Duckling Ugly Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 alwaysjoked 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,