Ugly Duck

Duck was especially ugly today, her splotchy spots brightened by the morning light angling into the fish tank. Yes, the angling light also highlighted the poo swirling through the water, but Cora only had eyes for Duck—the fish that all of Cora’s classmates agreed was the ugliest of the tank, her jaw jutting out farther than those of the other “normal” fish and her spots, according to many of Cora’s classmates, the color of puke. But to Cora’s eyes, Duck’s spots were the magical green of the moss that clung beardlike from the trees in Forest Park.

Though Cora’s (now least favorite) aunt had once said, on the death of Cora’s betta fish, Betty, “Well, at least fish don’t have feelings,” and Cora’s (now least favorite) uncle had added, “Not the brightest creatures on the planet either,” Cora knew better. Fish just had their own way of communicating, and from Cora’s experience, it was a much better way than how most humans communicated. Like her aunt and uncle, for instance. Like Naomi and all of Naomi’s friends. If only people could be more like fish. “Right, Duck?” Cora whispered, and Duck, in her own wordless, lippy way, agreed.

“Hi Cora.”

Of course it would be Naomi. Of course she would be the one to interrupt Cora’s perfectly peaceful moment. And of course she would just stand there, as she always did, waiting for Cora to cautiously say hi back, because maybe this would be the moment when Naomi Parsons would finally be nice to her again, like when they were younger—back before, for reasons Cora never understood, everything changed. But no. As soon as Cora allowed a quiet “hi” to escape her lips, Naomi ever-so-casually, using only the tip of her pinky, tipped the bottle of fish food off the table, and a thousand flakes scattered out across the floor.

As Cora could have predicted if she had given it a moment’s thought, Naomi’s next move was to announce, for all to hear—especially Mr. Blevins, who was up at the front of the classroom looking over papers—“Cora, you better clean that up before Mr. Blevins sees!”

Mr. Blevins stood up from his desk to get a look at the mess of fish food on his floor. He sighed in that way that teachers sigh when they want you to know how disappointed they are, and oh how Cora hated to disappoint her teachers. “It’s okay, Cora,” he said with another sigh. “Just get it cleaned up before class.”

“But I—”

“Here, let me help you,” Naomi said, kicking flakes in Cora’s direction.

And once again, Cora could not think of what to say. Later she would come up with the perfect words: By knocking over the bottle again? Is that how you’re going to “help” me?—said just loud enough for Mr. Blevins to hear. In that awful moment, though, she could only manage to stare at Naomi’s lip-glossed mouth, those sticky lips smiling in that way that appeared so sweet to others, but Cora knew better.

When she had finished gathering the flakes into a paper towel, she said her silent goodbye to Duck, who seemed to be looking at her with a sad expression, her lips even more frowny than usual, and Cora couldn’t help but wish that it was Naomi who was the sad one for once, wish that it was Naomi who was ugly, that it was Naomi whose face was covered in puke-colored spots. Then she would know. Then she would finally understand what it felt like to be Cora and Duck.

At lunch, Jaylah whispered, “You heard about Naomi?”

“No, and I don’t care,” Cora said, digging her thumbnail into a grape and splitting it in two. She assumed Naomi had won another award or managed to get yet another boy to fall in love with her.

“She went home with some weird face thing.” Jaylah took a bite of her sandwich. The white bread and peanut butter made a gluey ball that stuck behind her front teeth. “Thum kind of ayergic reaction.”

“Yeah, well, she’ll probably just get more attention for it,” Cora said, sliding the remainder of her grapes and sandwich over to Jaylah. Naomi’s name always had a way of making Cora lose her appetite.

Jaylah, on the other hand, never lost her appetite. “Well, at least she can’t torture you anymore,” she said, diving straight into Cora’s half-eaten ham and cheese. “I mean, until she gets better.”

