Duckling Ugly

12 A feast of flowers

You can't wake up and still think you're dead.

No matter how strange your surroundings, there's something about being made of flesh and bone that tells you instinctively you haven't left it all behind. And so, when I opened my eyes to see a room with bright white walls and no windows, I knew I wasn't in heaven―but I wasn't anyplace on earth I knew, either. The light came from a large skylight above me, and through it I could see a clear blue sky. The rainstorm had passed.

"Good morning!"

I didn't know anyone was beside me until I heard the voice. I turned to see him sitting there next to the bed. A boy. He wasn't much older than me. He was clean-cut, had blond hair, a clear complexion, and pastel blue eyes. When he smiled I thought I recognized him, but knew I was wrong. His smile held no hint of deception; it was an honest smile, and I knew no one like that.

I sat up, expecting to feel weak, but I didn't. I felt completely rested.

"Hi, I'm Aaron," he said, and gently took my hand.

His clothes were white, and at first I figured this to be a hospital―but the style of his clothes was not hospital-like at all. He wore an eggshell-white shirt, and an eggshell white vest. Even his pants were that same soft shade of white. It was such an odd combination, and yet it seemed so perfect, you might wonder why everyone didn't dress like this.

Aaron was handsome. Truly so. Not in a Marshall Astor kind of way, but in a way that went beyond mere good looks. I was happy just to gaze at him, then I silently scolded myself for being so foolish. That's when I realized where I'd seen him before.

"I... I've been dreaming about you!"

He smiled gently, as if this were no surprise to him. "You probably have lots of questions," Aaron said.

I nodded.

"Well, come with me," he said. "Time to find the answers."

Like I said, I knew I was alive―no question about that, and yet when I stepped out of that little white room, I found myself in paradise. It wasn't just any paradise, either―it was my special one. "Nowhere Valley." This was the place I went when I closed my eyes. Oh, I didn't get it exactly right in my head; the moun­tains around this valley were higher than the ones in my mind. The houses I had always pictured in soft tones of blues and yel­lows were all eggshell white, and built in little clusters around the valley, not evenly spaced like I had imagined. But otherwise, it was every bit the same. The valley was the greenest I've ever seen, about a mile long. A stone path began at the small one-room cot­tage where I awoke and wound like a lazy river from this end of the valley to the other. If this was my new life, then everything I had been through had been worth it!

"Welcome to De León," said Aaron. Then he took my hand without any of the hesitation a boy usually has when taking the hand of a girl, and he led me down into the valley.

My body ached as I walked, but I was so focused on the sights it didn't matter. At the first house we passed, a couple in their twenties was sitting on a porch swing, sipping lemonade, and they waved to us. Their clothes were the same shade of white as Aaron's, which I now knew were soft as velvet, pure as satin. I looked down at what I was wearing. They had taken away my shredded gown and given me a white dress as well, but it wasn't made of the same material as their clothes. What I wore was cot­ton, but their clothes made the purest cotton look as ugly as a potato sack.

The couple came forward. "Good morning, Aaron," the man said. "Hello, Cara. It's good to have you here."

I looked at Aaron, gaping. "But... how does he know my name?"

"Shhh," Aaron said gently. "Just take it in. Enjoy it."

Then the couple clipped some flowers from their beautiful garden and threw them in the path in front of us. I tried to walk around them, but Aaron wouldn't let me. "No," he said. "Walk over them. Crush the petals beneath your feet so their fragrance fills the air."

And so I did.

At every house we passed, people stopped whatever they were doing to say hello, and to throw flowers in our path. One woman came running out of her house to give me a gentle hug. "I'm so glad you pulled through," she said. "My name is Harmony."

Harmony was beautiful―perhaps Momma's age, but without the world-weariness that weighed on my mother's face. In fact, everyone here was beautiful. It wasn't a plastic, fake beauty, like fashion models, or like Marisol. Nothing so skin-deep. Like my ugliness, their beauty went to the bone.

"I tended to your wounds, and Aaron and I took turns sitting with you," Harmony told me. I could still feel those wounds from the greenhouse glass, which had cut me in so many places. I looked at the long gash on my arm. There was no bandage, even though the wound was still red and a bit swollen. It had been stitched closed by sutures so fine I could barely see them. In fact, all my wounds had been sewed the same way.

"I did all the work," Harmony said proudly. "Ninety-five stitches in all."

"Harmony's our seamstress here," Aaron said.

The fact that I was sewn up by a seamstress didn't sit well with me. "No offense, but... aren't there any doctors here?"

Neither of them answered right away. Then Harmony said, "We get by without."

I wanted to ask how―or more importantly, why―but Aaron gently urged me forward along the path.

Along the way, more flowers were tossed at my feet by smiling residents of the valley, and the perfume of the crushed petals filled the air around me. I began to realize that this was part of some ritual. It made me think of a punishment I heard about from the olden days. When a soldier was found guilty of some criminal act, the other men formed two lines and the offender had to pass between them, while the other men beat him with their fists, or with sticks, or with whatever they wanted to use. It was called a gauntlet, and "running the gauntlet" left a man bro­ken in more ways than one. Well, this was an anti-gauntlet, and the men and women on either side of the road delivered pleasure rather than pain, offering me good wishes and flowers before my feet. I had never felt so accepted in my life.

You might think such a thing would feel good, but you have to understand I wasn't used to acceptance. It felt strange. It was, in its own way, terrifying, and by the time I had come to the far end of the path, my hands and legs were shaking as if the men and women had beaten me.

Aaron put his hand around my waist to give me support as we passed the last of the homes, as if he understood exactly how I felt.

At the end of the path loomed a mansion―the last structure before the walls of the valley closed in. The double doors were wide open and inviting. I hesitated. Experience told me that sometimes the most inviting places are just to lure you to some­thing awful. I tried to sense deceit or hidden intentions in Aaron. Either there were none, or my intuition was broken.

"Come on," Aaron said, gently easing me forward. "He's waiting for you."

