Duckling Ugly

1 To the bone

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.

Unprepossessing.

It was another one of those nice words for "ugly." Even nicer than plain. It was just a coincidence that the judge's computer came up with that word for me to spell, but still it bothered me. Momma would have called it ironic. The Almighty showing He's got Himself a sense of humor. I'm sure that's what she was thinking out there in the audience.

Well, she's not me. The contests she went out for when she was my age were beauty contests, not spelling bees. She was pos­sessing, pre possessing―there was no "un" about it.

"Contestant thirteen," the judge's voice boomed.

In the previous round, there had been five more eliminations. Only six of us remained. I stood up and felt the searing spotlight on me again.

The judge looked at the word that had been thrown up on his computer screen, and he hesitated. He glanced at the judge next to him, who only shrugged. He took a deep breath and turned to me.

"Please spell abomination."

Some gasps of surprise from the audience. A few snickers.

The heat I felt in my ears, then cheeks had nothing to do with the lights. I knew I was going blotchy red. I tried to tell myself it was just coincidence again, but deep down I knew it wasn't. This word was too easy. The other kids were getting words like cairn­gorm and pneumonectomy. Whether this was the Almighty having a major laugh or something other, I couldn't figure out yet.

"Abomination," I said. "A-B-O-M-I-N-A-T-I-O-N. Abomina­tion."

"Correct."

I sat back down and looked at the crack-nail toes sticking through the tips of my sandals.

There's that old joke: "Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone." But they're wrong―because with me it goes deeper than the bone. It goes right to the marrow. I once over­heard our pastor say to one of the other parishioners that looking at me was enough to question your belief in God. Momma over­heard it, too, so we left that church and found another.

Four more contestants were disqualified, one after another. It was down to me and some brainiac who kept nervously cracking his knuckles.

"Contestant thirteen," came the booming voice.

I stood.

When the judge looked at the computer screen this time, he took his time. He called all the other judges over. They con­ferred, then sat down again, looking back and forth to one another. When the head judge got on the microphone, he didn't offer me a word to spell. He offered me his apologies.

"I'm sorry, Miss DeFido . . . but the rules are very strict," he said. "We have no choice but to give you the word that comes up on the screen. You understand?"

I nodded.

"There's nothing we can do about it."

I nodded.

He took a deep breath and said, "Please spell... grotesque."

And this time there was unrestrained laughter in the audi­ence; the chuckling, twittering voices of students, and parents, too. This was no accident. Somewhere out there, I knew, there was one kid, or two, or a whole gaggle of them who were secretly gloating over having somehow pulled this prank.

I knew what I had to do. Holding my head as high as I could manage, I spelled the word.

"Grotesque," I said. "G-0. . .^w I leaned closer to the micro­phone. "T-0..." I grabbed the microphone stand like a rock star. "H-E...I looked out over all those people in the audi­ence. "L-L. Grotesque."

Silence from the judges. Silence from the audience.

Finally, the head judge leaned toward his microphone. "Uh... I'm sorry," he said. "That is incorrect."

Then, in the front row, a newspaper photographer stood up and brought his camera to his eye.

Go on, take my picture, I thought. Go on. I dare you.

And I smiled for him, as wide as I could, stretching my lips over my terrible teeth.

The lens shattered with such force the entire camera fell to pieces.

People nearby shielded their eyes from the flying shrapnel, and the photographer, his hands and face bloody, stood for a mo­ment staring in shock, then raced down the aisle in pain.

"Cheese," I said.

Then I took off the number 13 sticking to my shirt and left.

My mother found me walking by the side of the road ten minutes later. She pulled up in her classic pink Cadillac―the kind they got sticking out of the roof of the Hard Rock Cafe. It has wings like the Batmobile and funky bullet-shaped taillights. Everyone knows when Momma drives down the street. When she saw me, she slowed down, matching my pace.

"Cara DeFido, you get yourself into this car."

"Give me one good reason."

"Because it's a twenty-mile walk back to Flock's Rest."

"So I'll hitchhike," I told her.

"And who is it you think's gonna pick you up?"

"Yeah," said my brother from the backseat. "One look at her and they'll break the land-speed record to get away."

Momma turned around and tried to whack him, but her headrest got in the way. "You just shut that piehole, Vance," Momma said.

"Hey, I'm just trying to help!"

The way Momma saw it, she was the only one allowed to tell me how ugly I was, and she had no qualms about doing it. "Honey," she used to say when I was little, "you're as ugly as a duck­ling coming out of its shell." And then she would kiss all those ugly parts of my face.

It might sound horrible, but you gotta understand, she said it out of love. Okay, maybe a little out of bitterness, too, but mostly out of love. See, my momma, she's smart enough to know there's some things the world doesn't forgive. The world can forgive you for being stupid. It can forgive you for being blind, for being deaf; it can even forgive you for being bad. This world doesn't forgive ugliness, though―and if Momma had pretended that I wasn't, it would have been a cruelty beyond measure, because how could I ever face the world without being prepared for the nastiness it would eventually kick back at me?

I knew she couldn't be too mad at me for what I did at the spelling bee, because she had raised me not to take any guff for being ugly. Some kids need tough love―well, Momma raised me with ugly love.

Even now I could see the love behind her stern face. I knew she wanted to jump out of that car, hug me, and make all the meanness in the world go away. But just as she wouldn't give me that hug, I wouldn't ask for it. We both understood that sympa­thy was one step above pity, and we would have none of that.

"I don't like what happened in there any more than you do," Momma said, "but if you think I'm gonna let you walk home, you got something else coming!"

"I swear, Momma, if you make me get in that car, I will look into your rearview mirror, and your side mirrors, too!"

"So what?" said Momma. "I'll just buy new ones, and take it out of your allowance."

"What allowance?"

By now Momma's patience had worn as thin as her mascara. "Cara, I am not gonna say it again. Get in this car!"

I looked at the road before me. It was straight, the ground was flat, and in the distance, I could see the mountains. Our town was at the base of those mountains. It was getting late in the afternoon, but I didn't care if it got dark. I could probably be home by midnight if I walked fast enough. Then I saw the bill­board about a hundred yards ahead, featuring my father's smiling face, before his hair went salt-and-pepper. It was one of the really old billboards back from the days when he had a dozen used-car lots around the county, instead of just one. DEFIDO MO­TORS, the billboard said. WE TREAT YOU RIGHT-O AT DEFIDO. The sign was faded, but it didn't stop his face from looking down on me. I wondered how many of these old billboards were on the road between here and home. I could bear a twenty-mile walk, but not the prospect of Dad glaring down at me ten times larger than life, over and over again.

"Did you call Dad?" I asked Mom.

"And tell him what? That you spelled a four-letter word?"

"Technically," said Vance, "it was one four-letter word, and a couple of two-letter words."

"I had every right to do it!"

Mom didn't answer right away. She just kept that stern ex­pression, then said, "Maybe you did, but it doesn't mean I have to like it."

Then another car passed, heading back toward Flock's Rest, and one of my classmates shouted out the window, "Hey, DeFido, wha'cha doing there? I don't see no sign that says COYOTE CROSSING!"

There was laughter from the other kids in the car, and they peeled out.

Momma pursed her lips and ignored it, the way she always taught me to ignore it―but I think it hurt her more than it hurt me.

"If you walk, you'll have nothing but your own thoughts for company," she said. "And some evil company they'll be. The sooner we get you home, the sooner you can get your thoughts on something else."

"Ah, she'll just go into her room and do some more of those stupid ink drawings," said Vance. Momma gave him her best dirty look, and he wilted like a fern in a frost.

In the end, I got into the car. Not because of the long walk, not even because of having to face my dad's billboards. It was that passing car that made me realize I couldn't make the walk... because I knew everyone riding back to Flock's Rest from the spelling bee would pass me, and I couldn't bear the thought of every single driver having something to say.

2 Master-means

I touched the tip of the wolf-hair brush to the surface of the ink and watched as the ink slowly wicked up into the brush, until it shone wet and dark.

At first I didn't know what had drawn me to Chinese ink painting. I didn't even know anyone Chinese. There was some­thing about the simplicity of it, and the feel of a single bamboo brush carving up the white void. It just felt right. Then I learned that the art form began as a way to write the complicated symbols of the language. It all made sense to me then. Ink drawing was the Chinese version of spelling! I even went as far as to learn the seven basic strokes of Chinese writing and use only those strokes in the things I drew, so it all had a mysterious Zen look about it.

I wasn't a master artist or anything, but that didn't matter. I didn't draw for others. I did it because of how it made me feel. I could lose myself in those brushstrokes―and as my brother had so rudely guessed, that's exactly what I did when I got home from the spelling bee.

My favorite subject to draw was "Nowhere Valley," or at least that's what I called it. You see, there are two places I like to go when the outside world becomes too cruel. Nowhere Valley is one of them. It exists only in my head: a hidden place of rolling hills covered in hundreds of shades of green. I imagine myself walking along a meandering stone path, breathing in the smells of wildflowers and orange blossoms. People wave to me from their pastel-colored houses as I pass, and I wave back. I hear voices filled with joyous laughter, not mocking laughter. Some­times I see the valley in my dreams, but more often I see it in my daydreams. My simple brush drawings can almost capture the essence of the place. I wouldn't dare add color, because there's no pigment in the world that could do justice to what I see in my mind. Adding color would be sacrilege―like colorizing a classic old movie.

Today, however, my heart was not in my brush. No matter how I drew the hills and paths, my imaginary valley gave me no comfort. So I rinsed off my brush, capped the ink, and decided to visit that second place I go to when life gets the better of me. It was the only place I knew where the residents didn't care how ugly you were. That's because they were dead.

"Vista View" has to be the worst name ever given to a cemetery. First of all, the word vista already means "view" in Spanish, so the name is really "View View." And second, when you're six feet under, you've got no view, except for maybe your own toes, so pointing out the beautiful view is kind of insulting to the dead, don't you think?

Vista View hasn't always been a cemetery. Back in the day, it was a botanical garden―the most beautiful in the state. Winding trails and beautiful trees and flowers from all over the world filled the place. Our town of Flock's Rest got its name because of Vista View. Flocks of all kinds of birds would make their trek over the mountains and be drawn to the lush greenery of the botanical garden, where they'd fill the trees and ponds, making a racket that could be heard for miles. The woman who owned the place entertained bird-watchers in her little white house on a hill, smack in the middle.

But then the place went bankrupt. An undertaking conglom­erate bought it and decided it was a fine place to plant people in­stead of trees. Now rich people from all over bury their loved ones there, paying more for a little burial plot than most people pay for homes. The beautiful trees and stuff are still there―only now those winding paths are all lined with gravestones. As for the old woman, they let her stay on in her house, but I don't know if I'd want to live in the middle of dead people, no matter how nice the view-view was.

I told my parents I was taking a nap, then I locked my bed­room door and climbed out of the window. I was careful to slip out the back way of our mobile-home park so they wouldn't see me. Let my parents think I was brooding in my bed, wallowing in self-pity. They didn't need to know everything I did.

It was dusk when I got there. It was the time of day when the colors of the earth bow out and let the colors of the sky take over. This was my favorite time of day, because shadows get long, and with a face like mine, shadows are your friend.

There was a strange smell in the graveyard today. Something chemical that I couldn't place at first. Then, when I heard the metallic rattle followed by a long smooth hisssss, I knew what that smell was. Spray paint.

I heard their voices just in time and ducked behind a tall gravestone. Cautiously, I peered out of the shadows to see them.

Marshall Astor shook the spray can in his hand, then dotted the I's and crossed the T's of something nasty he had sprayed on a gravestone.

Lately the gravestones had been smashed and defaced by kids too stupid to find something better to do with their time. I hated it, because spraying rudeness on tombstones was the opposite of what I did with brush and ink.