A break from Naomi’s torture, how nice that would be. If only Naomi hadn’t trained all her many friends in the art of tormenting Cora. And one of them, the worst of them, Jodi—who apparently had been eavesdropping on their conversation from the nearby popular table—just dropped a note on top of Cora’s head, which then went sliding down her bangs, bounced off her nose, and landed on her lap.

“What’s it say?” Jaylah said, but of course she was already reading it for herself. I’d rather be all spoty than look like you, Baggie.

“If you’re going to insult people,” Jaylah shouted to Jodi, who had linked arms with two of her friends and was now walking off (laughing) (at Cora’s expense), “you should at least learn how to spell!” Then to Cora, “Baggie? Seriously? What does that even mean?”

But Cora knew what it meant. As with all their names for her, she could always find a reason they were true. In this case, it was true that she wore baggy clothes, which she preferred to the tight-fitting jeans that Naomi and her friends wore. Baggy clothes were more comfortable. Baggy clothes hid the fact that she had a middle-aged woman’s behind, and the last thing she needed was Naomi and friends making fun of her behind.

Why? thought Cora, watching through stinging eyes as Jodi and her friends disappeared into the hall. Why couldn’t they all just leave her alone? How she wished, oh how she wished, that Jodi would catch whatever Naomi had and be sent home too. A break from both Naomi and Jodi—wouldn’t that be nice.

Half the cafeteria ran out into the hall when they heard the scream. Jaylah would have run out too if Cora hadn’t held her back. Instead Cora sat stiff in her seat and waited for the noise to die down. Only when she felt sure that enough time had passed, after the last locker had slammed shut, after the class bell had faded, did they finally venture into the hall—where, unfortunately, they ventured directly into two of Naomi’s friends. Clara with her new pink hair and Marquita with her bandanna thing were standing outside the nurse’s station—obviously waiting for Jodi. “What are you staring at, Ugly?” Clara said. She was talking, of course, to Cora. For reasons neither Cora nor Jaylah understood, Naomi and her friends only ever picked on Cora.

Ugly. That, Cora would say, was also true, and it hurt in a deeper way than the other insults because it wasn’t all wrapped up in cleverness. Clara was too preoccupied to come up with a more original insult, and so it was what it was. And as Cora stood staring at Clara’s nose, mostly to avoid Clara’s eyes, how she wished that Clara’s nose, that her whole face, were covered in those pukey spots. Then she would know what ugly felt like. And as Cora and Jaylah walked toward their next classes, a fresh new wave of screams followed them down the hall.

That afternoon, the school nurse, Ms. Kelly, came into Cora’s science class to talk about the “health situation.”

It wasn’t at all funny how she said it, but for some reason Cora could barely keep from laughing—and the more Ms. Kelly went on about this “somewhat mysterious virus” and how it “seemed to mostly affect the facial region,” the more little squeaks and sputters escaped her lips. She tried to disguise them in a coughing fit, but this only made it sound as if she were choking on the hilarity of it all. Everybody glared—even Liza, who before Cora had also been tormented by Naomi, though not as badly, not ruthlessly and for no apparent reason.

It was hard to look at Ms. Kelly and not see Mrs. Claus. Her short, round body, her rosy cheeks. She looked as if she bathed in boiling water—probably, Cora imagined, in an attempt to wash away all the germs she encountered each day. “I want you all to know,” she said, “that the girls’ faces—”

Why did she have to keep saying faces!

“Cora,” Ms. Kelly said, “do you think you can control yourself or do you need to visit the office?”

Cora bit down on her tongue. Then, to make extra certain she would not laugh again, she thought about the dead bird she found outside the school last week. Except for the fact of it being dead, there did not seem to be anything at all wrong with it. For a very long time—maybe longer than she realized—she could not take her eyes off its beautiful blue feathers, its tiny beak, opened just slightly. When she had finally snapped out of her trance, she was sitting cross-legged under the tree, wet seeping through her jeans from the dewy bark chips, and there was Naomi, standing above her, saying, “That’s so sad.” Did Naomi Parsons have a heart? Cora wondered in those brief three seconds before Naomi went on to say, “It must have seen your ugly face.”