"Who's waiting for me?"

Aaron smiled. "We just call him Abuelo." Grandfather.

The mansion had dozens of rooms. Through the open doors I saw a library, a sunroom, and a huge kitchen. Music poured from the entrance of a grand salon, harpsichord and violin. There was joyous laughter everywhere, and then it occurred to me that with all the voices I heard, both in the valley and in here, I had not heard a single child. It seemed Aaron and I were the youngest ones here. With so many happy couples, shouldn't there be chil­dren? I thought to ask Aaron, but the thought was blasted out of my mind by the sight before me as we neared the center of the mansion.

There was a wide marble staircase, leading up to a closed ma­hogany door adorned in gold. This was the only door I had seen in the entire mansion that wasn't open.

Aaron stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

"Don't be afraid," Aaron said. "Go on. He's expecting you."

I could feel my heart pounding against my ribs, and I thought for sure it would burst halfway up, and I'd tumble back down the stairs. Still, I forced myself forward until I was at the top of the stairs, then I reached for the golden knob on the huge mahogany door and leaned against the door with all my weight.

The door slowly creaked open, and I slipped through the gap into a huge oval ballroom. There were no windows, only a sky­light, just like in the tiny room where I had first woken up. The walls here, however, weren't white. They were painted black, and on every wall there were dozens of picture frames―rectangular, square, oval―and every single one of them was covered by the same soft white cloth everyone's clothes were made of. I won­dered what artwork could be so precious that no one was al­lowed to see it.

"Finalmente!" said a voice both gentle and rough.

He sat on a soft padded settee at the far end of the room, in the shaft of light brought in by the skylight.

"Vengas aqui, mi hija." When I didn't move, he sighed, and re­sorted to English. "Come here, my child."

I approached across the black marble floor, cold beneath my bare feet.

The old man had a glow about him that had nothing to do with the light of the sun. It was an inner radiance. He was truly old―perhaps as old as poor Miss Leticia had been―but the vi­tality in his eyes was like that of a man in his twenties.

"Did you enjoy your pascua de florida? Your feast of flowers? I can still smell the blossoms on your feet."

"It was . . . uh . . . interesting."

"Forgive me," he said. "I am a man in love with ceremony."

Now that I was just a few feet away, I could see that his skin was marred by deep wrinkles, but that didn't lessen how hand­some he was. Looking at his face was like looking at an ancient oak in the first days of summer―lined and wizened, and yet as gloriously green as a sapling.

But when he looked at me, clearly he saw something differ­ent. He saw my ugliness.

"Ah! That face, that face!" he said. "So many tears your face has drawn from you, verdad?"

"My face is my business," I told him.

"This is true. But you are here, so that makes it my business as well." Then he gestured all around him. "For you, I have cov­ered all my mirrors."

So, it wasn't artwork on the walls around us.

He narrowed his keen eyes and took in the features of my face. "Hmm," he said. "Que feo. What Aaron says is true. You are very, very ugly―but do not think you are special in this. You are not the first, you are not the last. And I have seen uglier."

If anyone else had said that, I would have called them a liar, but there was such authority in the old man's voice, everything he said rang true. There was a certain light to Abuelo, too. Not something I could see, but something I could feel, as irresistible as the pull of gravity, yet somehow a bit dangerous, like radiation. I'd call it graviation. G-R-A-V-I-A-T-I-O-N. Good word.

He smiled at me as if he could read my thoughts. If he told me he could, I would have believed him. I almost wanted him to, because it was so hard to put into words all the thoughts and feelings I had had since opening my eyes to this wonderful place.

"Why did you bring me here?" I asked.

He waved his hand. "I did nothing. You brought yourself here. Like a salmon swimming upstream, there was an instinct in you to find this place. My letter merely reminded you."

I gasped. "You wrote the letter!"

The old man smiled, showing teeth as pearly white as his suit. "I wrote it, yes. But it was Aaron who convinced me you were worth the effort."

"Aaron convinced you? But... I never met Aaron before."

The old man raised his eyebrows. "Well, Aaron knows of you, even if you do not know of him. And when you came through the mountains, it was he who was waiting with the monks for you."

"The monks?"

"Not your concern. They found you, freezing to death in the rain, and they brought you here. That's all you need to know."

I thought back to that rainy night. Was it yesterday? A week ago? How long had I been unconscious? "My parents are proba­bly looking for me!"

"Let them look," Abuelo said. "They will not find you here. The earth itself conspires to keep this place hidden." Then he added, "Besides . . . do you truly believe they will search for long?"

I wanted to be furious at the question. I wanted to think my parents would tear the world apart trying to find me ... but did I really believe that? My father, who secretly thought I was the curse that brought him a life of failure? My mother, to whom I'd been such a burden for all these years? How long would they try to find me? How much did they truly want to?

I turned my eyes down to the black marble floor. "I don't be­long here," I told him. "I might not belong out there, but I definitely don't belong here."

"Perhaps this is true," the old man said, "but you are wel­come to linger awhile. Who knows, in time, you may see things differently, verdad?"

I didn't think so, but whether I belonged here or not, I couldn't deny the sense of acceptance I felt. "Thank you," I said. I would stay, I decided. At least until the ugularity of my face sucked away their acceptance, and poisoned them against me, as I knew it eventually would.

13 It's a beautiful life

I stayed in that little one-room cottage at the opposite end of the valley from Abuelo's mansion. When I had arrived, there was nothing in it but a bed, but each day someone else brought a single gift. The daily gifts were another one of Abuelo's rituals, I suppose. No one seemed to keep a calendar, so I marked the days by counting the things in my cottage. A table and chairs, a handblown glass oil lamp, a dresser.

Each morning I awoke to find Aaron sitting on my porch, waiting to take me to someone else's home for breakfast. I have to admit I liked that he was there, but all that attention from him made me self-conscious.

"Don't you have something better to do than babysit me?" I asked him on the third morning.