I should have known Marshall Astor was the one who'd been doing it. And sitting right beside him on a little stone mourner's bench was Marisol Yeager, his partner in crime. They were the undisputed king and queen of Flock's Rest High. He was hand­some, she was gorgeous, the world smiled on them, and they smiled right back. The way I see it, when you've got those kind of looks you have a choice: You can either use the brains God gave you, or you can skate through life on your looks and never let your brain develop much beyond dog intelligence. Marisol and Marshall had chosen the latter.

"Ooh, this place is so spooky," Marisol said. "I love it."

Marshall went on to another grave and shook his spray can, preparing for another round of vandalism.

"Can I try?" Marisol asked.

"Okay," Marshall said. "But you got to think up something clever to write."

Marshall Astor was rumored to be distantly related to the fa­mous Astors―you know, the rich ones who went down on the Titanic. If it was true, then some other distant cousins must have gotten all the money and class. Still, it had never stopped Mar­shall's father from wearing the name like he was royalty―that is, until the day he had too much to drink, drove off a bridge into the river, and went down with the Buick.

Marshall was half as smart and twice as useless as his father ever was―but he was strong, had a winning smile, and good hair in a stiff wind. Around here, that's enough to make you mayor, which his father was until that fatefiil day.

"How about this?" said Marisol, still pondering what to spray on the tombstone. "'Why do I always wake up with dead hair.' Get it? 'Dead hair'?"

Make that fly intelligence. Marisol had always been one of those baby beauty queens, with platinum blond hair that had probably been bleached from birth. Our hatred of each other was deeply ingrained, but I'll get to that later.

These two were the source of much misery around Flock's Rest High. They were what I call master-means. Not master "minds," because that would be giving them too much credit― but they did have a way of motivating other people to do their thinking for them.

As Marisol sprayed her message on a nearby gravestone, I tried to figure out how I could get out of there without being no­ticed. It wasn't dark enough yet to escape unseen, and I wasn't quiet enough to slip away unheard. But maybe if I waited, the shadows would take over and I could scurry away before they started the make-out session that I knew was coming. Maybe the sound would startle them enough to make them leave and go swap saliva somewhere else, which was fine by me.

But before I could plan a suitable getaway, Marisol came around the tombstone, looking for another one to spray, and saw me lurking there. She let out a scream that could wake the dead around us.

I jumped back at that ear-piercing shriek, hitting a tree―but when I turned, I saw it wasn't a tree at all. It was Marshall, who stood there like an oak.

"Well, look what we have here," he said. "Nothing to be scared of, Marisol. It's just the Flock's Rest Monster."

I grimaced at the nickname. It had been with me for as long as I could remember.

My grimace must have looked like a wolf baring its teeth, be­cause he said, "Look at that, I think it's got rabies."

"What do you think you're doing," Marisol said, "spying on people?"

"I wasn't spying, I was just―"

"You're sick," Marshall said.

"No, no, what was the word?" Marisol said slowly. "She's an . . . abominationl"

That caught me off guard. Had they been there that day―or had they only heard? Or were they the master-means behind it?

I lunged toward Marisol, wanting to rip that pretty skin off her face, but Marshall held me back and then tossed me against a gravestone so hard it almost toppled over. I felt the impact of that stone in every joint of my body.

"Don't you touch Marisol," he said. "You ain't got a right to touch her. Or me. Or anybody."

I tried to get away, but he pushed me back against the stone again. "Where you going, piggy girl? Don't you want to spy on us some more? Maybe I'll get you a camera. Hey, will it break if you're the one snapping the picture, too?"

Then something swung out of nowhere and slammed against Marshall's ear. He stumbled back.

Suddenly there, in the half-light of day's end, was a woman who had to be at least ninety years old, brandishing the blunt end of a pitchfork.

I knew who it was right away. Most folks just called her "the crazy woman of Vista View" and left it at that, but I knew her name: Miss Leticia Radcliffe. She was the one who lived in the house. The one who didn't leave when the place became a ceme­tery.

"Hey!" yelled Marshall, holding his ear. "What are you, nuts?!"

"You stay back or I'll swing it again. And next time I'll use the business end."

And, just to make her point, she swung the blunt end one more time. It didn't come anywhere near him. In fact, she wasn't even facing him directly when she swung it, and I wondered why.

"Marshall, let's just go," begged Marisol. "That witch'll kill you soon as look at you."

But Marshall was not the kind of guy to back down from a fight, especially with a feeble old woman. He stepped forward, sticking his chest out.

"You get outta here," he said to Miss Leticia. "Go on back to your house. This ain't none of your business."

"This used to be my land," she said, "so I make everything that happens here my business. You leave this girl alone, and get out the way you came."

"And if we don't?"

Then Miss Leticia Radcliffe did the most wonderful, wicked, unbelievable thing I'd ever seen. She took that old pitchfork and jammed it right through the tip of Marshall's left Nike!

Marshall wailed in pain. "Ahhh, my toe!"

Then the old woman leaned close to him and whispered, "Next time . . . it'll be your heart."

She pulled out the pitchfork, and the fight blew out of Mar­shall like he was a balloon that had been popped. He took off with Marisol, limping and moaning all the way.

When they were gone, Miss Leticia turned to me―and now I could see why she hadn't looked right at Marshall when she had swung that pitchfork. Miss Leticia had cataracts as gray as an April storm. She could see enough to tell night from day, I guessed, but not a whole lot more. She must have known Vista View like the back of her hand, and she didn't need to see much to know what was going on when she got there.

She looked toward me, but not quite at me. "Now I'm just guessing, mind you―but from what that boy called you, I would say that you're the DeFido girl."

"Cara," I told her. "So you heard about the nickname."

"Oh, believe me, I've been called a whole lot worse than that." She let loose a long, hearty laugh. "The Flock's Rest Monster' ain't all that bad, considering. It sounds legendary. Dignified."

She planted the pitchfork firmly on a grave and took my hand. "You come on in. I'll make us some tea."

3 The sweet and the rancid

Although I didn't actually know her before that day, Miss Leti­cia had always been of interest to me. Maybe it was because she was an outcast in town, rumored to have killed her husband when he sold this land, which had been in her family for genera­tions. That was long before I was born, but the rumors still hung like sheets on a clothesline, twisting more and more the longer they stayed in the wind.

Her whole life now was spent in her cottage, and the huge greenhouse behind it that had once been the centerpiece of the botanical garden. It was a grand Victorian greenhouse, with a high crystalline dome, and smaller wings on either side.

She didn't take me to the cottage―instead she took me right to the greenhouse, which was even more spectacular inside than out. Strange black orchids grew from the dark soil, and up above hung carnivorous pitcher plants so big they could drown a rat. I took a deep whiff. Every inch of the place was alive with aromas. Turn your head and the scent would change to something else.

"Being as I can't quite see the things I grow anymore," she told me, "I cultivate things that appeal to the other senses." The green­house was full of flowers that not only smelled sweet, but were soft to touch as well. Some of the plants grew exotic berries that danced on your tongue when you tasted them. I could see Miss Leticia more clearly in the greenhouse lights now. She was a heavy woman, but she wore her weight well. She had skin like dark chocolate, and her hair was a mess of steel wool pulled into a bun.

She led me to a little cast-iron table and chairs surrounded by staghorn ferns and lilies, but she walked a little too close and banged her shin against one of the chairs with a nasty clang. I gri­maced, practically feeling it myself.

"You all right?" I asked.

"Yep. It wasn't me anyway―it was this thing." She lifted her skirt a bit to reveal steel braces that ran up either side of her shin, practically up to her knee. She had them on both legs. "Metal on metal―that's why it sounded so loud. I got steel rods in my back, too―and a pacemaker. Got a grandson calls me Nana Cyborg, on accounta all that metal." She laughed so conta­giously, I had to laugh, too. "Then, after all that, I got these cataracts in my eyes, and I said, 'No more!' There'll be no more doctors touching this here body less'n it's to pretty it up for my wake." She laughed again. It seemed strange that she could joke so easily about dying, but then, when you're as old as Miss Leti­cia, death stops being the enemy.

"Now you just sit yourself down, and I'll go get that tea," she said. She went off into her cottage and returned a few minutes later with a tray.

"It's good to have a guest," she told me. "No one comes around but my son and that horrible wife of his. And all they want to talk about is putting me in a home. But I tell them I got a home."

I breathed in the steam of her tea, then took a gentle sip. Al­though her cloudy gray eyes had been disturbing at first, after I'd been sitting and drinking with her for just a few minutes, any sense of discomfort faded away. "Now you tell me your trou­bles," she said, "because my guess is you got no one else worth tellin' em to."

"I just had a bad day, is all." I didn't say anything more, hop­ing I wouldn't have to get into it―but Miss Leticia wasn't going to let me off the hook.

"Hmm," she said when she realized I wasn't talking. Then she rapped her knuckles against one of her leg braces. "These braces here give me support. I don't mind, on account of I know my legs need it―otherwise they hurt something awful. I know you're hurting as well. Ain't no shame in needing a little sup­port." She took a long, slow sip of her tea. "Now, why don't you tell me what happened that's got you so upset?

"Clammed up, are ya? Hmm. Must be a lot going on in that head of yours."

Then she smiled a little too mischievously for a woman of her age. "What could it hurt to let some steam out of that pressure cooker?"

I sighed. "Well, I was in this spelling bee, and―"

"Ah," she interrupted, "I knew you were the type for casting spells!"

"No, not casting spells," I told her. "It's about spelling words."

"Spells, spelling; it's all the same," she said. "Puttin' letters in order is no different than puttin' words in order. There's a magic to both of them, true enough."

Though I knew the notion was crazy, it was exciting to think that something as ordinary as spelling could have a kind of power. Maybe there was more to me than offends the eye!

When I told her about the words I'd been forced to spell, she pursed her lips and said, "My, my, my, what a place we live in. I think the people around this town are just unnaturally cruel."

"No," I told her. "People are the same everywhere, whether it's here in Flock's Rest or in some other town. They take one look at me, and they just can't control the things they say and do."

Miss Leticia waved her hand. "Don't you give no mind to the things people say. It's just a whole lotta quacking from a whole lotta geese."

"Yeah," I said, "but what about the things they do?"

Miss Leticia didn't have a quick answer for that one. "All I can say about that is what goes around comes around. You may never get to see it, but those kids who played that evil trick on you to­day, they will get theirs. And if it's not in this world, it will be in the next."

She said it with such certainty, it made me feel better. After that, I began talking about everything, as though a floodgate had opened inside of me. I went on and on about the things people said about me―to my face and behind my back. I told her about how most strangers treated me―as if touching me would some­how make them unclean. I even told her things about my parents that I'd never told anyone. Like how years ago, when my momma was sick, my dad had to take me to work with him. I spent a week with him on the car lots, and that was the week people stopped buying his cars.

"Within a year, all of his lots, except for one, went out of business, and we had to move to a trailer park. We've been there ever since. He never said it out loud, but I know he blames me. He thinks my face cursed his business."

"Hmm," said Miss Leticia. "Tell me, is your father an honest salesman?"

"Not really," I admitted. "His cars are mostly pieces of garbage."

"Well, then, his business deserved to be cursed."

I told her about my ink drawings, and the green valley I go to in my mind, where the people don't seem to notice my face― and how the flowers of her greenhouse reminded me of the gar­dens I imagine there.

"Tell me, child―do you sleepwalk?"

I hesitated. First, because it was an odd question, and second, because I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to answer. "No," I fi­nally said.

"All right, then. I had thought that maybe the place you was seeing is real, and maybe it was calling to you. That happens, you know."

I was going to tell her about the problem I had with mirrors and cameras, but I stopped myself―maybe because I was afraid to hear what she might say.

"You talk about being so ugly," Miss Leticia said. "I wish I could see you to tell you that you're not. But all I see these days are shadows, like I'm lookin' through a shower curtain."

"That's all right," I told her softly. "If you saw me, you proba­bly wouldn't even let me in here."

She laughed at that. "Is that how little you think of me?"