When Cora’s mind returned to the present moment, every muscle in her face was squeezed up into a scowl, and Ms. Kelly was telling the class, “Most likely, yes.”

Most likely yes what?

“That’s why we feel it’s best,” Ms. Kelly went on, “that the girls stay home for a few days. Until we’re absolutely certain they are no longer contagious.”

Oh.

“In the meantime, there is absolutely nothing to worry about,” Ms. Kelly said. “The girls are being treated at this very moment, and we fully expect them to be back among us next week.”

Oh.

Walking home from school that afternoon—alone, unfortunately, because Jaylah had track practice—Cora tried her best to ignore the two voices behind her. The first (Gillian): “We heard about you laughing.” The second (Sonya): “You’ll pay for that.” Gillian: “Looks like you already paid.” Sonya: “Yeah, what happened to your face, Maggot?” Gillian: “Maggots, that’s what happened.” Sonya: laughing. Gillian: “Oh my God, your face!”—which Cora, of course, took to mean her own face, until Sonya said, “What?” and then Sonya said, “Oh my God, your face!” and then the two of them were screaming and running past Cora, who unfortunately did not get a good look at their faces, only a blurry view of the sides of their faces, but even so, there was no doubt.

That night in bed, Cora’s closed eyelids were like movie screens, playing back the events of the day. How wonderful it had been to spend the afternoon without Naomi and Jodi. How wonderful the thought of school tomorrow without Gillian and Sonya. It was all so perfect. So perfect that Cora found herself wishing that the spots would spread to everyone who had ever been unkind to her—every single one of Naomi’s friends, for starters, but there was also the doctor who had told her she was acting like a baby, just for crying a little when she got her shot. There was the man at 7-Eleven who had yelled at her for bringing her rabbit inside the store, even though her rabbit was tucked inside her coat where he wasn’t bothering anyone. There was her math teacher who had said she wasn’t concentrating when she was trying her best—she really was.

The list continued into her dreams, and Cora awoke the next morning with a smile on her face that, if you did not know her well, if you did not know her to be a kind and gentle soul, might have appeared to be just a tiny bit—or maybe a tiny bit more than a tiny bit—wicked.

The morning air was unexpectedly warm, or maybe the warmth was coming directly from Cora, who had the strangest feeling inside as she walked along Elm Street toward school.

It wasn’t a bad strange feeling. She might even call it a pleasant strange feeling. The thought of a whole day without Naomi and her friends—the thought of every day without Naomi and her friends—the thought of no one ever bothering her again—brought an even bigger, more glorious vision to Cora’s mind. Imagine if every mean person—every mean person on the entire planet—caught this whatever-it-was, this face thing. Just the thought of it, the thrilling thought, brought a warm tingle to Cora’s own face.

Outside the school, there did not appear to be the usual crowd of kids waiting for the doors to open, and there were far fewer cars parked out front. If it weren’t for Jaylah waiting for her at their usual spot at the top of the steps, Cora might have wondered if she had arrived late, or mistakenly come to school on a Saturday. But then she remembered: Naomi and her friends, maybe all her friends—maybe every mean person on the entire planet, as she had wished—had caught the face thing. Imagining their faces, their ugly faces, Cora found herself caught up in another fit of (somewhat wicked-sounding) laughter, causing the few students who had come to school to back away as she rushed up the stairs to Jaylah.

Oh, but Jaylah’s face! Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. Not with her face, fortunately, but with her eyes—her eyes seemed to grow larger with every approaching step that Cora took.

“Your—” Jaylah said. Fear, that’s what it was. It was fear in Jaylah’s eyes as she stared at Cora’s cheeks.

“Your—” she tried again, backing away, then turning away, then running away, inside the school, disappearing down the hall, leaving Cora alone on the front steps, with only one wish.