He shrugged. "There's plenty of time to do the things I've got to do," he said. "Besides, it's not babysitting."

I wondered whether it was his assigned chore to be my escort, or if he did it because he wanted to.

Time was spent differently here than in the outside world. Some people had generators to make electricity, but they rarely used them, which meant there were no televisions, or video games, or any of the usual things people use to occupy their time. You might think that would be horrible, but it wasn't. Or at least it wasn't in De León. People kept busy, each in their own way―and wherever I went, people invited me to be a part of whatever they were doing.

In Harmony's house, for instance, some of the women would get together and weave with her. She invited me in and taught me how to do it, creating that fine fabric for the clothes they wore. They sang while they wove, and taught me the songs so I could sing along. We worked the hand looms to the rhythm of the song. It wasn't exactly what you would call fun, but it was soothing, and satisfying in a way I can't explain. I sat there all day and hadn't re­alized that hours had passed until Harmony lit the lamps. I left that evening feeling like I'd accomplished something great.

I quickly learned that everyone had their place in De León―or I guess I should say everyone made their place. There were Claude and Willem―two craftsmen who carved furniture with so much love, you could just about feel their embrace when you sat in one of their rocking chairs. There was Haidy, who spent her days writing poetry, and her husband, Roland, who set it to music. Maxwell, the storyteller, would come to a different house each night and enter­tain better than the finest film, in return for being fed.

Even Aaron, the youngest of the men, at sixteen, had found his niche.

I asked him about it late one afternoon. We were sitting out by the small fishing pond, watching the early twilight sky change colors.

"What do you do all day?" I asked. "I mean, when you're not being my personal social director. Do you go to school? I don't see a little red schoolhouse anywhere in the valley."

"There is no school," he told me. "At least not the kind you're thinking about."

"Well then, this must be heaven after all."

"We learn from each other," he explained. "And what we can't teach, we can read up on in Abuelo's library. Abuelo even gives lectures on everything from philosophy to physics―what­ever his current interest is."

"I guess when you've been around as long as he has, you be­come an expert in just about everything," I said. "But you still haven't answered my question. How do you fit in here?"

Aaron smiled. "When I'm not your social director, I'm everyone else's," he said. "I'm in charge of what Abuelo calls 'purposeful amusement.' I create games and challenges. I set up things to do when everyone gathers in Abuelo's mansion, or for the picnics on Sunday afternoon."

"So, then, you're a"―I tried to come up with the perfect word―"a recreologist."

He looked at me funny, and his expression made me laugh.

"Recreologist," he said, mulling it over. "I like it. You're good with words." He held eye contact with me, and it made me un­comfortable. What was it with these people? They were all gor­geous, and yet they could all stand to look at me. People simply didn't do that. Not even Momma, who could withstand my face better than anyone, was able to hold my gaze that long.

"Don't look at me like that!" I said, almost angry about it, be­cause it defied everything I knew about myself. "Look at me like a normal person does, which is not looking at all!"

I stood up, knowing my face was getting red and blotchy. I stood at the edge of the little pond and dared to catch my reflec­tion off the surface. I saw myself for only a few moments―my tainted, awful image―then the water defended itself as it always did, clouding over so it didn't have to reflect the likes of me. I growled in frustration.

"I wouldn't worry about that," Aaron said, seeing the sudden murkiness of the water. "It doesn't mean anything."

At that moment I wanted to throw him into the pond! "How can you say it doesn't mean anything? How many other people here fog water just by looking into it?"

"Abuelo says once you see a person's soul, you no longer see the outside."

"Abuelo's full of it!" I told him. "I'd like you a whole lot bet­ter if you just admitted, like a normal person, that I'm ugly!"

"Fine," Aaron said, getting miffed for the first time since I'd met him. "You're ugly. You're totally, completely, and undeniably ugly. If it makes you happy, I'll shout it to all of De León."

I still felt the flush in my face, but the reasons for it were changing. "It doesn't make me happy," I said quietly.

"Well," he said, offering me the slightest grin, "we'll have to find other ways to make you happy."

I can't quite say what I felt for Aaron during those first days in De León. Was it gratitude? Respect? Awe? It certainly wasn't the same kind of hopeless longing I had felt for Gerardo, and it couldn't quite be love, because I barely knew him. I liked his at­tention, though, and the way he treated me. Most of the good-looking people I knew were terminally self-centered, but Aaron didn't seem to be that way. He was genuine, he was thoughtful, he was too good to be true―and that kept me suspicious.

He was also very good at what he did. I got a taste of Aaron's "recreology" that first Sunday. He organized all sorts of clever races and contests―and everyone joined in, including me.

It was a Tom Sawyer kind of life in De León, and Abuelo was like our own Hispanic Mark Twain. I told Abuelo that, and he just laughed. "I am partial to Cervantes," he said, and he ex­plained that Cervantes was the Spanish author who had written Don Quixote, a famous story about an old knight who did crazy things, like attack a windmill. "He thought the windmills might be giants," Abuelo said. "I applaud a madman who sees the fan­tastic in the ordinary."

The point is, life was frozen in De León, in a time that may never really have existed. You might be tempted to call them back­ward, or ignorant, but you'd be wrong. They knew and understood technology, all the conveniences of modern life, but they simply didn't need any of it. Cars? Why have a car when the valley was only a mile long, and the walk was so refreshing? Electric lights? What was the point, when candles and hearths were so much more friendly and inviting? Telephones? Why not talk face-to-face when so much of communication is body language?

There was simply nothing wrong in De León―and, like I said, that kind of perfection is highly suspect. And then, of course, there were the Seven Mysteries, which made me wonder about the place even more―but I'll get to those later.