I didn't answer her. I knew now that Miss Leticia was a great soul, but there were some things I didn't think even a great soul could stand.

"Come here, Cara. I want to show you something."

Then Miss Leticia took my hand and led me through the green­house to a far corner. We pushed our way through a row of dense, lacy ferns to see the strangest growing thing I'd ever seen.

It was a pod, about three feet high, with a fat stalk pushing its way out of the top.

"Now tell me what you think this is," Miss Leticia said with a smirk.

"I have no idea."

"It comes from the rain forests of Sumatra. That stalk will grow six feet before it opens up into a flower. Take a deep whiff."

I did, but all I could smell were the sweet blooms growing elsewhere in the greenhouse.

"I don't smell it."

"No, not yet, but you will." She reached over and gently brushed her hand along the smooth stalk like it was a beloved pet. "I've been nursing this one for years, and this is the first time it's going to bloom. The Titan Arum, it's called... but some folks call it the Corpse Flower. You know why?"

I shook my head.

"It's called that," she told me, "because when it blooms, it smells like the rotting dead."

I shuddered at the thought. "I guess the cemetery's the per­fect place for it, then," I said nervously. Why on Earth, with all the wonderful-smelling plants she had, would she choose to grow this thing?

She must have read my mind because she said, "Oh, the scent of roses and gardenias is fine, but everyone needs a break from all that cloying perfume. Now and again I treasure the scent of something... other."

I took in another breath, trying to imagine what the flower would smell like once it bloomed, but I guess my imagination wasn't pungent enough.

"The beautiful and the terrible, the sweet and the rancid―it's all part of God's glory and has its reason to be," Miss Leticia said. "Just like you, Cara."

Suddenly she grabbed my wrists so tightly I could feel her nails cutting into my skin. "You have a destiny, child," she said. "Don't let anyone tell you that you don't."

Then she looked at me, and I swear she could see me through the deadness of her cataracts. "You came to me in your dark time, confiding in me, and that binds us," she said. "And so I will make it my business to be there when your destiny comes calling."

All the way home, I felt the sting of Miss Leticia's nails. I knew her nail marks would be in my forearms for days―but I didn't mind.

You have a destiny; she had said. Those marks were a reminder.

Miss Leticia was weird, but she was wise in a way few people could understand. Whether she knew things or just suspected things, I didn't know―but then, to a person with intuition, sus­picion had to count for something. No one had ever suggested I had a place and a purpose in the world. My parents, who on their best days saw life as an inconvenience, had never―could never― make me feel the way Miss Leticia had in the short time I had known her.

It was around 9:30 at night when I climbed back through my bedroom window. My parents were always respectful of my pri­vacy, so I don't think they even knew I'd been gone. They proba­bly just thought I'd wallowed myself to sleep―as if self-pity was some kind of narcotic.

Well, okay, maybe I did feel a little sorry for myself, but that never made me want to wallow in misery. It just made me mad. It made me want to do something about it, if only I could find the right thing to do. The satisfying thing to do.

I opened my door to the fading smell of fried chicken. Dinner was over, but I knew there would be a plate in the fridge for me. My chicken would have its skin peeled off, because Momma had heard that oily foods make acne worse, so what she serves me al­ways has the flavor and consistency of hospital food.

Mom was in her bedroom, probably reading a self-help book; Vance was in his room listening to music so loud I could hear which song was playing in his earphones; and Dad was in the living room, drinking a beer and watching RetroToob, the cable network devoted completely to old, goofy TV shows he grew up with.

I quietly closed my door again, not hungry for dinner or fam­ily time. Instead I turned to face my dresser and played the game I played every night. It's called Does Cara Have the Nerve? See, there's this big old mirror attached to my dresser. I've never actu­ally looked into it because it's covered with a sheet, just like most of the other mirrors in our house. I hear in some places it's a custom to cover mirrors with a sheet when you're in mourning, and I wonder sometimes if my parents are in mourning for the beautiful daughter they never had. Anyway, my momma won't let me get rid of the mirror because it's part of a set. So, just to tick her off, I glued a bunch of ugly things on the sheet covering the mirror: a baboon's butt, a dentist's image of advanced tooth decay, plastic vomit. Momma says I have a twisted sense of humor, but at least I have one.

My heart was racing that night, though, because I thought that this might be the night I win the game. This could be the day I actually defied her, and everyone else in this hateful town, by tempting fate and looking into that mirror.

I took a step closer to the dresser. My conversation with Miss Leticia had made me feel strong, purposeful. That's a good word, P-U-R-P-O-S-E-F-U-L. Spelling it even made me feel more so. I reached up my hand, and took another step closer. D-E-T-E-R-M-I-N-E-D.

My words gave me power. They made me feel that I could change the way things had always been. That I could pull off the sheet, look myself in the face, and the mirror would hold the re­flection, just like it did for other people. For normal people. My fingertips were against the sheet now. V-I-C-T-O-R-I-O-U-S.

But who was I kidding? I knew what would happen. The mir­ror would see me and shatter, just like every mirror. A-G-O-N-I-Z-I-N-G.

And then I would have to explain to Mom and Dad exactly what had possessed me to destroy this lovely piece of furniture. A-B-O-R-T.

In the end, my courage failed me. My words failed me. I pulled my hand back from the sheet and let it be. The game was lost. Tonight was not the night―but I refused to feel miserable about it. Mom with her helpless self-help books, and Dad with his TV nostalgia, had misery wallowing down to an art―but I refused to join them . . . because, as Miss Leticia had said, I have a destiny.

I just had to figure out what it was.

4 The mercy seat

That night―the night before I received the mysterious letter―I had a dream.

It was a driving dream―I'd had a lot of those since Mom had taught me to drive a few months before. I was behind the wheel of her big old pink Caddie, and we were driving down a highway, heading out of Flock's Rest.

"Just keep your eyes on your destination," Mom said, which didn't make sense, because I couldn't see my destination, but people don't talk sense in dreams―especially your parents.

We crossed over the river where Marshall's dad went the way of the Titanic and out onto a long stretch of highway.

We kept passing Dad's old, faded billboards―just like we al­ways do in real life. WE TREAT YOU RIGHT-O AT DEFIDO, said one. BUY AT DEFIDO: SOLID CARS FROM SOLID TIMES, said another.

Those signs were put up at a time when everyone thought our family was riding a wave to better places, but instead we wiped out. Dad's biggest consolation was that the billboard company that rented the signs went out of business before his car lots be­gan to fail―and so all those advertisements for DeFido Motors were still up. Sure they were fading and peeling, but anywhere you drove in the county, you could still see my dad's smiling face looking down on you, along with some car he had once tried to sell.

"The clock broke during my fifteen minutes of fame," Dad would say every time we passed one of those old billboards.

In the dream, though, we came up on the billboards much more often than in real life. The next one featured Mom's Cadil­lac. I remembered seeing it before on one of the roads heading north out of town.

"Look, there's us!" Mom said in the dream. "Wave hello!"

We passed the billboard, and then I heard a different voice beside me. A younger voice.

"Shouldn't you be getting home?" the voice said. "Everyone's waiting for you."

I turned to see a boy about my age sitting next to me in the car, where my mother had been. I couldn't quite see his face― all I could see were his eyes. They were beautiful. A shade of blue that couldn't exist anywhere but in a dream.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Better keep your eyes on the road," he said gently, but I couldn't look away from him.

"Mom, she's doing it again!"

I woke up from the dream to find myself standing in the cor­ner of my room. The northwest corner, to be exact. As I stepped away from the corner and turned toward Vance, I could feel a stiffness in my legs that told me I had been standing there for hours.

"I haven't been doing anything," I told him. "I... I just thought I saw a spider, that's all."

"Yeah, sure," said Vance, shaking his head and walking away.

I wasn't lying when I'd told Miss Leticia I didn't sleepwalk― because I don't actually walk, I just stand. I'm a sleep-stander. Always in the same corner, too―and I often wondered if there was no wall there, would I still stand in the same spot, or would I be a walker after all?

Thinking about it had never yielded much, so I just accepted it as one more weird thing about me. It wasn't until much later that I began to get truly curious about it and think there might be a reason for it. But on that morning, I was as clueless as ever.

With the dream quickly fading, I dressed and went out into the kitchen. Things were back to normal, as if the spelling bee had never happened. We sat at the breakfast table, with silence punctuated by cereal crunches and "pass-the-milks," as usual.

A few years back, Momma had gotten it into her head that a healthy day begins with a family breakfast, so the four of us al­ways sat down together in the morning, even on the days it would make us late for school.

"The occasional tardy is acceptable," Momma would say. "Starting your morning without quality time is not."

You have to understand, my momma had gone to college for two reasons. One, to get a degree in psychology. Two, to catch a successful husband destined for great things. In the end, she got neither.

At breakfast that morning, I could see Vance looking back and forth between Mom and Dad, and I could tell he was waiting for the right time to talk about something. Finally, when Dad started to push his chair back, getting ready to leave, Vance blurted it out.

"I've been thinking..." he began.

"That's new," I said.

Usually Vance would sneer at me when I said something like that, but he didn't. Whatever his mind was wrapped up in, it was wrapped up completely. He started biting his lower lip, making his slightly buckteeth stick out like Chuck E. Cheese.

"Thinking about what?" Dad said.

"About school and stuff. I figure, being that I'm in eighth grade and all, and that I'll be starting high school next year and all... I was thinking maybe I might wanna go to that Catholic high school."

"We're not Catholic," Momma reminded him calmly.

"Well, you don't have to be," Vance said. "St. Matthew's takes all types, just as long as your grades are good enough, and mine are."

"I'm not paying for a private high school," Dad said. "Noth­ing wrong with a public education."

By now I could tell Vance was getting antsy.

"All right, then, not St. Matthew's. What about Billington High?"

"That's twenty miles away," said Dad.

"Yeah, but their football team's ten times better than Flock's Rest High."

That caught Dad's attention. Now Momma was the one get­ting nervous. "You fixing to play football?"

"What if I am?" said Vance.

Dad looked at him like he'd just stepped into the Twilight Zone. That's because Vance was about as athletic as an end table. He was the star of the middle-school chess team, and I always joked with him that the only sports injury he'd ever get was carpal tunnel from lifting heavy queens. No, Vance was not fixing to play football. I knew what this was about, even if my parents did not.

"Vance just doesn't want to go to the same school as me," I announced. "He doesn't want to be the kid brother of the Flock's Rest Monster."

Vance looked down into his Apple Jacks. "That's not true," he said, but by the way he said it, you could tell it was.

"Tell you what," said Dad. "If you go out for a sport this year, make the team, and stay on that team for the whole season, I'll make sure you go to whatever high school you want, no questions asked."

"Yes, sir," said Vance. It was the first time I'd ever heard him call my dad "sir" outside of a spanking or grounding. He contin­ued to stare into his Apple Jacks, probably pondering the chances that he would actually succeed.

Both Dad and Vance left that morning without ever meeting my eye . . . but what surprised me was that Momma wouldn't look at me, either.

Our school is an old brick building, with a gym that smells like sweat and varnish and a cafeteria that smells faintly of Clorox and beef gravy. It was built way back when schools were institu­tions, like hospitals and insane asylums. At recess I saw Marisol Yeager lingering in a downstairs hallway, surrounded by her clique of socialites. I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of seeing me try to avoid her. I walked right past her, and she stepped in front of me.

"After last night, I'd think you'd be too ashamed to show your face in school," she said, her mouth working up and down with her usual wad of chewing gum.

I held back a smirk. I had seen Marshall limping up the steps into school this morning. It was my guess that he wouldn't tell anyone what had happened last night, because it would incrimi­nate him as the graveyard vandal. Marisol, however, was not smart enough to keep her mouth shut.

"Don't you think I know that you and that old witch were working together?" she said. "You two are, like, in collision with each other."

