Duckling Ugly

  I can’t tell you how relieved I was by his approval. A man who smiled like that wasn’t about to hurl you back over the mountains. “You got all three right!” I said. Even though the drawings were stylized, and simplified with the barest gestures of lines, he had figured them out.

  Then he turned to the one wall I hadn’t gotten to yet—still stark white, without a single brushstroke. He pointed to it. “Leave this wall blank,” he said. Then he nodded to me, said adios, and left without another word.

  As relieved as I was that he hadn’t expelled me from De León, I was also confused.

  Leave this wall blank.

  It was a mystery. The seventh mystery, I thought, and glanced at the individual drying brush marks on the wall. Even more than keeping track of the days, I was keeping track of the many strange things that didn’t sit right with me about De León. I was supposed to “find the answers” here, but for a place that was supposed to hold all my answers, the people of De León didn’t care much for my questions. Oh, sure, they were polite when I asked, but through the pleasant talk, there was a silent air of secrecy—like they all had a malformed child locked away in the attic—which was impossible, because of mystery number one: There were no children in De León.

  Aaron had become uncomfortable when I asked him about it during my first days there.

  “The women here don’t seem to be able to have babies,” he told me. “I think it’s something in the water.”

  “That’s awful.”

  Aaron shrugged. “They don’t mind. Or at least they don’t anymore.”

  It bothered me, but not as much as it might have, since I didn’t plan on inflicting my genes on a defenseless, unsuspecting future—but how could such a thing not bother all the other women here? I asked Aaron more questions about it, but he just changed the subject.

  It wasn’t just him. Everyone I spoke to had the same kind of response to my questions. It was like all of their information was sifted through a strainer, to remove anything juicy before it got to me.

  Mystery number two: “To Serve Abuelo.”

  I learned about this particular mystery while weaving with Harmony and a few of the other women, when I questioned them about the isolation of the town.

  “If nothing comes in or out,” I asked Harmony, “how did Abuelo send me his letter?”

  The women in the room, who had seemed so happy with their weaving and their humming, now looked at one another apprehensively.

  “The monastery,” said one of the other women. She was immediately shushed, and the silence that fell made the birds outside seem loud.

  I looked to each of them, but none would return my gaze. “Monastery?” Hadn’t Abuelo once mentioned something about monks?

  Harmony sighed. “We’re not entirely self-sufficient,” she said. “Our valley is small. We don’t have land to raise our crops, or to raise livestock. So Abuelo struck a bargain a very long time ago with the Vladimirian monks.”

  I thought of the various kinds of monks I knew about. Buddhist. Franciscan. Benedictine.

  “I never heard of the Vladimirian monks,” I told them.

  “And you never will hear of them again,” a woman named Gertrude said. “They exist to keep us secret. To bring us the food we cannot grow, and to take messages to the outside world when we need it.”

  “And what do they get out of it?”

  “The joy of serving Abuelo,” Gertrude said.

  “And,” said Harmony, “that’s all there is to know about that.” Then she launched into a song, and the other women joined in. Although I had a ton more questions, it was clear there were no more answers in this sewing circle.

  Mystery number three: “Go with the Flow.”

  I stumbled upon this one while visiting with Claude and Willem, the two men who made furniture. I enjoyed watching them work, and I loved the smell of the fresh wood—but I had a better reason for hanging around them. Unlike many of the others, they got careless with their talk—especially once they grew more comfortable with me.

  “How long have you lived here?” I once asked them as they worked together on a table.

  “Not all that long,” the tall one named Willem said. “Our little group is nomadic by nature.”

  “Nomadic?” I said. “It seems to me you’ve been here for a long time.”

  “Long is a relative word,” said Claude, with a distinctly French accent. “We were in Lourdes before this. And before that Tibet—a valley in the Himalayas, not much different than this, although even less accessible.”

  “We follow the flow,” said Willem.

  “The flow of what?”

  The question hit a nerve, and they both became a bit uncomfortable.

  “Just the flow.”

  I knew I had stumbled upon something important, but what it meant, I had no idea. “So how much longer will you be staying here?” I asked.

  Willem rubbed his hand thoughtfully on the smooth wood of the tabletop. “Abuelo seems to think it won’t be much longer. But I think he might be wrong.” Then he looked out the window. “Just look at that grass. Look how rich it is, look how green.”

  Claude shook his head without looking up from his work. “He was right the last time.”

  “Yes. Well, we’ll see.” And then Willem changed the subject. “Have you considered what your place might be here? What you can add to our little community?”

  “That’s easy,” I told him. “Nothing.”

  “Pshaw,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.” I never actually heard a person say “pshaw” before. I almost laughed.

  “You must have some skills.”

  I shrugged. “I can spell.”

  “Ooh,” said Claude, “witchcraft! We have no witches here. That would be new.”

  “No.” I sighed, thinking about poor Miss Leticia, who had made the same mistake. “Not that kind of spell. I spell words.”

  Willem rubbed his chin thoughtfully, getting sawdust all over it. “Hmm. Words, words, words…we already have a poet.”

  “And a scribe.”