Even with my suspicious nature, I quickly fell into the easy pace of life there, and each day I found myself thinking about my old life less and less. It's not like I forgot about my family, or Gerardo, or even Marisol and Marshall... but when your days are packed with people who are genuinely kind and unburdened by their own lives, how can you choose to think of bad times? The thoughts did come, though. Usually at night. I would worry about Momma worrying about me. I thought about how Dad would blame himself because of that stupid deal he'd made with Marshall about the car. I thought of Miss Leticia, and mourned the fact that I hadn't been there for her funeral. But then morn­ing would come, Aaron would be at my door with a smile that ap­peared to have no ulterior motive, and those lonely night thoughts dissolved like the early-morning mist.

Getting to know everyone in De León, and seeing how well they all fit in, made it more and more obvious to me that I didn't. It was a constant reminder that I'd eventually have to leave. I didn't know where I would go, only that I couldn't go back home. I mentioned this to Aaron, and he just became un­comfortable, and shrugged. The thought of me leaving was the only thing that ever seemed to rattle him―after all, I was the only one here his age, and beggars can't be choosers.

Harmony was much more open when I talked to her about eventually leaving.

"If you find your place among us," she asked, "will you still want to leave?"

I thought about it. "No," I told her, and it was the truth―but I couldn't imagine anything I could do that would be of use to anyone in De León.

After I'd been in De León for a week, my little one-room cottage had become furnished and inviting. There was something missing, though, and I couldn't put my finger on what it could be. It was Aaron who had the insight to see what was really missing from the place.

It was the evening of my seventh day. He had just come over with a wooden board game he had invented and Willem had built for him. Kind of a cross between Stratego and chess. We had just started playing when he looked around the room, and said, "These are all things other people wanted to give you... but since you've been here, you haven't said if there's anything you want."

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "Maybe a radio? A laptop? A TV Guide!" But I was kidding, and he knew it. If I missed any of those things, I only missed them on the surface, because they were familiar. I thought about his question a bit more deeply. Once I did, my answer was easy. "How about a bamboo paint­brush, some ink, and some paper?"

Aaron nodded. "I'll see what I can do."

The next afternoon he came to my cottage all smiles, with a jar of ink in one hand and a brush in the other. "We didn't have bamboo," he said, "so Willem used his lathe to make you one out of birch wood."

I took the brush, holding it like something precious. The pale bristles were soft and tapered to a point, the way I liked it. I could tell it wasn't wolf hair, or even rabbit. "What kind of hair is it?"

Aaron blushed a bit, and scratched the side of his head, re­vealing a little thin patch on his scalp.

"No!" I said. "You didn't."

"I did. You've got yourself a genuine Aaron-hair brush."

"That's just plain creepy."

He shrugged. "It just means there'll be a little bit of me in everything you draw."

I looked at the brush again, deciding it wasn't as creepy as it was sweet. Then I realized something was missing. "Is there any paper?"

He smiled and gestured toward the empty white walls of the cottage. "Who needs paper?"

I think that was the moment my feelings toward Aaron took a quantum leap beyond gratitude, respect, and awe.

14 The seven mysteries

I once saw this documentary about a family who had adopted a young chimpanzee. They raised it as part of the family. It ate at the table, had its own room done up like any other kid's room. The little chimp had all the love it could handle, and yet there was a deep sadness in its eyes. It knows there's something wrong, I remember thinking. It knows it can never be like the tall, slender crea­tures around it. I wondered if he was human in his dreams, only to wake up to realize it was never going to happen.

That's how I felt among the beautiful people of De León, and no matter how accepted they made me feel, I knew I would never be like them. I wondered how long it would take for them to realize it and send me on my way.

I had been in paradise for three weeks when Abuelo paid a surprise visit to my cottage. What had begun as a bare room was now decorated with furniture, quilts, and other warm touches brought by the residents of De León. Everything, of course, but mirrors.

I was doing my ink drawings―I had already filled up two whole walls and was working on a third. I stiffened when I saw Abuelo at my open front door. Abuelo never came to visit you― you always went to see him. I looked at the ink drawings on the wall and felt as if I had been caught doing something wrong.

"Hola, mi hija," he said as he stepped in. "I came to see how you are getting on."

"I'm good," I squeaked out. Abuelo never did anything with­out purpose. I was convinced that this was the day he would cast me out. After all, I had yet to make myself useful here. Was my free ride over? My heart began to beat like I was running a marathon, but I tried not to let it show.

He took a look at the walls, taking them in, saying nothing, then stepped back from the fullest wall to see it as a whole. "It looks like . . . writing," he said.

"It is . . . kind of," I explained. "I use the basic strokes of Chinese writing for all my drawing." I picked up my brush and on a blank spot of wall showed him the seven simple marks I had taught myself years ago.

"The Chinese call these strokes the Seven Mysteries," I told him.

Abuelo studied the seven marks, then stepped closer to exam­ine the individual drawings, each one no larger than a sheet of paper, since that was the size I was used to. I waited for him to turn to me, offer his apologies, and tell me I had to leave De León. But he didn't. Instead he pointed to three of the drawings. "This one is the view from your porch," he said. "This, I think, is Harmony's garden. And this ... this is me!" He smiled broadly. "Que bueno!"

I can't tell you how relieved I was by his approval. A man who smiled like that wasn't about to hurl you back over the mountains. "You got all three right!" I said. Even though the drawings were stylized, and simplified with the barest gestures of lines, he had figured them out.

Then he turned to the one wall I hadn't gotten to yet―still stark white, without a single brushstroke. He pointed to it. "Leave this wall blank," he said. Then he nodded to me, said adios, and left without another word.

As relieved as I was that he hadn't expelled me from De León, I was also confused.

Leave this wall blank.

It was a mystery. The seventh mystery, I thought, and glanced at the individual drying brush marks on the wall. Even more than keeping track of the days, I was keeping track of the many strange things that didn't sit right with me about De León. I was supposed to "find the answers" here, but for a place that was supposed to hold all my answers, the people of De León didn't care much for my questions. Oh, sure, they were polite when I asked, but through the pleasant talk, there was a silent air of secrecy―like they all had a malformed child locked away in the attic―which was impossible, because of mystery number one: There were no children in De León.

Aaron had become uncomfortable when I asked him about it during my first days there.