"The word is collusion," I told her. "C-O-L-L-U-S-I-O-N."

She pursed her pretty lips angrily. Marisol hated when I spelled things for her. She had her reasons. "Here," she said. "Spell this." She raised her hand, about to flip me her favorite gesture, but before she could, I grabbed her wrist, spun her around, and wrenched her arm behind her back.

She bleated in pain, then counterattacked, stomping on my foot with her heel almost hard enough to break bones. When she pulled free, she swung her arm and hit me in the face so hard I saw stars, like in a cartoon.

I didn't want to let Marisol win, but hitting her back would just turn this into a catfight, and that simply wasn't my style. Then I realized I had a weapon that could strike at her little so­cialite heart. Thank goodness I had just come from art class.

I reached into my backpack and, with the dexterity of a gunslinger, took out a little bottle of drawing ink, spun off the cap, and dumped the entire thing down the front of Marisol's pretty pink designer blouse. It soaked in and spread like black blood from a wound.

She just stood there, her hands out stiff, little clicks coming from her throat instead of words.

"There," I said. "Now your outside's as black as your inside."

As I walked away she finally found her voice again, and called me every name her limited vocabulary had to offer. "You're gonna pay for this!" she yelled. "You wait and see! You're gonna pay!"

My breakfast table at home might have had every seat filled, but my lunch table at school was always empty. Some other schools have all these open-air spaces where you can go to eat lunch un­der a tree or something like that. They have places where you can be alone without bringing attention to the fact. We didn't have those kinds of spaces. Our cafeteria had nothing but tables for ten. Even on the occasions when I started out at a table with other kids, they always migrated elsewhere, and my table for ten became a table for one.

I would take my time eating, hogging that table for as long as I possibly could. I figured if they're not gonna sit with me, let the other tables be as cramped and uncomfortable as possible. Serves them all right.

The spot directly across from me was what I liked to call "the mercy seat." That's from the Bible. It's what they called the lid on the Arc of the Covenant, which held the Ten Command­ments. The Israelite high priest would make offerings to God there. My mercy seat was a little bit different, though. See, every once in a while, someone would come and sit across the table from me. They did it out of guilt, and to feel better about them­selves. They'd sit down, exchange a few awkward words with me, then go off feeling like they'd done a kind deed. They had treated the Flock's Rest Monster with a godly kind of mercy. I used to like it when people sat there, until I realized no one ever came more than once.

It had been a while since anyone had sat in the mercy seat―a month, maybe more―so I was surprised when someone came over. Today's guest was Gerardo Sanchez.

"Hey," he said as he sat down with his tray.

I just kept on eating.

"So what do you think this is?" he asked, pointing to the lumpy white stuff slithering all over an English muffin on his plate.

"Creamed gopher," I suggested. "The Tuesday special."

He chuckled. "Yeah, probably." Then he sat there in an un­comfortable silence that irked me.

"So, like, why do you sit here all by yourself?" he finally asked.

I liked his direct approach, so I answered him. "I don't sit all by myself. I just sit. Being all by myself, that's other people's idea." More silence, and so I said, "Are you gonna ask me to the homecoming dance?"

The look on his face was worth the price of admission and then some. It made me laugh out loud suddenly, and some creamed gopher came out of my nose. Seeing that made him laugh. I wiped the stuff off.

"So you weren't serious?"

"Hey," I said, "I'm serious if you are."

"Nah," he said with a certainty that left no room for doubt.

When it came to looks, Gerardo was no Marshall Astor, but he wasn't bad-looking, either. He had dark, decent hair; a body that was a little bit scrawny, but not at all mealy. His teeth had once been crooked, but braces were taking care of that. All in all, Gerardo was an average-looking guy, and from what I could see, he always had the attention of a few average-looking girls. It didn't take long for me to figure out what he was doing in the mercy seat.

"So which girl are you trying to impress?" I asked.

He gave me that openmouthed, shrug-shouldered I-don't-know-what-you-mean expression, and so I gave him that tilt-headed, cross-armed, I-ain't-buying-it look.

A moment more, and he caved. "Nikki Smith," he said with a sigh. "She thinks I'm not sensitive. I figured coming over here and talking to you might make her think different." He looked at me for another second, then began to get up. "I'm sorry," he said. "It was dumb."

On another day I might have let him go, but today I was feel­ing vulnerable. Although I had gotten used to being alone, some days were better than others when it came to accepting it.

"Don't leave yet," I whispered to him. "If you really want to make it stick, you have to sit here with me until the bell rings. She'll really be impressed by that."

He took on a cornered-animal look.

"Yeah, I know, sitting with me for all of lunch is a fate worse than death."

"Well, not worse," he answered, and he made himself com­fortable in the mercy seat again.

"So, are you?" I asked.

"Am I what?"

"You said you wanted to show Nikki that you're sensitive. Are you?"

"I don't know. I guess." He thought about it. "I'm not insen­sitive . . . or at least I'm not insensitive on purpose."

"Well, that's better than nothing, I guess."

"Why do girls always want sensitive guys anyway?"

"They don't want their feelings hurt," I told him. "They fig­ure a sensitive guy won't hurt their feelings, even if he breaks up with them." I noticed that Gerardo had eaten his dessert first, so I spooned my Jell-O onto his plate. A reward for taking the mercy seat. "Of course, I've got no feelings left to hurt. An in­sensitive guy would be fine with me, as long as I got to smack him if he got too insensitive."

He laughed at that, then leaned a bit closer. "So tell me, be­cause I gotta know―how come you and Marisol hate each other so much?"

"Isn't it obvious?" I said. "Look at her, look at me."

Gerardo shook his head. "No―it's more than that. It's like you two have got... what's it called... a vendetta." Good word, I thought. V-E-N-D-E-T-T-A.

"She sat next to me in science class in seventh grade." And that was all I told him. I didn't tell Gerardo how she got by in science by copying answers from the boys she flirted with― there were always one or two within cheating distance. That par­ticular semester she got seated in a corner with just me next to her and Buford Brainard in front of her―a kid who had all of his brains in his name, and none in his head.

So Marisol had a choice: Either she could study for the tests or cheat from me. You can guess which she chose. Up till then, Marisol's nastiness was limited to the occasional cruel jab to keep me in my place. After all, her circle was so far above mine, most of the time she didn't see me. However, things did not go well for either of us that semester, and our general feeling of dis­like bloomed into something vicious.

"If you want to know why we hate each other, ask her to spell mitochondria," I told Gerardo.

"Huh?"

"Mitochondria. Ask her to spell it."

"What'll she do if I ask?"

"Probably claw your eyes out."

"No thanks, I'll pass." .

Then Gerardo looked at me―and not just a sneaky sideways glance. I get those kinds of glances all the time―people stealing a look like they might check out a circus freak. This look from Gerardo wasn't one of those, though. His eyes scanned my face, taking in all my features.

"You know, there's stuff they can do for a person's face these days," he said.

"Really?" I said. "Like what?"

"I don't know. Surgery and stuff. I saw this one show―they took a guy who was like the Elephant Man and made him look halfway decent. Not that you're the Elephant Man or anything."

He was right; he wasn't insensitive on purpose, just by acci­dent. I could respect that. "Yeah, right, surgery," I said. "Maybe if my parents win the lottery."

"I guess that kind of thing costs an arm and a leg, huh?"

"Yeah," I said. "They charge an arm and a leg, and all they give you is a face. Pound for pound, not a very good trade, is it?"

"Guess not," he said. "But there's gotta be some guys around who'd go for a girl... like you."

Normally, I'd be insulted by this conversation. But Gerardo was saying it like he cared about the answer.

Suddenly Gerardo snapped his fingers. "Hey, what about that one kid, uh ..." He looked up, trying to remember his name. "Started with a T. Tad. Todd."

"Tud," I said, miserably. "And that wasn't his name, it was a nickname."

"Yeah, whatever happened to him?"

"Gone," I said, and offered nothing more.

"Too bad, you two coulda been a pair."

Any inroads Gerardo had made with me were now gone. I turned my attention to my plate and didn't look up. I just scarfed down my creamed gopher.

"What? Did I say something wrong?" Gerardo asked.

I could tell him, but the telling would require an explanation, and I just didn't feel like it. "You can go now," I said. "Time off for good behavior. I'm sure Nikki will be satisfied."

"Nope, the bell hasn't rung."

I shrugged. "Suit yourself."

I didn't say another word to him.

Finally, the bell rang, he got up and left, and I knew, like all the others who had come for their own selfish reasons, he would never grace the mercy seat again.

Tud. Tuddie. A kid I hadn't thought about for more than two years, and hoped never to think about again. You could say I had blocked out his memory, but that afternoon, thanks to Gerardo, Tuddie was all I could think about as I walked home.

Tuddie was as ugly as me―maybe uglier, if you can imagine such a thing. He had ears that stuck out like fleshy funnels, a crooked underbite like a badly bred bulldog, pasty skin, and sad, sagging eyes. Like me, there was no actual physical deformity to him, he just had an unnatural case of butt-ugliness. I couldn't even remember what his real name was. Everyone just called him Tud, which was short for "That Ugly Dude."

He used to try to hang out with me when we were still in grade school, thinking we had something in common. I tried to be nice to him―I really did―but the truth was, I hated him as much as I hated the beautiful people like Marshall or Marisol. Maybe I hated Tuddie more, because he saw us as kindred spir­its―as if ugliness loved company the way misery did. Well, I could live with my own face, but I didn't have to live with his. Eventually, I started ignoring him, giving him the cold shoulder, trying to be anywhere he wasn't. Still, he'd always find me―and then people started calling me Tug. "That Ugly Girl," which to me was far worse than any of the other nicknames folks gave me. "The Flock's Rest Monster"―at least that had identity to it. "That Ugly Girl" did not.

Finally, I snapped. I pushed that boy away―told him to crawl back under whatever rock he crawled out from, and never come out again.

And so he did.

One day he just disappeared. Some say his daddy put him out of his misery. Others say he ran away to join a freak show. Ralphy Sherman said he got sold into slavery in Madagascar. Whatever the truth was, Tuddie was gone, and I was glad for it. Once he was gone, they stopped calling me Tug and went back to calling me the Flock's Rest Monster, which was fine by me. Better a solitary monster by choice than a pathetic pair of repulsives.

But with each step I walked that afternoon, there came an­other memory of Tuddie's tragic, festering face, and my own sense of despair began to deepen. Looking at him was the closest I could come to looking in a mirror. His sorry fate, whatever it was, couldn't be much different from what mine would eventu­ally be.

By the time I got home, I was feeling lower than low. The last thing I expected was to find my destiny waiting on the kitchen table.

5 Question and answer

"Something came in the mail for you, honey," Momma said the second I got home. She left it for me on the kitchen table, all by itself, so I couldn't miss it when I came in. It was a little white square right in the center of the big brown circle of the table.

The letter was addressed in a sweeping handwriting I couldn't imitate even if I had the finest brush. The words were like wispy clouds blowing across a windswept sky.

Miss Cara DeFido.

My name had never looked so beautiful.

"Who on earth do you think it's from?"

I just shrugged. I think Momma was more curious than I was about it. Who with such handwriting would be writing to me?

I picked up the creamy white envelope. The paper must have been expensive, soft to the touch, like velvet. I flipped it over to see who it was from, but there was no name, just an address: 1 Via del Caldero, in a city named De León.

I tried to rip the envelope open, but it wouldn't tear. I tried to peel it back from where it had been sealed, but the glue held tight.

Momma handed me her fancy letter opener. Carefully, I in­serted it into the corner and slit it across. The paper resisted for a moment, then cut with no noise, as if I was cutting through a living membrane. I shivered.

"Go on, go on, see what's inside," Momma said.

I reached in and pulled out the letter. It was on the same creamy white paper. There were no marks or letterhead to reveal the sender―and only three words on the page, written in the same sweeping handwriting.

"Well, what is it?" asked Momma impatiently. "Is it a letter from someone we know? Is it an invitation?"

