Duckling Ugly Read Online Free PDF

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 yourface 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