"The women here don't seem to be able to have babies," he told me. "I think it's something in the water."

"That's awful."

Aaron shrugged. "They don't mind. Or at least they don't anymore."

It bothered me, but not as much as it might have, since I didn't plan on inflicting my genes on a defenseless, unsuspecting future―but how could such a thing not bother all the other women here? I asked Aaron more questions about it, but he just changed the subject.

It wasn't just him. Everyone I spoke to had the same kind of response to my questions. It was like all of their information was sifted through a strainer, to remove anything juicy before it got to me.

Mystery number two: "To Serve Abuelo."

I learned about this particular mystery while weaving with Harmony and a few of the other women, when I questioned them about the isolation of the town.

"If nothing comes in or out," I asked Harmony, "how did Abuelo send me his letter?"

The women in the room, who had seemed so happy with their weaving and their humming, now looked at one another apprehensively.

"The monastery," said one of the other women. She was im­mediately shushed, and the silence that fell made the birds out­side seem loud.

I looked to each of them, but none would return my gaze. "Monastery?" Hadn't Abuelo once mentioned something about monks?

Harmony sighed. "We're not entirely self-sufficient," she said. "Our valley is small. We don't have land to raise our crops, or to raise livestock. So Abuelo struck a bargain a very long time ago with the Vladimirian monks."

I thought of the various kinds of monks I knew about. Bud­dhist. Franciscan. Benedictine.

"I never heard of the Vladimirian monks," I told them.

"And you never will hear of them again," a woman named Gertrude said. "They exist to keep us secret. To bring us the food we cannot grow, and to take messages to the outside world when we need it."

"And what do they get out of it?"

"The joy of serving Abuelo," Gertrude said.

"And," said Harmony, "that's all there is to know about that." Then she launched into a song, and the other women joined in. Although I had a ton more questions, it was clear there were no more answers in this sewing circle.

Mystery number three: "Go with the Flow."

I stumbled upon this one while visiting with Claude and Willem, the two men who made furniture. I enjoyed watching them work, and I loved the smell of the fresh wood―but I had a bet­ter reason for hanging around them. Unlike many of the others, they got careless with their talk―especially once they grew more comfortable with me.

"How long have you lived here?" I once asked them as they worked together on a table.

"Not all that long," the tall one named Willem said. "Our little group is nomadic by nature."

"Nomadic?" I said. "It seems to me you've been here for a long time."

"Long is a relative word," said Claude, with a distinctly French accent. "We were in Lourdes before this. And before that Tibet― a valley in the Himalayas, not much different than this, although even less accessible."

"We Mow the flow," said Willem.

"The flow of what?"

The question hit a nerve, and they both became a bit uncom­fortable.

"Just the flow."

I knew I had stumbled upon something important, but what it meant, I had no idea. "So how much longer will you be staying here?" I asked.

Willem rubbed his hand thoughtfully on the smooth wood of the tabletop. "Abuelo seems to think it won't be much longer. But I think he might be wrong." Then he looked out the window. "Just look at that grass. Look how rich it is, look how green."

Claude shook his head without looking up from his work. "He was right the last time."

"Yes. Well, we'll see." And then Willem changed the subject. "Have you considered what your place might be here? What you can add to our little community?" "That's easy," I told him. "Nothing."

"Pshaw," he said. "I'm sure you'll think of something." I never actually heard a person say "pshaw" before. I almost laughed. "You must have some skills."

I shrugged. "I can spell."

"Ooh," said Claude, "witchcraft! We have no witches here. That would be new."

"No." I sighed, thinking about poor Miss Leticia, who had made the same mistake. "Not that kind of spell. I spell words."

Willem rubbed his chin thoughtfully, getting sawdust all over it. "Hmm. Words, words, words . . . we already have a poet."

"And a scribe."

"Ah, well," said Willem, this time with less conviction. "I'm sure you'll find something."

Mystery number four was the weather, and mystery number five was everything that grew beneath the unseasonably warm sun. See, it was almost winter now. Back in Flock's Rest, sycamores would have lost all their leaves; the days would be cold and the nights colder. But in De León, it was always spring on the edge of summer.

I asked Petra, our resident piano virtuoso, about it, and she answered without missing a single note in her sonata. "It's the pattern of winds, and thermal vents in the mountainside," she said. "I think it's called a microclimate. I'm sure there are books about it in Abuelo's library."

I looked, but I couldn't find a single one.

The fishing pond was mystery number six. Soren was De León's designated fisherman―a big Scandinavian with a blond beard that hid most of his face. He would have looked natural in a Viking hat.

I stopped to watch him fish one day and asked how such a small pond―no bigger than thirty yards across―could support so many fish, and so many different varieties.

The utter panic in the big man's eyes at the question was al­most comical. "I just catch them," he mumbled.

"Still, I'll bet you have a theory about it."

Again, panic. Then he was saved by a tug on his line. "Excuse me." He reeled in his catch. I don't know much about fish, but I do know that I'd never seen anything like this one before. It was least two feet long, with a blood-red head, fading to a neon- blue body, blending into a tail as green as the oak leaves shading the pond from the unseasonably warm sun. It made me think of the Galapagos Islands―a place off the coast of South America so isolated, it gave rise to creatures seen nowhere else in the world.

"So," I said, gaping at the unearthly fish, "is that what they mean by a 'rainbow trout'?"

He quickly strung up his fish with the other equally odd spec­imens he had caught, said "good day," and left like a man racing from a tornado.

And now I had mystery number seven: an order from Abuelo to leave a perfectly good drawing wall untouched, with no expla­nation. Perhaps it was less grand then the other mysteries, but it was just as frustrating. They all knew things I didn't―I was cer­tain of it. It was all a reminder that I was the chimp at the table.

The day after Abuelo's surprise visit, Aaron came to take me out for a picnic. I knew right away that this was different from the other times we had done things together. I could tell because he was ap­prehensive, maybe a little bit excited. This is a date, I thought. The only other date I'd been on was that infamous and miserable night with Marshall Astor―but this was something else entirely. I didn't know whether I was more excited or terrified.