I held the page out of her sight.

"It's none of your business," I told her. When she realized I was serious, she huffed and left the room. Mom's curiosity would have her stewing all afternoon, but I didn't care. This, I knew, was a personal message, not meant for anyone's eyes but mine.

I sat down at the table and took a few deep breaths. I was get­ting light-headed, and my fingers were getting cold. An inexplic­able excitement was being pumped through my veins. I looked at the smooth white note once more.

Three words. That's all. No signature, no explanation.

Those three words were a challenge, and deep in my heart, I knew it was nothing so simple or easy as a spelling bee. This was the challenge of my life.

I moved my index finger across the page, feeling its velvety smoothness, and traced the letters with my fingertip.

FIND THE ANSWERS

The three simple words that changed my life forever.

Miss Leticia's greenhouse was different during the daytime than it was at night, but it was just as beautiful. When I got there, the sun was shining through the great glass dome of its center sec­tion, casting lines across everything like the bars of a cell. I could now see the tops of the trees in the dome. To me, it was a re­minder that this enclosed oasis was nothing but captured beauty. A false reality to be sure, yet easy to lose oneself in, as Miss Leti­cia had been lost all these years.

Today she was tending to lilies of the valley, blooming around a little indoor pond. Her hands were covered with dirt.

"They're beautiful," I told her, and then I felt bad, because I knew she couldn't really see them.

"Beautiful, yes," she said, "but poisonous as a cobra. Let me go wash my hands, and I'll make us some tea."

When she came back, I told her all about the letter.

"What do you think it means?" I asked.

Miss Leticia held the letter in her withered hands. She moved her fingers across its surface, as if it were Braille.

"My, my," she said. "This is a fine weave. Not quite paper, not quite cloth―something else." She smelled it, but I already knew it had no scent. I'm sure all she could smell was the rich aroma of all of her blooming flowers. Her prize corpse flower had not yet opened, so everything still smelled sweet and calming, like the flavor of her tea.

"Do you think it's for real?" I asked. "Or do you think it's a joke?"

"Jokes don't come on paper like this. Give me the envelope."

I put it into her hands. She rubbed her thumb on the corners.

"No stamp? Is there a postmark?"

"No."

"That means it was hand-delivered."

"Someone must have just put it into our mailbox."

"You said the town is De León?"

"Yes," I told her. "And in our state, too."

"I don't know such a place."

She handed me the letter and leaned back in her chair. As she crossed her ankles, I could hear the gentle clink of her leg braces touching each other. "I don't know where the letter came from, but I can tell you this: Whoever sent it means for you to take it very seriously. They truly mean for you to find the answers."

"How can I 'find the answers' when I don't know the questions?"

And then Miss Leticia took my hands in hers. I flinched, thinking she might grip me with her nails again, but instead she rubbed my hands gently.

"You should start with just one. What do you think the most important question is?"

I didn't answer her. Maybe because I was more afraid of knowing the question than the answer.

When I got home, Vance was fighting with Dad over the control of the living-room TV. Dad was, of course, watching RetroToob. An awful episode of the show Nine Is Too Much, about a huge fam­ily in the 1970s that apparently had an electronic laugh track fol­lowing them wherever they went.

"How can you watch this garbage?" Vance said. "I mean, look at how they're dressed―they look like clowns."

I glanced at the TV. He was right. Striped pants and flowery shirts, all in colors that didn't match, and everyone's hair hung long in all the wrong places.

"When we were growing up," Momma said patiently, "those were the fashions. At the time it looked good to us."

Dad pointed his lecture finger at Vance. "You watch―when you have children, they're going to laugh at the way you wore your pants, and the strange things you did to your hair."

I walked past them, my hand in my pocket, still holding the mysterious note. I had no desire to be a part of the family festivi­ties tonight.

"Honey, where have you been?" Mom asked, just notic­ing me.

"Out," I answered, and went toward my room, to find that my door was closed. This wasn't unusual in itself... but I did see something that gave me pause. There was some cloth wedged beneath my door. I recognized it as one of my sweatshirts. It was blocking the space under the door so no air could get through. Who had put it there?

I pushed open the door, and was attacked by a stench so foul, I fell back against the hallway wall.

"Oh, yuck!" I heard Vance say from the living room. "What is that reek?"

Holding my hand over my nose, I forced myself to enter my room. I saw it immediately. It was everywhere. Bloody masses of fur and rot tacked to my wall, all over my ink drawings.

Roadkill.

Opossums, raccoons, rabbits. It wasn't just on the walls, but in my drawers, too, every single one. It was all over my clothes, and everything I owned.

This was a violation. A horrible, evil violation of one of the few places in the world I actually felt safe from the outside world. By now Vance and my parents were at the threshold. "Honey?"

I closed the door on them. I didn't want them to see this. Roadkill in my dresser, roadkill in my closet. My clothes were ruined. Even if I could get out the smell, I'd never get out the stains. And it wasn't over yet―because there was a lump be­neath my covers. A large lump. As I approached it, I steeled my­self for what I might find, and before I could change my mind, I pulled back the covers.

The coyote in my bed looked like it had met up with a semi. This coyote, however, had a dog tag around its neck. And the name on the tag said: CARA DEFIDO.

I slipped out of my room, not letting my family see inside.

"Honey, what's going on in there?" Momma asked, trying to peek around me. "What's that awful smell?"

"Nothing," I told her calmly. "I'll take care of it."

"Doesn't seem like nothing to me," Dad said.

"I said I'll take care of it. Just get me some trash bags."

Like the mysterious letter, this was my business. My problem. But unlike the letter, this was no mystery. This was Marisol.

I spent the rest of that day and halfway into the night in rub­ber gloves, disposing of the mess and scrubbing down my room. How had things come to this? One escalation after another ...

I should have realized she'd get revenge for her ink-stained blouse―but this was beyond a single shot of ink thrown in the heat of anger. This was premeditated, and carefully planned. She had to know when no one would be home, and she'd need ac­complices to do the dirtiest of the work. How could someone so beautiful be so mean-spirited? As I scraped up nasty bits of fur, I thought back to the one and only time Marisol had been nice to me. Even then she had had an agenda.

"Cara, I know we haven't really been friends, but I think that can change."

It was seventh grade. We had just gotten pink slips to go to the principal's office. Something about cheating on a science test.

"The thing is," Marisol said, "I was sick before the test." She gave a little fake cough. "That's why I couldn't study. So I thought just this once I could borrow some answers from some­one smart. Someone like you."

Then she went on to give me this whole sob story about how she was once "framed" for cheating, and if she got caught this time, the punishment would be bad.

"So what do you want me to do about it?" I asked her.

"Well, Cara," she said sweetly, "you've never been in trouble, so I figure if you admit to cheating off of me, they'll go easy on you. You just look at them with those sad eyes―how can they help but feel pity?"

"And what do I get in return?" I asked.

"My friendship," she said, "and a promise that one day I'll pay back the favor."

Ten minutes later, we were in the principal's office, and the principal told us exactly what we expected to hear, in exactly the tone of voice we expected to hear it. "Blah blah blah identical tests, blah blah blah zero tolerance." And then he waited to hear our response.

"Well," said Marisol, letting it all roll off her back, "I know nothing about this. Maybe Cara has something to say."

The principal looked at me. I took a long moment to think about this one, knowing full well what the consequences would be, either way. Finally, I said, "Every word is spelled right."

"Excuse me?" the principal said.

"The written answers. Every word is spelled right. I'm the county spelling champion, five years running." I looked at the questions on the test in front of me. Question number six was: What do you call the engine of a human cell? "Why don't you ask Marisol to spell mitochondria?"

The principal took away both tests so Marisol couldn't see. "All right, Marisol," he said. "Spell mitochondria."

"Well, I don't see a reason―"

"Just do it," said the principal.

Marisol gripped her chair. First she went pale, then she started to go beet red. "Mitochondria," she said. "Mitochondria. M...I...T...O...K...O...N...D...R...Y... A."

The first time Marisol had been caught cheating she got a three-day suspension. This time she was expelled, and she spent the rest of seventh grade homeschooled.

She was back at school in the fall, though, and it had become her life's mission to make me pay.

Well, now she had. I had a trash can full of dead animals to prove it―and I knew I'd be a fool to think it would stop there.

When I was done cleaning, I took a long, hot shower, but no matter how much I scrubbed, I just didn't feel clean. I could never wash away pretty filth like Marisol Yeager, just like I could never wash away my hideous face.

I threw out my clothes. I threw out my covers. Even my mat­tress was ruined, so I slept on the floor that night, clutching in my hand the shimmering satin note. My one ray of hope was that letter.

Find the answers.

It seemed like a lifeline that could somehow save me from this terrible, terrible town.

6 Are we there yet?

That night I dreamed about the boy with blue eyes so intense, I couldn't see the rest of his face. I didn't know where I was at first, but as my vision cleared, I saw that we were in my special place. The green valley where all my troubles didn't seem to exist.

The boy held my hand, and we strolled down the winding stone path. His hand was soft, and the air was warm and full of wonderful floral smells, just like in Miss Leticia's greenhouse. I wished that she would appear in the dream so I could show this place to her, but she didn't.

"Are we there yet?" I asked the boy, even though I didn't know where "there" was.

"Almost," he answered. "Keep your eye on your destination."

But just as before, I couldn't. I tried to turn my head, but it seemed my eyes were locked on his. He didn't look away, the way most people do anytime I stare.

"How can you look at me?" I asked him. "I'm horrible."

He didn't answer, but he didn't look away, either. So I took the bamboo brush that had suddenly appeared in my hand and gently brushed it back and forth across my face. Instead of leav­ing a line of black ink, the brush erased me. I could feel my fea­tures blur into nothingness.

"There," I said. "All better now."

We kept on walking. The feeling of fury I had taken to bed was leaving me with each step down the stone path, and although this growing contentment felt wonderful, I fought to hold on to my anger. I owned that anger. I had earned it, and I didn't want to lose it.

I woke up standing in the northwest corner of my room.

7 Breaking a swet

It turns out I was wrong about Gerardo Sanchez.

I had thought he'd be just a one-lunch-stand, but he came back. Oh, he didn't come back to the mercy seat right away, but about a week later. The letter was in my pocket. I had carried it in a pocket since the day I had received it, and no matter how much I fiddled with it, it never got wrinkled or worn. I was so pleased that Gerardo actually came back to sit with me, I was going to show it to him―tell him about it, and ask him what he thought it meant―but I stopped myself. Two visits to the mercy seat wasn't enough to earn that kind of trust. And besides, Marisol might be watching. The thought of her coming by and snatching the note from my hands was enough to keep it in my pocket.

"So who are you trying to impress today?" I asked when Ger­ardo sat down.

"No one," he told me.

"Nikki Smith still doesn't think you're sensitive enough?"

"Yeah, she does," he said. "We're going out now. Been to the movies and everything."

"Goody for you."

There was an awkward silence, but not as bad as the first time he had sat there. "So," he asked, "what do you think's in this burger?"

I lifted my bun to reveal a gray slab beneath a sickly pickle slice. "Kangaroo," I said.

"Yeah, you can tell by the way the burgers bounce."

I looked at his plate. He wasn't touching the burger, but he had already eaten his brownie, so I gave him mine. "There. Two for the price of one."

"Thanks."

"Are you gonna tell me why you're sitting here?"

"Okay," he said, "here's the deal. If I hang out at tables with other girls, Nikki gets jealous. And if I go sit at a table with my friends, Nikki gets suspicious, thinking I'm talking about her and stuff. But she doesn't care if I sit with you. She thinks I'm being noble or something."

"Why don't you just hang out with Nikki?"

"Hey," Gerardo said, "I really like her. But it's not like I want to be around her all the time."