  “Ah, well,” said Willem, this time with less conviction. “I’m sure you’ll find something.”

  Mystery number four was the weather, and mystery number five was everything that grew beneath the unseasonably warm sun. See, it was almost winter now. Back in Flock’s Rest, sycamores would have lost all their leaves; the days would be cold and the nights colder. But in De León, it was always spring on the edge of summer.

  I asked Petra, our resident piano virtuoso, about it, and she answered without missing a single note in her sonata. “It’s the pattern of winds, and thermal vents in the mountainside,” she said. “I think it’s called a microclimate. I’m sure there are books about it in Abuelo’s library.”

  I looked, but I couldn’t find a single one.

  The fishing pond was mystery number six. Soren was De León’s designated fisherman—a big Scandinavian with a blond beard that hid most of his face. He would have looked natural in a Viking hat.

  I stopped to watch him fish one day and asked how such a small pond—no bigger than thirty yards across—could support so many fish, and so many different varieties.

  The utter panic in the big man’s eyes at the question was almost comical. “I just catch them,” he mumbled.

  “Still, I’ll bet you have a theory about it.”

  Again, panic. Then he was saved by a tug on his line. “Excuse me.” He reeled in his catch. I don’t know much about fish, but I do know that I’d never seen anything like this one before. It was at least two feet long, with a blood-red head, fading to a neon-blue body, blending into a tail as green as the oak leaves shading the pond from the unseasonably warm sun. It made me think of the Galápagos Islands—a place off the coast of South America so isolated, it gave rise to creatures seen nowhere else in the world.

  “So,” I said, gaping at the unearthly fish, “is that what they mean by a ‘rainbow trout’?”

  He quickl
y strung up his fish with the other equally odd specimens he had caught, said “good day,” and left like a man racing from a tornado.

  And now I had mystery number seven: an order from Abuelo to leave a perfectly good drawing wall untouched, with no explanation. Perhaps it was less grand then the other mysteries, but it was just as frustrating. They all knew things I didn’t—I was certain of it. It was all a reminder that I was the chimp at the table.

  The day after Abuelo’s surprise visit, Aaron came to take me out for a picnic. I knew right away that this was different from the other times we had done things together. I could tell because he was apprehensive, maybe a little bit excited. This is a date, I thought. The only other date I’d been on was that infamous and miserable night with Marshall Astor—but this was something else entirely. I didn’t know whether I was more excited or terrified.

  Aaron led me from my end of the valley to the other, where Abuelo’s mansion stood, then he took me up the steep slope behind it, as if we were climbing out of the valley.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  The soft grass gave way to harsh nettles as we got higher, and soon the rough brush gave way to jagged rocks. The valley was not easy to get out of, or to get into, for that matter.

  The shoes they had given me were not meant for climbing this kind of terrain. I wanted to ask Aaron where we were going, but he had this look on his face—a slight grin of anticipation, and I could tell that whatever he wanted to show me, it was a surprise.

  Finally, Aaron stopped at a plateau, the mountainside still looming ahead of us.

  “Have a look,” he said, then gently grabbed my shoulders and turned me around.

  I hadn’t realized how high we had climbed until I looked out to see the valley spread before us.

  On either side of the valley were dense clouds. I could hear distant thunder and see lightning flashes within the grayness. It was storming in the outside world, but the clouds never flowed over those hillsides into the valley of De León.

  We sat down and ate sandwiches made from home-cured ham and fresh-baked bread. My clothes had gotten dirty from the climb, but I noticed that Aaron’s didn’t have a trace of dust. I reached over and touched his sleeve. I did it to feel the fabric, but then I realized I was gently rubbing his arm. I pulled my hand back, a bit embarrassed.

  “No, it’s okay,” he said. “You like the way it feels, don’t you? It’s made of swan gossamer.”

  I looked at him like I hadn’t heard him correctly. “Swan what?”

  “Swan gossamer,” he said. “Once a year the swans come in the spring to mate. Hundreds of them. We brush through their feathers to collect the soft down, and then spin it into thread.”

  “It’s so beautiful.”

  “It never gets dirty. It never wears out.”

  “I wish I could wear it,” I said.

  He smiled at that, then reached up and touched my face, looking, as he always did, right into my eyes. It would have been a wonderfully romantic moment, but my face, which had always been my enemy, chose this moment to launch an offensive—and when I say offensive, I truly do mean offensive.

  They say acne is caused by pores swelling up, becoming infected. When a pore is clogged with dirt, it becomes a blackhead. As the infection grows, it becomes a whitehead. And every once in a while, one of them turns into Mount St. Helens. If you have acne, you know exactly what I mean. And if you don’t, just be thankful.

  Aaron quickly pulled his hand away when he realized he had inadvertently popped a zit. For a brief, brief instant, he looked at me with the same nauseated disgust that I got from the rest of the world. Then he looked away from me for a moment, forcing that feeling away. He wiped his fingers on a rock. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It happens.”

  I couldn’t look at him now. I was too humiliated. I pressed the back of my hand to my face, just in case I wasn’t done erupting. I felt tears of embarrassment coming, so I let my hair dangle in front of my face so he couldn’t see it.