Aaron led me from my end of the valley to the other, where Abuelo's mansion stood, then he took me up the steep slope be­hind it, as if we were climbing out of the valley.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"You'll see."

The soft grass gave way to harsh nettles as we got higher, and soon the rough brush gave way to jagged rocks. The valley was not easy to get out of, or to get into, for that matter.

The shoes they had given me were not meant for climbing this kind of terrain. I wanted to ask Aaron where we were going, but he had this look on his face―a slight grin of anticipation, and I could tell that whatever he wanted to show me, it was a surprise.

Finally, Aaron stopped at a plateau, the mountainside still looming ahead of us.

"Have a look," he said, then gently grabbed my shoulders and turned me around.

I hadn't realized how high we had climbed until I looked out to see the valley spread before us.

On either side of the valley were dense clouds. I could hear distant thunder and see lightning flashes within the grayness. It was storming in the outside world, but the clouds never flowed over those hillsides into the valley of De León.

We sat down and ate sandwiches made from home-cured ham and fresh-baked bread. My clothes had gotten dirty from the climb, but I noticed that Aaron's didn't have a trace of dust. I reached over and touched his sleeve. I did it to feel the fabric, but then I realized I was gently rubbing his arm. I pulled my hand back, a bit embarrassed.

"No, it's okay," he said. "You like the way it feels, don't you? It's made of swan gossamer."

I looked at him like I hadn't heard him correctly. "Swan what?"

"Swan gossamer," he said. "Once a year the swans come in the spring to mate. Hundreds of them. We brush through their feathers to collect the soft down, and then spin it into thread."

"It's so beautiful."

"It never gets dirty. It never wears out."

"I wish I could wear it," I said.

He smiled at that, then reached up and touched my face, looking, as he always did, right into my eyes. It would have been a wonderfully romantic moment, but my face, which had always been my enemy, chose this moment to launch an offensive―and when I say offensive, I truly do mean offensive.

They say acne is caused by pores swelling up, becoming in­fected. When a pore is clogged with dirt, it becomes a blackhead. As the infection grows, it becomes a whitehead. And every once in a while, one of them turns into Mount St. Helens. If you have acne, you know exactly what I mean. And if you don't, just be thankful.

Aaron quickly pulled his hand away when he realized he had inadvertently popped a zit. For a brief, brief instant, he looked at me with the same nauseated disgust that I got from the rest of the world. Then he looked away from me for a moment, forcing that feeling away. He wiped his fingers on a rock. "Don't worry about it," he said. "It happens."

I couldn't look at him now. I was too humiliated. I pressed the back of my hand to my face, just in case I wasn't done erupt­ing. I felt tears of embarrassment coming, so I let my hair dangle in front of my face so he couldn't see it.

"No," he said, sounding a little bit angry. "Don't you do that. Look at me."

I shook my head. What a fool I was to think that I could have anything resembling a normal relationship with someone who looked like Aaron. All my weeks here, pretending I could ever belong―but I was just deluding myself―and the people here weren't helping, they were just feeding that delusion―even Aaron. As he sat across from me, I realized he was just taking the mercy seat. The school cafeteria was gone, but the mercy seat would always be there no matter where I was.

Then Aaron said, "You don't remember me, do you?"

That made me look up. "Remember you?"

"I thought you eventually would, but you didn't. Maybe this will help." He brought his hands to his face. "I don't know if I can do it anymore. It's been a while, but I'll try."

He put his thumbs behind his ears and pushed them forward so they stuck out like funnels. With his index fingers, he lifted up on his eyebrows. With his pinkies, he pulled down on his cheeks, so his eyes took on a mournful droop. He sucked his cheeks in, pushed his lower jaw out so that his bottom teeth stuck out in an underbite. Then he pushed his lips forward and pursed them so they looked like a pink hair scrunchie.

Suddenly it hit me.

"Tuddie?"

He let go of his ears and his eyes and put his jaw back in its natural position.

"That nickname stuck so well," he said, "no one even knew my real name was Aaron."

I looked at that face, that beautiful face, and although I could see a hint of the resemblance to That Ugly Dude, as everyone called him, it was hard to believe this was the same boy. I'd be ly­ing if I said I could recognize him from his eyes, because back home I never looked into Tuddie's eyes. No one did.

"But... your face ..." I said. "How... ?"

Aaron just shrugged. "You could say I grew out of my awk­ward stage."

Then he told me how he had run away, much the same way I had, at that defining moment when he could no longer stand how he was treated. He was on the run for months, until he found this place.

"I dreamed about it, though," he told me. "I knew the direc­tion I had to go, but I had no hints to help me along. It took a while, but I finally found my way here. At first Abuelo wasn't go­ing to let me stay. He said I was too young. This society didn't have room for people our age―but you see, they were getting bored. One party, one picnic, had gotten just like every other. So I started making up new things for them to do. Abuelo chose to let me stay... then I thought of you."

Now I couldn't look him in the face again, but this time for a different reason. A different kind of shame.

"Why would you think of me? I was so nasty to you."

"So was everyone," said Aaron.

"But coming from me, it must have been worse."

"It was. But after a while I stopped blaming you for it. See, Cara, I understand. I know what it's like to hate your face so much, you wish you could be out of your own skin. And so when you looked at me, how could you help but hate me, when I only reminded you of yourself?"

His unconditional forgiveness made me feel less deserving of it. "Well, as you can see," I said bitterly, "I have not grown out of my awkward phase, and all your charity isn't going to change it."

"You know what your problem is? You spent too much time listening to all those idiots in Flock's Rest who made you feel worthless. That girl―what was her name? Marissa?"

"Marisol," I said, growling it out like it was a foul word.

"You still think about her, and all the others, don't you?"

"Sometimes."

"Well, don't! I never think about any of them―not at all. Because I am not Tuddie anymore, and you don't have to be the Flock's Rest Monster!"