I knew what he meant. Nikki Smith was an okay girl, but she was also a chatterbox, and the worst kind: the kind that insisted that you respond to her chatter. She would not accept the typical "yeah . . . yeah . . . uh-huh" kind of responses that a person could usually get away with. Nikki required an in-depth analysis of every pointless thing she said, to prove you were actually listening.

"So anyway," Gerardo said, "sitting with you is like my only safe zone. Nikki doesn't get jealous because she knows there's nothing going on, and my friends don't care because it's not like I'm sitting with their enemies."

"So I'm like Switzerland," I told him.

"Huh?"

"I'm like Switzerland; I'm neutral territory."

"Yeah. Yeah, that's it."

"Only thing is," I reminded him, "Switzerland is beautiful."

"Well, to be honest, if you were beautiful, I wouldn't be sit­ting here with you right now, so there's something to be said for being the dog-faced girl."

I picked up my spoon and flung some peas at him, but I couldn't help but smile, because for once, someone was laughing with me, not at me.

Gerardo didn't sit with me every day after that―only when he couldn't stomach being around Nikki, which was often enough. He told Nikki he felt bad for me. He told his friends I was doing his homework for him. Neither was true. The truth was, he sat with me because he wanted to.

"I like you," he said one day. "Not in the way guys like girls, because to me you're not a girl."

I'd be lying if I said that it didn't hurt, but the hurt didn't come anywhere close to how good it felt to have him say "I like you" and know that he meant it. I could live with all the uninten­tional insensitivity in the world because of the unintentional honesty that came with it.

Gerardo would tell me things about himself that he couldn't tell anyone else, because unlike other kids in school, I didn't have a network of friends to gossip with. In turn, I'd tell him things, too.

One day he asked me the big question―the one he'd proba­bly been dying to ask since that first day he took the mercy seat.

"I know it's just a stupid rumor," he began, "and I know it couldn't possibly be true ..."I saw how hard it was for him, so I made it easier by guessing the question myself.

"You want to know if my face breaks mirrors."

"You know what? Forget I asked," he said. "It's just a stupid thing people say―"

"It's true."

I don't think he was expecting that. He just stared at me, probably wondering if I was joking.

"Water's the only place I can see my reflection," I told him, "and even then, the water goes cloudy in a second."

"No way."

"Think about it," I told him. "The whole idea of ugly people breaking mirrors had to come from somewhere, didn't it? I'm sure it's pretty rare, but there must have been other people in history who did it."

I told him about how, when I was a baby, my father had to take out the rearview and side mirrors in our cars, because I couldn't help but look in them. "They don't have to do it any­more, since now I know better."

"That's wild!"

I guess he was right. It didn't seem wild to me, though. It's amaz­ing the things you grow used to. "There was this one professor at the community college who tried to do a study of it," I told Gerardo. "He thought he could find some kind of scientific explanation."

"So did he?"

"Well, my mother and me went to his laboratory when I was eight. He hooked me up to wires, and computers and stuff. Then he had his assistants bring in mirrors of all shapes and sizes, on the other side of this Plexiglas barrier, and had video cameras recording the results. I looked into each of those mirrors, and I'll tell you, you couldn't have destroyed those mirrors more completely if you'd taken a hammer to them."

"Wow," was all Gerardo could say.

"In the end, the joke was on him," I said. "He couldn't get any of the results on film because the lenses of the cameras blew up, too. I wasn't sad about it, though. In some weird way, it felt like I had won. It's like I had beaten science! Anyway, as we were leaving, I saw the professor guzzle a few swigs of whiskey from a flask, and I heard him say to his workers, 'That girl is so ugly, the mirrors don't just break, they break a sweat.'"

Gerardo laughed nervously, still not sure whether or not to entirely believe it.

So I leaned closer to him and whispered, "I'll show you if you want..."

He found me after the last bell had rung and the school was be­ginning to clear out. In his hand he had a little round makeup compact―the kind that flipped open with a mirror in the top half. He looked around at the crowds of kids going through their lockers and filtering out of school.

"Not here," he said. "Come on." He checked several class­rooms, but they were either locked or there were teachers in­side. Then he tugged on the door of the janitor's closet, and it swung wide. We checked to make sure no one was looking and stepped in, closing the door behind us. The room was cramped and smelled of Pine-Sol. I giggled. The janitor's closet was a no­torious makeout spot. "Bet you never thought you'd be in the janitor's closet with me," I said.

"Don't gross me out," Gerardo answered. "So are you ready?"

"You may want to cover your eyes."

He didn't. Instead he held the little compact at arm's length and flipped it open. "Okay, what do I do now?"

"Just angle it toward me so I can see it."

He shifted it until I caught my reflection. The compact hummed for a second, like a cell phone set on vibrate, and the glass fractured into a hundred pieces. Some pieces stayed in the little round frame, some flew out. I felt a piece hit my blouse, then I heard it tinkle to the ground.

Gerardo just stared at the compact still clutched in his hand. "That," he said, "was the coolest thing I've ever seen."

Then he tilted his hand slightly. A piece of glass was sticking out of his wrist.

"Oh, crap!" He dropped the compact and reached for the glass with his other hand, grimacing as he pulled it out. It hadn't hit a major vein or anything. Just a couple of drops of blood spilled out. He put his wrist to his mouth to suck the blood off. When he looked at it again, it had already stopped bleeding. He looked at the half-inch sliver of glass in his other hand.

"You know what?" he said. "I'm going to keep this."

"What for?"

"Evidence," he said. "Evidence that Cara DeFido's got some kind of magic."

"Yeah, ugly magic," I said.

"That's better than no magic at all." Then he shook his head. "There's got to be some reason for it," he said.

Find the answers, I thought, and gently touched the pocket where the folded letter rested―but I kept the thought to myself.

That was the day I started wondering if maybe Gerardo was one of the answers I was supposed to find.

It wasn't just Nikki's compact mirror that broke that day. A bar­rier inside of me had broken as well―and Gerardo deciding to keep that little piece of glass made it even worse. I was feeling an emotion I had never allowed myself to feel for anyone. It was dangerous. The thing is, Gerardo acted real with me. He would act one way with his friends, another way with Nikki. But he didn't need to put up a front with me, because I was nothing to him. I guess, strangely, being nothing made me all the more im­portant―and although he began as nothing to me, too―just another short-time occupant of the mercy seat―that was chang­ing. Sure, he only sat with me once or twice a week, but on those days that he didn't, I began to feel a longing that would follow me through the rest of the day. All these years I'd kept my feel­ings for others covered as completely as the mirror in my room, but now that was changing.

Part of me knew those feelings would eventually choke me. But when something takes root, you can't stop its growth. It wasn't any old thing that was growing, either. My feelings for Gerardo were just like Miss Leticia's corpse flower: all ripe and ready to blossom into something that Gerardo would surely find repulsive.

8 Into ugly

The letter was just about burning a hole in my pocket. I could feel it there every minute of every day. Sometimes I could swear it was moving, rubbing itself against my leg to remind me it was there. Whenever Marisol walked by, giving me a sneer, in­stead of sneering back, I just reached into my pocket and brushed my fingertips across the smooth, soft paper. You have a destiny, that paper said. Marisol can torture you all she wants, however she wants. No amount of roadkill will ever take that away.

I stopped by the library after school one day, to do some in­vestigating. I got on the Internet and searched for a town called De León. I found six of them, but all in different states, none in ours. So then I opened up the atlas―you know the one―it's so big that the library's got to have its own special stand for it. I searched every inch of our state on the map. No De León.

It had been two weeks since I got the letter, and I was still no closer to figuring out who had sent it or why.

I tried not to think too much about it, but the questions in my head just kept coming. How could somebody in some far-off place know what I needed to find? Have they been watching me? Should I be frightened? And what if, after all my searching, this was just another one of Marisol's stupid tricks, designed just to drive me crazy?

I pulled out the note and looked at it again. No. Marisol did not have a sweeping handwriting like this. Her letters were all happy and round. She dotted her i's with hearts. And the paper―this wasn't the kind of paper you found in any stationery store. There was true magic in this note―I knew it in my heart, even if I didn't have any evidence. Yet.

"Can I help you?" the librarian asked.

"Huh?"

"You seem a bit confused; I was wondering if I could help you."

I looked around and found that I was standing in the quiet reading room, facing a blank wall. I hadn't even remembered walking there. I must have been wandering while looking at the note. It was just like the way I would wake up and find myself standing in the corner of my room. I had gotten used to that particular weirdness, but this was the first time I ever remem­bered wake-walking. I felt strangely unsettled and couldn't look that librarian in the eye.

"I'm fine," I told her.

She left, not all that sure that I was.

I'm so stupid―it's just three words, I told myself. Why should three words have such control over me? It was like some sort of magic spell.

Then I got to thinking about what Miss Leticia had said about words, letters having a magic to them when they were in the right order. Spells and spelling are one in the same. Spelling. Let­ters. The idea struck me at dinner one night so suddenly, I dropped my spoon right into my soup, and it splashed across the table, right into Vance's eye.

"Hey!"

"Excuse me." I got up, dinner suddenly forgotten, and went to my room, locking my door. My parents didn't question it, since I did it so often. Maybe they were glad to have me gone from the table. It was breakfast that Mom was determined to make a family meal. By the time dinner rolled around, she was too tired to care.

The second my door was locked, I went to my desk, pulled the note out of my pocket, and set it on my desk. Then I took out a piece of paper, my brush and ink. I let the tip of the brush soak in the silky blackness, then I closed my eyes, trying to feel a connection to the words. From my mind to my hand, to my fin­gers, to the tip of the brush. Then I opened my eyes and wrote in smooth simple strokes:

FIND THE ANSWERS

Even before I took the next step, I could sense I was onto something. It wasn't just the words, it was the letters. The letters and the spaces between. It was the spelling. It was the spell. I took the letters and began writing them down in different com­binations.

FIND THE ANSWERS

DITHERS IN WRENF

STAINED WN FRESH

TRAIN WEDNES SHF

RAINS WHEN FEETS

THERE WINS FANDS

WHERE FINS STAND

That gave me a moment's pause. "Where Fins Stand." It didn't make any sense, yet somehow it sounded familiar. I searched my mind for the meaning, but I couldn't grab anything from those words. Still, there was some connection.

FIND THE ANSWERS

WHERE FINS STAND. . .

I shook my head to shake the thought loose and kept on play­ing with the letters, but no other combinations stood out in my mind. Eventually, I had to face the fact that I was on a wild-goose chase. As sure as I was that there was something hidden in those letters, logic told me to forget it. I closed the ink and crumpled the paper.

As for what happened next, well, I should have been smart enough to see it coming―or at least to step out of the way before I was hit. But I was so obsessed with figuring out the note, I never saw all the forces around me coming together. It wasn't so much a conspiracy of things as it was separate events weaving themselves together into a net that snared me sure as an animal trap.

The next day was a bad one. For one, all that time I'd been spending obsessing over the note kept me from studying, so I failed a math test. Then at lunch Gerardo spent the whole time talking about Nikki, and how good things were between the two of them. Well, they say bad news comes in threes―and when I got home on that day, I found my dad sitting on the sofa, across from none other than bad news number three: Marshall Astor, Marisol's boyfriend and accomplice in crime. My heart took a long, slow fall into my gut.

"What's he doing here?"

"Cara, honey," Dad said, standing up, "that's no way to talk to a guest."

"That's no guest, that's vermin. I'll get the rat poison."

Dad laughed nervously. "She's got a biting sense of humor, doesn't she? You two talk. I got some, um, business I have to take care of." Dad was out of that house at light speed.

I looked around, hoping Momma and Vance were there. Any­thing to keep me from being alone with Marshall, but they were nowhere to be found.

"So what do you want?" I asked. His foot was no longer ban­daged, though he did still walk with a little bit of a limp. "If you want me to testify against Leticia Radcliffe, forget it."

"What? Oh. No, I never told nobody about that." I saw his toes wiggle in the tip of his shoes. He grimaced, and that just made me smile. I didn't usually enjoy other people's pain, but for Marshall Astor, I'd make an exception.

