Duckling Ugly (9 page)

“Fine. And I have a right not to go with Marshall anywhere,” I said, but my resolve was failing. Then I got to thinking, if this whole thing wasn’t some scheme of Marisol’s, and if she truly didn’t want Marshall to take me, then how could I pass up this chance to make her miserable? I thought about Gerardo, too. He’d be there with Nikki. Certainly, she wouldn’t stand for him dancing with most other girls, but what about me? If Gerardo danced with me, would Nikki see that as him being noble? I could swallow my pride and pretend to be some social charity case if it meant Gerardo would dance with me. Then again, would he even ask? I’d never know if I stayed home.

I think Momma knew I was on the verge of giving in, because she got quiet. Serious.

“Honey, life does not throw you many opportunities,” Momma said. “Don’t go and squander the ones you get.”

“But I don’t like Marshall Astor.”

“You don’t have to,” Momma told me.

And the look in her eyes when she said it struck home, because I knew she wasn’t talking about me and Marshall. She was talking about her and Dad.

There were good things I could say about my momma and bad things. But the sadness I saw in her right then made me feel selfish thinking about myself.

“Go and be happy, Cara,” Momma said. “I need you to be happy.”

That fence I was sitting on had become too uncomfortable, so I finally jumped off. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

I didn’t tell Gerardo. I had planned to, but then he started talking all about how he and Nikki were going to the dance, and he asked me what I thought he should wear. After that, I didn’t want to talk about it. No matter what awful fate awaited me at that party, it would be worth it to see the look on Gerardo’s face when I walked in with Marshall!

T
he day before homecoming, Nikki went to get her teeth cleaned, determined that if she couldn’t outshine the likes of Marisol and her beauty-queen friends, she could at least outsmile them. While Nikki’s motormouth was being worked over, Gerardo had the afternoon free. So I took him to Vista View to meet Miss Leticia.

“This here’s a good girl,” Miss Leticia told him. “You treat her right, you hear?”

Gerardo put up his hands. “Hey, I’m not gonna treat her at all.”

“Well,” said Miss Leticia, “that’s fine, too.”

Miss Leticia seemed worried about something today. She wasn’t saying anything, but it was right there in her body language.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

“Oh, I’m fine. I got my son and that wife o’ his comin’ over tomorrow, and they always set me on edge.”

I didn’t ask any more questions. Miss Leticia had told me how, every time they come over, they bring brochures from nursing homes—not good ones, but the cheap ones that give you a
room, a bed, and, if you’re lucky, something edible once in a while. The kind of place you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Okay, maybe your
worst
enemy, but no one else.

“Maybe the corpse flower will bloom and chase them away,” I suggested.

She laughed at that. “Maybe so, maybe so. It sure is gettin’ ready.”

“The
what
flower?” asked Gerardo.

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

Miss Leticia went inside, leaving us to walk through the greenhouse. There was a sour smell in the air, like dirty socks, as we got close to the corpse flower. Its stalk was now almost six feet high. You could see the crack where the flower would start to unfurl. “When it blooms it smells like dead bodies,” I told him.

“Cool,” he said. “I hope she opens up the doors so the whole town gets a whiff. The ultimate stink bomb!”

I thought it would be perfect if we were holding hands as we walked among the plants, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Still, I tried to keep my hands in full view, hoping he’d notice how nice they’d been looking. He didn’t, but he did make another observation.

“You know, I don’t know why they call you the Flock’s Rest Monster,” Gerardo said. “There’s nothing monstrous about you. Except maybe for the way you look, but looks don’t make a monster. It’s the things a person does.”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I’ve done some pretty monstrous things.”

“Tell me one.”

And so I told him all about how I got Marisol expelled from school.

“Hmm,” said Gerardo when I was done. “Well, you didn’t do anything monstrous at all. Marisol brought that on herself.”

“So what about you?” I asked him. “What bad things have you done?”

He looked away from me then, tugged off a loose fern leaf, and fiddled with it.

“I’ve done some stuff.”

“Tell me.”

He kept his eyes on the fern in his hands instead of me.

I could tell there was something he wanted to say, yet didn’t want to say at the same time. I wondered which part of him would win out.

“Go on, it’s okay,” I told him.

“No, it’s not,” he said. “But I’ll tell you anyway.” He took a deep breath. “You know, I almost got expelled, too. It was last year. They weren’t just going to expel me, they were going to send me to juvie.”

“I didn’t know that.” And then I asked as gently as I could, “What did you do?”

“I hacked into the district’s computer. I didn’t change grades or anything. I just got onto the teachers’ Web sites and had some fun. I put pictures of monkeys in place of their faces, stuff like that.”

I grinned. “I didn’t know you were a computer geek.”

He shrugged. “I’m not. It’s just a hobby, you know.”

“Well, that’s not so bad,” I told him.

“Yeah.” Then he paused. “I swore I’d never do anything like
that again. But about a month ago, your friend Marisol asked me to hack into another computer.”

“Marisol wanted you to fix up her grades?”

He shook his head. “No. She wanted me to do something else.”

I still didn’t get where this was going. Usually, I’m quicker, but not this time. I just stood there cluelessly waiting to hear what despicable thing Marisol had asked him to do.

“Anyway, she pulled out a stack of bills from her purse. I don’t know where she got it from. I tell her no, but she keeps peeling off twenties…until I finally say yes.”