"Tell it to the mirrors!"

I realized I was shouting, and I looked down, even if he didn't want me to. "I'm sorry," I said. "It's not you I'm mad at."

"So who are you mad at?"

"I don't know. Everyone? No one? God?" I reached up the sleeve of my dress to blot my tears. And the fabric got stained, not just with tears, but with a spot of yuck still oozing from my popped zit. "Let's just go back," I said, disgusted. "Picnic's over."

But he didn't move. Instead he said: "I know something that'll help your acne."

"No, you don't," I told him. "Nothing can help it. Believe me, I've tried everything."

And then he whispered, "You haven't tried this."

Aaron got up and began to climb higher up the steep, rocky slope behind us. "C'mon," he said. "It's not far." Then, when I didn't move, he said, "Or are you just gonna sit there and feel sorry for yourself?"

That got me moving. Like I said, I didn't like to wallow in self-pity, and here I was doing just that. "Okay," I said, "wait up."

After only about two minutes of climbing, we came to a deep crack in the mountain face. I could feel warm air rising from its depths and smell earth, like in the first moments of a rainstorm. This wasn't just a crack in the stone, this was the mouth of a cave.

Aaron stepped into the darkness, but I hesitated. Standing in the stark daylight, I couldn't see him in the cave ahead of me, but I heard his voice coming from inside. Now, without seeing his face, just hearing his voice, I truly recognized him as the boy I once knew as Tuddie.

"I can't force you to follow me," he said. "You have to come because you want to."

Want. There were a lot of things I wanted right then. Too many to put into words. I was a big empty bucket of want.

"You've trusted me this far," he said from the darkness. "Will you trust me a little bit farther?"

There was something important about all of this. Then it oc­curred to me that being at the mouth of this cave was no coinci­dence. Whatever was down there in that cave was the reason we came all the way up this mountainside for the picnic. M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.

I felt like I did when I stood in my room, before my mirror, daring myself to tear away the sheet. Spelling the words in my head always helped move me forward. D-E-C-I-S-I-V-E.

One step more, and I entered the mouth of the cave. D-E-S-T-I-N-Y.

I reached into the darkness, felt Aaron grab my hand, and he pulled me out of the light and into the bowels of the earth.

15 The cauldron of life

We lingered in darkness for a moment, then I heard the whoosh of a flame, and I could see his face again, lit in orange flicker­ing light. In one hand he held a torch.

When my eyes adjusted to the dim light of the cave, I could see a narrow slope leading deeper into the mountain. He didn't speak as he led the way down.

"What's down here?" I asked.

"Best to see for yourself."

We went through one cavern after another, and when I thought we had reached the bottom, there was yet another deep, winding pathway taking us farther down.

"Stay close to the light," he said when I started to lag too far behind. "There are things living down here."

"What kinds of things?"

"They don't have names―but they won't come near the light."

I tried to imagine what could possibly live here beside bats and rats, but my imagination hadn't prepared me for the "things" Aaron was talking about.

We rounded a bend, and only for a moment I saw it scuttle up a wall and out of sight. It looked something like a koala, with soft, furry eyes, a small snout. . . and eight spidery legs that clung to the wall as it scurried away I groaned slightly. Seeing that was more information than I needed, and from that mo­ment on I stayed as close to the light as I could possibly get. Even Aaron seemed frightened by it, but only slightly―or maybe he was only being brave for me.

"No one's ever been hurt by the things down here."

"Always a first time," I told him.

The caverns, which began as empty stone chambers, slowly be­gan to change their nature the deeper we got. Massive stone for­mations, almost bonelike in shape, stretched from floor to ceiling around us. Stalagmites grew from the ground like jagged teeth, and stalactites dangled from above us like limestone icicles. They all shimmered like they were covered with diamond dust, reflect­ing Aaron's torch in every color of the rainbow. The fear I had when I began our descent was slowly replaced by wonder.

Finally, we reached the most magnificent cavern of all, and Aaron doused the torch because he didn't need it anymore. The walls themselves were glowing, giving off a strange light as bright as moonlight on snow. It was hot and humid here; my clothes stuck to my body, and yet it wasn't an unpleasant sensation. The air hung motionless, smelling like mint and eucalyptus and cin­namon wrapped together in a rich earthy peat. Miss Leticia would have liked this place.

Aaron spoke in a whisper, but here the softest voice sounded loud. "Abuelo says God needed a cauldron to brew up creation, and here it is. We call this cavern EI Caldero de Vida―the Caul­dron of Life. After He was done, God might have cast the caul­dron aside, but it's never entirely empty."

We walked forward into the cavern. The floor was covered with moss greener than the grass in the valley. I couldn't imagine anything green growing down here, about a mile down, and yet it did.

"Take off your shoes," Aaron said.

As I remembered from my days in Sunday school, that's what Moses had to do when he approached the Burning Bush. "Why?" I asked. "Is this holy ground?"

Aaron shrugged. "Maybe." Then he smiled. "But I just like the feel of the moss on my feet." He was right about that. Once I took off my shoes, it felt like I was walking on plush green velvet.

"Abuelo believes the earth itself is a living thing, and this is where its soul lives." Looking at this place, I could see why the old man felt that way.

"Do you believe that?" I asked.

Aaron thought about the question and, rather than answering, said, "Abuelo is sometimes very crazy, and sometimes very wise. It's hard to figure out which is which."

We stepped forward across the massive domed cavern. In the very center, hanging from the ceiling, was a single stalactite, ta­pering down from the roof and coming to a pinpoint about ten feet above the floor. It was glistening wet, and I got a shiver, be­cause it reminded me of something, and I didn't know what. I stopped walking, but Aaron gently took my elbow and urged me forward.

I slowly approached the great glistening stalactite. The only sound now was the squelch of my feet against the soft moss and a rhythmic drip of water. Suddenly it occurred to me what the sta­lactite reminded me of.

