “happily ever after” moment,
I thought. I would have been perfectly happy for time to stop and the universe to come to a satisfied end.

But, of course, it didn’t.

I
won’t try to explain what it’s like to go from hideous to gorgeous. There are no words to describe the feeling—at least not in any language I knew…or at least any language I knew
yet.
Let’s just say Miss Leticia had been right all along. I did have a destiny.

In those first days after the unveiling, I soaked in my new self, just as my skin had soaked in the water of the fountain. It was amazing how many mirrors there really were in De León, once they had all been uncovered—and I must have caught my reflection in every one, preening like a model for the camera. I know it sounds awful, but I just couldn’t help it. It’s like I needed to see that beautiful reflection over and over again to make myself believe it was real. Hair like mocha silk; soulful caramel eyes; skin as smooth as my swan-gossamer gown; and a figure with all the right curves from whatever angle you looked.

I posed for Giancarlo, the portrait painter. “Venus herself would be jealous,” he said, and Abuelo promised to hang the portrait in his mansion once it dried.

I visited everyone, spoke with everyone in De León those first few days, and if I had questions before, I had even more now. This
time, though, everyone was much freer with their answers…although they all acted as if the answers should be obvious.

“If it’s the Fountain of Youth and Beauty, why isn’t everyone young?” I asked Aaron as I helped him prepare for a treasure hunt that would take the citizens of De León most of Sunday to complete.

“Nearest I can figure is that the water doesn’t move time
backward,
it just stops it where it is. Whatever state you were when you drank, that’s where you stay.”

“So I’ll always be sixteen?” I asked.

He laughed. “It doesn’t stop you from growing, silly—just from growing old.”

I didn’t quite get it, until I remembered something I had learned in science—that there’s a point for everyone where they stop growing
up,
and start growing
old.
“I think girls are supposed to keep growing until they’re about eighteen,” I said. “But boys grow until they’re about twenty.”

“So there you go,” said Aaron. “We’ll be eighteen and twenty forever. Once we get there, of course.”

I laughed. Even the sound of my laugh had changed, filtered through a much more shapely mouth. Aaron looked at me and shook his head. “What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing. It’s just that for all those weeks, I tried to imagine what you’d look like after visiting the fountain. I never even came close to imagining you the way you look now.”

“What if it hadn’t worked?” I asked him. “What if I had stayed ugly?”

“Why would you want to think about something like that?”
He grabbed me and tickled me in the ribs until I laughed, and forgot the question.

During one of my weaving sessions with Harmony and her friends, I asked about children again. I wanted to find out for myself whether the women of De León truly didn’t mind being barren.

“Nature gives life in many ways,” she said. “There can’t be birth without death.”

Gertrude nodded. “It would be unnatural.”

It seemed strange to me that she would say something like that—after all, there was nothing natural about eternal life, was there? But then, if the fountain was a natural place, perhaps it was. Perhaps it was just a hidden side of nature.

“There are times I wish I could trade postmortality for the chance to have children,” said one of the younger women. “But that’s not a choice we have anymore. Postmortality is forever.”

“Don’t you mean
immortality
?” I said.

Harmony strung a fresh thread of gossamer into her loom before answering. “Abuelo might talk of immortality, but none of us is truly immortal, Cara. We
can
live forever, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we
will.
”

“I…don’t understand.”

“Flesh is still flesh,” she explained. “We do not wither, but we do wear. We bruise, we bleed, we break, and if it’s bad enough, we die.”

“That’s why we have to be careful,” Gertrude said, and then went into the long tale of poor Virgil Meeks, who was gored by a mountain goat and died at the untimely age of 137.

I thought about this. “It’s actually a blessing that the fountain doesn’t make us truly immortal,” I pointed out. “I mean, what’s the value of life if you can’t die? How could you ever appreciate anything? This way life is still precious.”

“Postmortality,” like everything else in De León, was perfect—but there was still something about it that bothered me. “
Postmortality
is such an ugly word for such a wonderful thing,” I told them. “Shouldn’t it be called something better…like…oh, I don’t know…
Eternessence.
”

They all chuckled and repeated the word, trying it on for size. They liked it. They liked me. Now I had not only their acceptance, but their approval as well.

I had finally stepped into that great destiny Miss Leticia had spoken of—and my destiny was perfection. But what happens once you’ve arrived at that final destination? What then?

I should have stayed content to be one of the beautiful people of De León, but each night, it wasn’t the sense of belonging that filled me as I drifted off to sleep. More and more, my mind was filled with the faces of the people back home in Flock’s Rest.

“It’s natural to think about them at first,” Aaron said. “Don’t worry, it’ll pass.”

I believed him, but I had my doubts.

Abuelo called for me two weeks after my “unveiling.” We met in his great ballroom. His throne room, now filled with a hundred mirrors: a grand
reflectorium.
Those mirrors would stay uncovered until the next poor unnaturally ugly soul found his or her way under Abuelo’s wings—and I would probably be the one to lead the new arrival down the gauntlet of flowers, as Aaron had led me.

Abuelo rose from his golden sofa and gave me a powerful hug. Then he walked around me, looking me over like I was a sculpture and he was Michelangelo.

“Harmony does good work, no? That gossamer gown is the finest she’s made yet.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Much love went into it. She has a special place in her heart for you, I think. Like a mother.”

That made me think of Momma. Was Harmony taking her place? Was it okay to let that happen? One thought led to another, and in an instant my head was flooded with Flock’s Rest.

“You are restless,” Abuelo said. “I see this. And I also know why.”

“You do?”

“It is because you have not found your place here. You have not yet found a task that fits you. Am I right in thinking this?”