Free Duckling Ugly by Neal Shusterman

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 likethat 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 Iheard 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