"Ruined your football season, I'll bet."

He shrugged. "I couldn't play anyway. I was already on aca­demic probation."

I crossed my arms, making it clear I was done with the small talk. "So what do you want?"

"There's no point in beating around the bush," he said. "I'll just say it straight out. I'm asking you to the homecoming dance."

It caught me so off guard I just laughed out loud.

"I'm not making a joke," he said. "I'm serious."

"You think I'm gonna fall for that? What are you gonna do, wait till I get all dressed up and pour a bucket of blood on me? Sorry, I saw that movie."

"Nah, that's gross," he said. "I wouldn't do that."

"Oh, but it's not too gross to fill someone's room with roadkill?"

"I had nothing to do with that!" he said. Then he hesitated. "Well, okay, I did help Marisol scoop up the roadkill, but I didn't know what she was going to use it for."

I just looked at him in disbelief.

"I didn't!" he said. "I thought she had got it into her head that they needed a decent burial, or something. I didn't know she was gonna do what she did! I didn't find out until after."

I wasn't sure who was more of a fool―him for saying some­thing like that, or me for actually believing him.

"So you're telling me Marisol has nothing to do with you ask­ing me to the dance?"

"No," he said, "it's not Marisol's idea at all. In fact, she's pretty mad about it."

"Is that so?" Anything that made Marisol mad was fine by me―but I wasn't foolish enough to think Marshall was doing this out of the kindness of his microscopic heart. "If it's not a Marisol scheme, then you must be doing it on a dare."

He shook his head. "You're so sure you're completely un­datable―well, maybe you're not. Maybe there are some decent things about the way you look."

"Name one."

He panicked for a moment, looking me up and down, trying to find something. Finally, he said, "You . . . uh . . . you've got nice hands."

Hah! Even if it were true, it wouldn't have made me believe his intentions. "I see right through you!" I told him. "You've got some secret reason for wanting to take me, and I want to know what it is!"

Suddenly he got all mad. He picked up a pillow and he threw it down hard. "Why do you gotta ask? Can't you just accept the invitation and leave it at that?"

Then I thought of Gerardo. I never even went so far as to imagine him inviting me to the dance, because I knew he was go­ing with Nikki Smith. I tried to imagine myself with Marshall As­tor, and I simply couldn't. "Who says I even want to go with you?"

He laughed―as if any girl in the world would be a fool to turn down an invitation from him. "You know what they say, Cara. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth." I thought he might make some crack about me looking like the gift horse, but he didn't.

"I only promise you two things," Marshall said. "One: This is not a trick. No one's gonna do anything bad to you, or they will answer to me. And two: You will have a good time."

"And how can you be so sure of that?"

Marshall smiled his winning smile. "Because if there's one thing I know, it's how to show a girl a good time."

And then he strutted out like so much peacock.

After he left, I stormed into my room, slamming the door, even though no one was there to hear it. I just liked the sound of hearing it slam. Nice hands, he had said. That was the best thing he could say about me, and even that was a lie. I was a nail-biter. More than that, I bit the skin around my nails, so both my hands always looked like a war zone.

But then I looked at my hands, and I realized that maybe Marshall was a bit more observant than me ... because my fin­gertips weren't gnawed on at all. My nails were smooth, my cuti­cles were smooth. It looked as if I had just had a hundred-dollar manicure. It was impossible, because I'd been biting my nails more than ever. And yet they were perfect.

Like magic.

I gasped, and reached into my pocket, pulling out the shim­mering note. I had been running my fingertips over its soft tex­ture day after day, and my fingers had been healed. Repaired. Beautified. It was definitely a hint of something magical and mys­tical, but how far it went―how deep it went, was still a mystery.

"I'm not going."

"What do you mean you're not going?"

My momma was practically on her hands and knees, begging. "He is the handsomest boy in your grade, and if he's taken a lik­ing to you―"

"He hasn't taken a liking to me," I told her. "Face it; there's something else going on here."

She put her hands on her hips. "Well, how do you know he isn't into ugly girls?"

The very concept completely derailed my train of thought.

"In this world," my momma said, "there is a man for every woman. You go to the mall, you look at people. Half the time they look so mismatched you wonder what's going on. But to them, they fit perfectly."

Vance sat in the recliner just enjoying the whole thing. Dad was in the kitchen, pretending not to listen, but I know he was.

"What are you gonna do for the rest of your life, Cara?" Momma asked. "You gonna lock yourself in your room? You gonna climb out that window and go walk around the cemetery your whole life?"

I snapped my eyes to her..

"You think I don't know you do that? I know every time you climb out that window, but I never say anything because I figure you've got a right to do the things you do."

"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!

9 B-e-t-r-a-y-a-l-s

The 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.

Marshall, to my amazement, was a perfect gentleman. He danced with nobody but me all night! Even the slow dances, with his hands around my waist.

First it felt so strange, so awkward. I had never been that close to a boy. Every time we took a break from dancing, he got me some punch. He treated me with the respect I didn't think he could give anyone, and I dared to start thinking that maybe I had misjudged him. Maybe, as bad as he was, there was a good side trying to come through.

Don't you believe it, Cara, a voice in my head told me, but I was starting to enjoy myself too much to pay it any mind.

It could have been the perfect evening―in fact, it would have been, if it hadn't been for one thing.

Gerardo Sanchez.

An hour into the party, Gerardo arrived with Nikki Smith clinging to him like kudzu, and he was clinging right back. They were a couple, I knew that in theory―but actually seeing it with my own eyes was too much to take. It set my blood on a long, slow boil, and not even the sight of Marisol on the sidelines with­out a dance partner could make me feel better.

Each time Marshall and I danced, they were both there danc­ing, too.

I caught Gerardo's eye, but he didn't acknowledge me. Maybe he was too ashamed or embarrassed by his confession. Maybe he was just freaked that I was there with Marshall.

The thing is, even though I had the best-looking boy in front of me, teaching me dance moves, getting me punch, treating me like I wasn't the Flock's Rest Monster, I knew he wasn't the one I wanted. No matter what Gerardo had done that day at the spelling bee, it was him that I wanted to be holding me in those slow dances, with those clumsy hands and those skinny arms.

But those skinny arms were wrapped around Nikki, and I be­gan to hate her like I hated Marisol.

The boiling in my blood started making its way to my brain, and I started doing some crazy things.

I watched Gerardo and Nikki dance, so I danced harder with Marshall. I watched how close they danced in the slow numbers, and I pulled Marshall that close to me whether he liked it or not.

"Uh, Cara, I think we should sit this one out," Marshall said.

"No," I told him. "You said we're gonna have a good time, and I say I want to dance."

I half expected him to storm away, but he didn't.

Then, as the night got later, and all the dances started to be­come slow, the jealous vein throbbing through my body just hem­orrhaged, until it was all I could feel.

And that's when I saw it.

I saw Gerardo look into Nikki's eyes, and pull her into that perfect embrace in the middle of a slow song. They kissed, and kissed, and didn't stop.

I looked to Marshall. He looked at me with some kind of ter­ror in his eyes, but I didn't care. I grabbed him by the tie, pulled him toward me, and planted a kiss on him, the likes of which he will never forget.

With all of his jock strength, he could not pull away. I had him locked in that kiss like a boot on a car tire―and the couples around us pulled back until we were there, standing by ourselves. His arms, which had at first been struggling, were now limp, weak, like a rag doll.

That'll show him, I said to myself. That'll show Gerardo. He can have Nikki, but look at me. I've got Marshall Astor!

Finally, I let Marshall go, and he stepped away, catching his breath. His mouth opened and closed a few times, like a fish that had flipped out of its bowl.

"Uuugggghhhh!"

He brought the back of his hand up to his mouth, wiped his lips, and didn't stop there. He practically put his whole hand in his mouth, rubbing at his gums and teeth, as if he could just pull the kiss out. And when he realized that the kiss just wasn't going away, he started to go a little bit pale.

"Forget this," he said. His eyes were locked on me, and the expression of horror and helplessness on his face made me, for the first time, truly feel like the monster they said I was.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out his car keys, and hurled them at me. They hit my dress and jangled to the ground.

"Nothing is worth this," he said. "Tell your father he can keep his car! I don't want it!" His face started to pass through several shades of green. His cheeks swelled.

Then he turned, looking for the nearest trash can, but the closest thing he found was, unfortunately, the punch bowl.

I didn't think he would do it, but that kiss must have been so disgusting to him, nothing could stop nature now. And before the whole school, Marshall Astor threw up into the homecoming punch bowl.

10 Tempest and a teapot

I tore out of the party faster than Cinderella at midnight, and I left no shoe behind. I didn't leave those car keys behind, ei­ther; I picked them up before I headed out. The jealousy I felt just moments before had played itself out, and all that remained was humiliation. This time those kids in there hadn't played a trick on me―I had played the trick on myself.

I didn't know who to be more horrified by: myself for what I had done; Marshall, for finding me so utterly repulsive; or my fa­ther, who, in his misguided desire to see me happy, had offered Marshall Astor a used car from his lot in return for taking me to the homecoming dance.

Is that the going rate for spending time with me? I thought. A Chewy for your troubles?

Well, I had the keys to that car now. The lot was speckled with rain, and a chill in the wind made it clear that these were the first drops of a storm. Let it rain, I thought. Let their tai­lored suits and chiffon dresses get drenched and ruined. Let lightning strike and take down the power, so there'll be no more slow dancing for anyone.

I got behind the wheel and peeled out of that parking lot before anyone could come out and stop me. When Momma had taught me to drive, she angled the mirrors away from me. But these weren't. I caught my eyes in the rearview mirror. It shat­tered. Little bits of glass were next to me on the front seat, and I thought of the sliver of glass Gerardo had kept. Did it mean any­thing at all to him? Did he think of it once while he was in there with his lips firmly pressed against Nikki Smith's freshly cleaned teeth like a sucker fish? The fact that I even cared just made me feel worse.

I knew I couldn't go home. I couldn't face my parents now, especially my father, knowing the part he had played in this. There was only one person to talk to now. The woman whose clouded eyes couldn't see me.

It started to rain heavier, and the windshield wipers pounded out a drumbeat, primal and ominous. Now the tears I'd been holding back―not just today, but all my life―burst from my eyes, so that I could barely see. The tears were full of all the things I could never be. All the dreams denied me because of a face too hideous to see its own reflection.

The sobs came with such strength, I couldn't catch my breath. The tears blurred my vision even more than the rain. I never even saw the gate of Vista View Cemetery until I plowed through it, crashing it open. I flew around the curves of the road winding up the hill and skidded to a halt at the top, right in front of Miss Leticia's house. A white van and an expensive car were in the driveway. I didn't stop to think what they might be doing there. Instead I ran to the front door and pounded and pounded and pounded until she finally answered.

"Cara? What are you doing here? You shouldn't be here, honey, this ain't a good time at all." She looked careworn in a way I'd never seen before.

"Please, Miss Leticia―let me come in! I have to talk to you, I just have to!"

She looked past me, into the rain. "You here alone?"

"Yes."

She sighed. "All right, then. Come on in―but only for a bit."

She led me quickly past the darkened living room and into the kitchen. "Whose cars are out front?" I asked. "Do you have guests?"

"Yes," she said. "Guests." She pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and practically forced me down into it. "You sit right here, and I'll be back in a minute. Don't you move from that spot!"

"I won't."

I was so relieved to be there, out of the rain, away from my life, it didn't hit me how odd she was acting. I was cold and her house was warm, that's all I cared about right then. Then I saw something else that could warm me up. Miss Leticia's tea tray was right there on the kitchen table. I poured myself a cup. The tea was light-colored―not like the tea she usually made. When I picked up the cup, there was no steam coming from it. It was cold. Well, I thought, her tea was something special, hot or cold. I brought it up and smelled it, trying to identify what kind it was. It had a grassy, bitter smell.