  “No,” he said, sounding a little bit angry. “Don’t you do that. Look at me.”

  I shook my head. What a fool I was to think that I could have anything resembling a normal relationship with someone who looked like Aaron. All my weeks here, pretending I could ever belong—but I was just deluding myself—and the people here weren’t helping, they were just feeding that delusion—even Aaron. As he sat across from me, I realized he was just taking the mercy seat. The school cafeteria was gone, but the mercy seat would always be there no matter where I was.

  Then Aaron said, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  That made me look up. “Remember you?”

  “I thought you eventually would, but you didn’t. Maybe this will help.” He brought his hands to his face. “I don’t know if I can do it anymore. It’s been a while, but I’ll try.”

  He put his thumbs behind his ears and pushed them forward so they stuck out like funnels. With his index fingers, he lifted up on his eyebrows. With his pinkies, he pulled down on his cheeks, so his eyes took on a mournful droop. He sucked his cheeks in, pushed his lower jaw out so that his bottom teeth stuck out in an underbite. Then he pushed his lips forward and pursed them so they looked like a pink hair scrunchie.

  Suddenly it hit me.

  “Tuddie?”

  He let go of his ears and his eyes and put his jaw back in its natural position.

  “That nickname stuck so well,” he said, “no one even knew my real name was Aaron.”

  I looked at that face, that beautiful face, and although I could see a hint of the resemblance to That Ugly Dude, as everyone called him, it was hard to believe this was the same boy. I’d be lying if I said I could recognize him from his eyes, because back home I never looked into Tuddie’s eyes. No one did.

  “But…your face…” I said. “How…?”

  Aaron just shrugged. “You could say I grew out of my awkward stage.”

  Then he told me how he had run away, much the same way I had, at that defining moment when he could no longer stand how he was treated. He was on the run for months, until he found this place.

  “I dreamed about it, though,” he told me. “I knew the direction I had to go, but I had no hints to help me along. It took a while, but I finally found my way here. At first Abuelo wasn’t going to let me stay. He said I was too young. This society didn’t have room for people our age—but you see, they were getting bored. One party, one picnic, had gotten just like every other. So I started making up new things for them to do. Abuelo chose to let me stay…then I thought of you.”

  Now I couldn’t look him in the face again, but this time for a different reason. A different kind of shame.

  “Why would you think of me? I was so nasty to you.”

  “So was everyone,” said Aaron.

  “But coming from me, it must have been worse.”

  “It was. But after a while I stopped blaming you for it. See, Cara, I understand. I know what it’s like to hate your face so much, you wish you could be out of your own skin. And so when you looked at me, how could you help but hate me, when I only reminded you of yourself?”

  His unconditional forgiveness made me feel less deserving of it. “Well, as you can see,” I said bitterly, “I have not grown out of my awkward phase, and all your charity isn’t going to change it.”

  “You know what your problem is? You spent too much time listening to all those idiots in Flock’s Rest who made you feel worthless. That girl—what was her name? Marissa?”

  “Marisol,” I said, growling it out like it was a foul word.

  “You still think about her, and all the others, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, don’t! I never think about any of them—not at all. Because I am not Tuddie anymore, and you don’t have to be the Flock’s Rest Monster!”

  “Tell it to the mirrors!”

  I realized I was shouting, and I looked down, even
if he didn’t want me to. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not you I’m mad at.”

  “So who are you mad at?”

  “I don’t know. Everyone? No one? God?” I reached up the sleeve of my dress to blot my tears. And the fabric got stained, not just with tears, but with a spot of yuck still oozing from my popped zit. “Let’s just go back,” I said, disgusted. “Picnic’s over.”

  But he didn’t move. Instead he said: “I know something that’ll help your acne.”

  “No, you don’t,” I told him. “Nothing can help it. Believe me, I’ve tried everything.”

  And then he whispered, “You haven’t tried this.”

  Aaron got up and began to climb higher up the steep, rocky slope behind us. “C’mon,” he said. “It’s not far.” Then, when I didn’t move, he said, “Or are you just gonna sit there and feel sorry for yourself?”

  That got me moving. Like I said, I didn’t like to wallow in self-pity, and here I was doing just that. “Okay,” I said, “wait up.”

  After only about two minutes of climbing, we came to a deep crack in the mountain face. I could feel warm air rising from its depths and smell earth, like in the first moments of a rainstorm. This wasn’t just a crack in the stone, this was the mouth of a cave.

  Aaron stepped into the darkness, but I hesitated. Standing in the stark daylight, I couldn’t see him in the cave ahead of me, but I heard his voice coming from inside. Now, without seeing his face, just hearing his voice, I truly recognized him as the boy I once knew as Tuddie.

  “I can’t force you to follow me,” he said. “You have to come because you want to.”

  Want. There were a lot of things I wanted right then. Too many to put into words. I was a big empty bucket of want.

  “You’ve trusted me this far,” he said from the darkness. “Will you trust me a little bit farther?”

  There was something important about all of this. Then it occurred to me that being at the mouth of this cave was no coincidence. Whatever was down there in that cave was the reason we came all the way up this mountainside for the picnic.