Uglies: Part I

Behind it trailed a growing bunch of revelers, dancing along with the beat, drinking and throwing their empty bottles to shatter against the huge, impervious machine.

The revelers were wearing masks.

On the familiar leafy path down to the water’s edge, it was easy to imagine Peris stealing silently behind her, stifling laughter, ready for a night of spying on the new pretties.

The machine was lobbing the masks out the back, trying to coax more followers into the impromptu parade: devil faces and horrible clowns, green monsters and gray aliens with big oval eyes, cats and dogs and cows, faces with crooked smiles or huge noses.

A minute later, when the machine had trundled half a block farther, Tally jumped out and snatched up a discarded mask from the street.

She’d only seen him once since the operation, and that was coming out of the hospital, before the swelling had subsided.

Someone stepped quietly into the elevator, looking back at the search party in bemusement.

Shay looked dubious. “How’d you manage that?”

Tally tweaked the eye-shape parameters, pulling the arch of the eyebrows down almost to normal.

Every blemish disappeared, her skin turning flawlessly smooth.

The high hairdo towered over her thin face like a dunce cap, the white-blond hair utterly incongruous with her olive skin.

Behind them the spires of New Pretty Town rose from the center of town, and around them was the greenbelt, a swath of forest that separated the middle and the late pretties from the youngsters.

A gust of wind billowed in Shay’s jacket, and she slid farther away, still smiling.

Shay was skimming just above the torrent, so low that she lifted a wake every time she banked.

Every time Shay screamed, Tally knew she was about to follow her friend through a wall of spray leaping up from the maelstrom.

She remembered that the Rusties didn’t use hoverstruts; every building was squat, crude, and massive, and needed a steel skeleton to keep it from falling down.

But in the moonlight she could imagine people scrambling over flaming cars to escape the crumbling city, panicking in their flight from this untenable pile of metal and stone.

Shay’s voice pulled Tally from her reverie.

Tally watched the last few uglies make their way inside, gawky and nervous, unkempt and uncoordinated.

But when Peris and I would go into town, we’d see a lot of them, and we realized that pretties do look different. They look like themselves. It’s just a lot more subtle, because they’re not all freaks.

“Doing tricks is great! Okay? Breaking the rules is fun! But eventually you’ve got to do something besides being a clever little ugly.”
“Like being a vapid, boring pretty?”

That her eyes would be laser-cut for a lifetime of perfect vision, reflective implants inserted under the iris to add sparkling gold flecks to their indifferent brown?

Something about the middle pretty made it hard to be flippant. He was wisdom personified, his manner so serious and formal that Tally found herself wishing she had dressed up.

He was definitely of middle age, but whoever had done his operation had botched it. He was beautiful, without a doubt, but it was a terrible beauty.

Her nose was aquiline, her teeth sharp, her eyes a nonreflective gray.

Her voice had the same slow, neutral cadence as a bedtime book.

Tally turned away from the vulpine eyes, shut out the razor-blade voice.

Clothes, bedding, furniture, the pictures on the wallscreen—it had all reverted back to Generic Ugly.

The sight of the plate of food, wilted and solitary, made the suppressed tears well up in her eyes.

She looked at her parents sheepishly, wondering what they must be thinking.

And she had made Shay a solemn promise.

She couldn’t stand another day like this, not knowing if her ugly purgatory would ever end.

The cruel pretties seemed even more unearthly to exhausted eyes.

Tally tried without success to imagine what a tousled Dr. Cable would look like.

Through bleary eyes, Tally saw that it was a 3-D copy of the note, perfect down to the slight incisions of Shay’s labored penmanship on the paper.

Tally glared at Dr. Cable, realizing she’d been duped.

“I’m afraid that we find the instructions on the note rather cryptic, Tally.”

Of course a hover board. What is it about those things and miscreants?

This last line, where it says to ‘wait on the bald head,’ clearly refers to a rendezvous point. You go there, you wait. Sooner or later, they’ll pick you up.

Like a mirror, but in close-up, it showed Tally as she looked right now: puffy-eyed and disheveled, exhaustion and red scratches marking her face, her hair sticking out in all directions, and her expression turning horrified as she beheld her own appearance.