Suddenly I heard a scream, and I looked up to see Miss Leti­cia racing toward me. She swung her hand and sent that teacup flying across the room, and it smashed against the wall. I stared at her in shock.

"That tea is not for you!" she said. "Did you drink any?"

"No," I said weakly. I was confused and more than a little bit frightened now.

"That's good, then. That's good." She relaxed. That's when I noticed she had a little wicker suitcase. It had been packed so hastily, the sleeve of a flowery blouse was sticking out of the side. "Maybe you just better go. I know you got troubles, but so do I. Now's just not a talkin' time."

My brain, which had been in power-saver mode since I got there, finally kicked in. It wasn't so much the suitcase or even the quivering tone of her voice that clued me in. It was the look on her empty-eyed face. That look spelled a hundred things, none of them good.

"Miss Leticia," I asked slowly, "what happened here?"

She clamped her hand over her mouth as if to hold back a wail, then took a deep breath. "That van is from the hospital. The car belongs to a doctor. I can't recall his name."

"Hospital?" I said. "Are you sick?"

"Not that kind of hospital."

It took a moment, but then I understood. Even before she said it, I knew why they were here.

"My son and that awful wife of his―they signed papers, and had me committed. Didn't even have the decency to come them­selves―they sent the doctor to come here and take me away." She gripped her arms, obviously cold like me, even in the heat of the room. "Old age does terrible things to you . . . but the things we do to each other are worse."

I stood up and looked out the kitchen door toward the dark living room. The truth was dawning on me much faster than I wanted it to. It wasn't just my life that had fallen apart tonight.

Wise and wonderful Miss Leticia Radcliffe suddenly wasn't so wise, and wasn't so wonderful. I took a step forward.

"Don't you go in there!" she shouted.

For a brief instant a lightning flash lit up the living room. I saw a hand hanging over the arm of a high-backed chair. The hand wasn't moving.

"Miss Leticia . . . what did you do?"

And helplessly she said, "I made them some tea."

Thunder rolled like the breath of a beast and echoed back from the mountains.

"It was only supposed to put them to sleep, so I would have time to get away," she said. "But I used too much lily of the val­ley! I made it too strong."

I stood there, unable to say anything, because my insides had started a war.

See, there's a part of you that's an enemy of the mind. It's the heart of inspiration and imagination... but it's also the heart of terror and paranoia. That part of me welled up at that awful moment and said to me, This is your fault. You cursed this poor old woman, just like you cursed your family. Your ugliness touched her and grew into this ugliness. No amount of sensible, rational thought was going to make that voice go away.

"Where will you go?"

"I got old friends in old places," she said. "I can still catch the late bus if I leave now."

"I'll drive you!"

"No!" she said, her voice like the thunder itself. "That would be aiding and abetting, and I will not bring you into this." Then her voice became quiet again. "I know where the Greyhounds stop, and I can see well enough to get there. You best leave here," she told me. "Go home."

"I can't go home."

"Then go someplace else. I'm sorry, Cara, I can't help you anymore." Then she picked up her little suitcase and left.

I stood there in the middle of her kitchen, unable to do any­thing but listen to the rain pounding on the windows like it was the start of the great flood. And then something occurred to me. Something awful.

"Miss Leticia! Wait!"

I raced to the door, not daring to look toward the living room. I burst out into the rain and looked around. It was dark, but I could make her out. She was waddling her way across the hill, taking a shortcut to the main road.

Got a grandson calls me Nana Cyborg, she had said, on accounta all this metal.

She was a single figure in the open grass, while up above the sparking clouds roiled like it was Armageddon.

"Miss Leticia! Stop!"

I raced out to the waterlogged hill. She didn't stop, she didn't turn.

"Come back!"

And then the heavens exploded. All I saw was a blinding white flash. I felt the thunder more than heard it, and the elec­tric charge knocked me off my feet. It sizzled through me like scarabs beneath my skin, and then it was gone. I knew I had felt only a hint of the lightning. The inky darkness returned, and the stench of ozone filled the air. I ran to Miss Leticia. The grass around her was singed and smoking, even in the rain. She was sprawled on the ground, trembling. Her dress was smoldering like the grass.

"C . . . C . . . Cara."

"We've got to get you inside!"

I looked around. The nearest structure was the greenhouse, its back entrance just about fifty yards away. I tried to lift her, but she was too heavy. In the end, I had to drag her across the hill by her armpits. I pulled open the door of the greenhouse, and was laid low by a stench more awful than anything I could remember. Miss Leticia groaned, then grinned. I pulled her over the thresh­old, and we collapsed in a bed of begonias.

That smell―it was like the horrible stench of meat left to rot in the hot, hot sun. A smell like my roadkill room, only ten times worse, and there were flies everywhere.

"It bloomed," Miss Leticia said weakly. "It finally bloomed."

There, just a few feet away from us, I could see the corpse flower's huge bloom. It had the shape of a teacup, but three feet wide and four feet high, surrounding that six-foot stalk.

Flies buzzed over the brim, in and out, in and out, pollinating the hideous thing.

Now it was complete. Now everything in the world had gone rancid.

"Isn't it wonderful?" she said.

"We've got to get you help."

"No help. No help. Already got my wish," she said. Her arm fluttered slightly. I took her hand. "The good Lord saw fit to keep me where I want to be. I got a plot waiting on the south side of the hill. It's good there. It's good."

I wanted to tell her to hold on. I wanted to tell her she'd come through, but it would have been a lie. "Please don't go," I begged, even though I knew I was being selfish. Because I needed her. She must have known what I was thinking, because tears came to her clouded eyes. "I'm sorry," she said. "I promised I would be here to see your destiny." She gripped my hand with the last of her strength. "Go find it," she said. "You go find the answers."

She didn't go limp. She didn't even loosen her grip. But in a moment her eyes, as lifeless as they had seemed before, became truly glazed with the emptiness of death, and I knew she was gone. I rolled her gently onto her back, closed her eyelids, and folded her hands over her chest. Then I tore two massive petals from her beloved corpse flower and covered her body.

I cried for her. They say when you cry for the dead, you're really crying for yourself and maybe partly I was. My life had become one betrayal after another. Gerardo, Marshall, my parents. Now fate it­self had stolen the only person in my life who hadn't betrayed me. I was alone now―really alone―and in that dark lonely moment, I dared to tempt fate. Not just tempt it, but challenge it.

The lights of the greenhouse were reflected in its many win­dows. At night, in the rain, you couldn't see anything beyond the glass. I pushed aside the big rhododendron and fern leaves until I caught my own gaze in the glass: my rain-drenched hair, my sag­ging gown, my awful cheeks and chin and teeth, all reflected painfully back at me.

Then that glass did what nature told it to. It shattered―and not just the window in front of me: It began a chain reaction around the entire greenhouse. One pane after another crackled and blew out, until the air was white with falling crystal, jabbing the plants and ground, piercing my dress, my skin.

And I screamed, not out of physical pain, but a pain much deeper, and much greater.

When it was done, the greenhouse was nothing but a skele­ton. All that remained was the iron frame and the shredded frag­ments of plants.

I could have crumbled, too. God knows I wanted to. Just fall into a heap until they found me there.

But it's in those moments when your world falls apart that you discover what you truly are made of. And I was not made of broken glass.

One by one, I pulled the shards from my arms and shoulders and scalp, dropping them on the ground. Then I walked out of that place, got into the Chevy my father had so unwittingly pro­vided me, and left town.

11 Northwest

I had no money, I had no destination, but that didn't matter.

When your only desire is to leave, any direction you take is the right one, as long as you don't turn around. I was still bleed­ing from the greenhouse glass, but I made myself believe it didn't matter. I would close the wounds with the sheer force of my will.

My life as I knew it was gone. It was now a blank page―that white void waiting to be carved into a new form by brush and ink. Who I would be was still a mystery, and in that car, in transit between a horrible past and an unknown future, I felt the terror and excitement of a babe at the moment of its birth.

A powerful sense of determination overtook me. Maybe it was just shock and loss of blood, or maybe it was something else. It felt magical―like a string was wrapped around my soul and pull­ing me forward, and if I didn't stomp on that accelerator, head­ing down those country roads to God knows where, that string would have pulled me right through the windshield to wherever it wanted me to go.

Like I said, any direction would have been fine, as long as it took me away from Flock's Rest―but I wasn't going in just any old direction, was I? I realized that pretty quick.

I was heading northwest. And this time, for the first time, I didn't resist the pull.

There were few cars out on a night like this, and with every mile I put between me and Flock's Rest, I began to feel my spir­its lift.

Every few miles on that rain-drenched highway, I saw re­minders of what I was leaving behind that made me kick up the rpm and push the Chevy harder. It was those signs by the side of the road, blooming in my headlights. Those old faded billboards advertising my father's cars.

Ten miles out, I saw my father's smiling face. The billboard read DEFIDO MOTORS: CLASSIC CARS FROM CLASSY TIMES.

Nineteen miles out, there he was again, the billboard showing him sitting on the roof of a used car, holding an American flag― as if buying used cars and patriotism were one and the same. DEFIDO MOTORS TRIED & TRUE.

Twenty-seven miles out, a billboard featuring my momma in her pink Cadillac, pointy tail fins and all. DEFIDO MOTORS, WHERE FINS STAND FOR STATUS.

I realized that the gravity was pulling me due west now. But there were no roads that went that way. Although I couldn't see them, I knew what was west of me. The mountains. The nearest road that crossed them was miles away.

I was approaching the county line. Just a few more of my father's old signs, and I'd be out of his sphere of influence for good. My gas tank was full. My mind was set. And nothing could stop me from es­caping forever that hideous place "where fins stand for status."

Even in my weakened state, I couldn't help but get stuck on that phrase. It kept coming back to my mind. DeFido Motors, Where Fins Stand for Status.

Find the answers ... Where . . . fins ... stand ...

I slammed on the brakes so hard I fishtailed, and did a full one-eighty. I found myself facing the wrong way in the lane, with a truck bearing down on me.

I hit the accelerator and pulled off the road, landing in a ditch. The truck barely missed me, its blaring horn changing pitch as it swerved past.

Now my wheels spun in mud, and I knew there was no get­ting this car out of the ditch. Dizziness almost overtook me then. I clutched the steering wheel and closed my eyes until the feeling passed.

Then I got out of the car and headed back to the billboard on foot.

It was about a mile back. In the darkness, it looked com­pletely black. Only in flashes of lightning could I see it now, and only for a second. My momma looked so happy in the picture, but that was a long time ago. Now the old billboard was falling victim to the elements. Another year or so, and a few more storms like this, and it would be down completely. One side leaned forward, the other side leaned back, the wood was pulling apart, and the paint had faded and peeled.

Find the answers . . . where fins stand . . .

Right behind the billboard was a narrow, weed-choked path leading through dense trees and up a hill into darkness. I took the path and headed off toward the mountains.

The rain turned to sleet, and although the cold numbed the pain of my wounds, it also stole what little body heat I had left. I couldn't feel my fingers, couldn't feel my toes, could barely feel pain when I tripped and smashed my knee against a stone. I wanted to sleep more than anything, but I knew if I did, I'd die. It would be years before they found my body out here, if they ever found it at all. Resting was out of the question. The only thing to do was push forward, following the path, following the gravity until I reached its center.

I stumbled up one hill and down another, over and over, each hill steeper than the one before.

I can't remember when I stopped walking. I don't remember falling down. But I do remember the feeling of cold mud against my back. I do remember the stinging feeling of sleet hitting my eyes as I lay on the ground, making it hard to see anything.

Now I can sleep, I thought. Now I can sleep, and I'll be fine.

And I do remember the angels looking down on me. Solemn faces and gray robes that must have been hiding their wings. They took me in their warm hands and lifted me up.

Finally, I closed my eyes, satisfied, because I knew they were taking me to my reward.