“So what did she ask you to do?”

He looked at me like I should already know…but when I looked back at him, still clueless, he finally said: “She had me hack into a certain computer, and put in a secret wireless Web connection, so I could control the computer from my laptop…and choose the words it was asking people to spell…”

It was like getting hit broadside by a truck. You don’t see it coming, and by the time you hear the crunch, it’s too late.

We sat there for a long time, the sour-sock smell from the corpse plant getting stronger and stronger. We couldn’t look at each other. The silence was so loud, if someone didn’t break it, I felt I’d go deaf. Well, if he wouldn’t do it, then I would.

“Don’t sit by me in the lunchroom anymore,” I told him.

“Yeah. Yeah, right,” he said, then he set his hands in his pockets and walked away.

I felt the breeze as he opened the greenhouse door, then I heard him say, “For what it’s worth, those words I made you spell…I don’t think any of those words apply to you.” Then I
heard the door close, leaving me in a cell of captured beauty about to be overwhelmed by the smell of death.

I started walking home, my mind a storm of bad feelings and bad thoughts. Normally, I would have been able to stand up to this the way I stood up to most everything. I was good at not letting myself get hurt anymore. But this time I’d been careless. I’d become vulnerable, and Gerardo’s betrayal, well, it hurt like a wound so deep it scraped bone.

I don’t know if you would call what I had a blind fury, but whatever it was, I lost track of where I was, and where I was going. Eventually, I got my feelings under control by thinking of my calming place. The lush valley, the pastel-colored cottages. The sense of belonging. I let it flow over me like a trance as I walked. When I came out of it, it was like waking up after sleepwalking. It took me a few seconds to get my bearings.

I had set out toward home, but somewhere along the way, I had changed directions. Now I was near the edge of the town, close to the interstate. I was just standing in an empty lot, facing the mountains.

What’s more is that I felt an urge to keep on going, like a kind of gravity pulling me in a direction other than down. I stood there for the longest time, trying to understand that feeling. But the afternoon was wearing on. The sun was about to set, and I was feeling cold in a place deep inside. Finally, I gave up and turned around to head home—but not before I realized the direction I was facing. Northwest.

If I was gonna find the answers, I knew I wouldn’t find them at the homecoming dance. Still, I went out with Momma to get a gown, and then I prepared for the first date of my life.

I sat in my room, in front of the sheet-covered mirror, wondering what I looked like, playing the game again, reaching up to tear down the sheet, only to pull my hand back like a coward.

“You look positively”—Momma grappled for the word—“fetching,” she said.

Vance peeked in and laughed. “Yeah, as in ‘Here, Rover, go fetch!’”

I threw a curler at him.

“You don’t listen to him,” Momma said. She kissed me and did what last-minute triage she could on my hopeless hair.

The doorbell rang, and Dad answered it. It was Marshall, all dressed up in a suit he had already grown out of. He didn’t look all too happy, but he didn’t look all that miserable, either.

He shook my dad’s hand.

“You make sure my daughter has a good time tonight,” he said, with a sternness in his voice I rarely heard.

“Yes, sir,” said Marshall.

He looked at me. I was afraid he was going to burst out laughing. But instead he said, “That’s a pretty dress you got on, Cara.”

Momma nudged my shoulder. “Thank the boy, dear.”

“Thanks,” I said.

As much as I hated to admit it, I was a little bit excited—and fearful, too—but I was walking into this with my eyes open. If Marisol, Marshall, or whoever had something awful planned for me, they would not get the satisfaction, because whatever it was, I would throw it back in their faces.

Out front, Marshall had himself a car. Nothing fancy, mind you. Just an old Chevy that had passed hands maybe two or three times before landing with him.

“Nice make-out car,” I said to Marshall with a smirk. “Don’t get any ideas. I’m not that kind of girl.”

He rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry. You’re safe.”

“Am I?” I said. “How about when we get there? How safe will I be then?”

He started the car and laughed. “You still think we’re pulling some prank on you, huh? I told you, it’s nothing like that.”

“So then what’s tonight about?” I asked.

“It’s about going to a dance, having a good time, and taking you home. And then driving away.”

“And then what?”

A frightened expression came over his face. “What do you mean, ‘then what?’”

“What happens then? You gonna take me to other parties? Or is this like the lottery, one date with Marshall Astor.”

He thought for a moment and then said, “Just enjoy tonight. We’ll let tomorrow take care of itself.”

When we got there, the party was in full swing. Couples dancing. The shy ones standing on the sidelines.

It wasn’t until I saw Marisol that I knew Marshall had been telling the truth. That bitter-sour look on her face when she saw us made it clear to me she’d had no part in this, and wanted no part of it, either. For the rest of the night, she tried to avoid us and busied herself with her friends and dancing with dateless boys. I, of course, did everything I could to be in her line of sight as often as possible. I even made a point of running into her in the bathroom.

“Isn’t this one of the signs that the world is about to end?” I said to her.

“Excuse me?”

“You know—hell freezes over, rivers turn to blood, and Marisol doesn’t have a date?”

She bristled like a porcupine, then tossed it off with a flick of her perfect hair. “Poor Marshall,” she said. “After tonight, I’ll need to disinfect him.” Then she strutted out—but stumbled clumsily on her high heels, clinching this as the high point of my evening.