An uvula. That strange dangle of skin at the back of your throat.

Beneath it was a stone formation growing from the cavern floor. It looked like a pedestal widening into a basin, like a bird-bath just a foot or so wide, full of water. Moisture had collected on the stalactite, and every five seconds or so a single drop of wa­ter fell from the tip into the basin, with a delicate plink. The sound was like the faintest, highest note struck on a xylophone.

There was a mist across the surface of that little pool of water. The closer I got, the more I could feel its heat.

Plink.

"Mineral water," Aaron said. "Just what your face needs. It'll open those pores and get rid of that acne."

"You think so?"

"Oh," said Aaron, "I know so."

Plink.

Then he put his finger in and swirled it around. "It's just right," he said. "Body temperature." The steam cleared away as he stirred, and colors played in the water like the aurora borealis―the northern lights captured in a shallow stone bowl. When he took his finger out, he wiped the water beneath one of his eyes, and then the other, as if it were invisible war paint. Then he licked his fingertip.

Plink.

The surface of the water was glassy, and for a strange instant I had the impression that someone was in there looking out at me, until I realized that it was my own reflection. I was just as horrible as ever. There was mustard on my lip from our lunch, and smudges of dirt from touching my face after touching the cavern walls. It was the longest I'd ever been able to see my own reflec­tion, because this water did not cloud.

Plink.

"Go on," Aaron whispered, standing right behind me now. Then he brought his lips as close to my ear as he could without actually touching it and whispered, "Your face is dirty. Wash it off."

Plink.

Between one drop of water and the next, I dipped both my hands deep into the pool and splashed the water onto my face. Once. Twice. Three times.

It burned. Not like the heat of water, not like the heat of flames, but a different kind of heat that soaked in through my pores, like fine needles penetrating so deep I could feel it all the way to the tips of my toes.

I opened my eyes, thinking they would sting, but they didn't. And when I looked at my hands, the water had already dried up, absorbed into the dryness of my skin.

"There," said Aaron. "All your skin needed was a good deep cleaning. No more acne for you."

The shimmering lights were gone from the pool, and it had misted over again. Another drop plunged from the pointy tip of the stalactite into the stone bowl.

Plink.

"Come on, Cara," Aaron said. "Let's go home."

16 Unveiling

It was already dusk when we emerged from the caverns, and by the time we made it back down into the valley, the sun was long gone from the sky.

There was a celebration at Abuelo's mansion when we got back. The entire population of De León was there. This time they weren't scattered around the mansion as I'd seen them before. Tonight, everyone was in that great room at the top of the stairs.

Musicians played, and people danced. Harmony was the first to hurry to me, and she gave me a bone-crunching hug.

"It's so good to finally see you," she said.

"What do you mean?" I asked her. "I just saw you yesterday."

"Let me take you to Abuelo," she said. "I know he'll want to see you right away."

We weaved through the dancing couples. The band played a melody that was a strange cross between classical and swing. I had never heard that piece of music before, and wondered if it had been written by one of the citizens in the town.

I looked around for Aaron, but he had already dissolved into the crowd behind me, and then, as we moved through the couples spinning one another to the music, there was Abuelo, on his settee.

Next to him was an intravenous stand, and a plastic bag of clear fluid dripped down a narrow tube that went into the vein on his left arm.

I had seen this before, on my own grandfather, when he was dying in the hospital. However, this old man seemed in the best of health. Truth be told, he seemed more radiant than any other time I'd seen him.

"What's the matter, Abuelo?" I asked. "Are you sick?"

He found this amusing, and turned to a woman beside him who was not quite as old as he. They shared a look and a chuckle. It irritated me that I couldn't be in on their little joke.

"I am, as you say, fit as a fiddle. Even fitter, for a fiddle will break its strings, whereas I will not."

He saw me looking at the intravenous bag.

"Oh, this thing. It's just a little pick-me-up. My annual beauty treatment." He and everyone within listening distance laughed.

He called to the musicians to stop playing, and they did al­most instantly. The dancing couples turned around to see what was happening, and as Abuelo stood, they cleared the floor.

He went out to the center of the room, rolling his intravenous stand with him. "My dance partner is slender and graceful, no?" Then he turned to me and gestured with one hand. "Come."

I didn't like being ordered around like a dog, and I didn't like being the center of attention. I felt the way I had beneath the lights at the spelling bee, but with the eyes of everyone in the room on me, I had no choice. I thought about the ritual of flow­ers when I first arrived, and wondered if some other ritual was in store for me today. Was today the day I would be cast out? Had they grown tired of looking at me?

The old man put his hands onto my shoulders, like a real grandfather might, and looked into my eyes.

"Ah, my ugly one, my ugly one. Do you have any idea at all who I am?"

Although I had no idea, I was beginning to sense that the an­swer was not something I was prepared to hear. Not just because of the cunning twinkle in his eye, but because I chanced to look at the intravenous bag hanging beside him and noticed something I hadn't noticed before. The clear water inside wasn't entirely clear. It was swimming with faint colors like the northern lights.

"My given name is Juan," Abuelo said. "My family name is Ponce de León."

I rolled it over in my mind. Juan Ponce de León―one of the great Spanish explorers. "You're one of his descendants?"

Abuelo slowly shook his head. "Think again."

As I recalled, Juan Ponce de León had laid claim to Florida― but he was best known for his folly, which was searching all his life for something he never found.

Or had he?

I thought back to the mineral pool deep in the "Cauldron of Life."

"The Fountain of Youth!" I said out loud.

It made the old man smile.

"You see," he said, to all those assembled, "every schoolchild knows of me."

"But that's impossible! That would make you hundreds of years old ..."

"Five hundred and forty-six―but who's counting?" He laughed heartily. "Alas, I found the fountain too late in life to be eternally young. Instead I am eternally old. It could not restore me, only sustain me, keeping me at the same age I was when I first partook of its waters. But I am not bitter―for I have learned that youth is overrated. It is the fountain's other gift― its true gift that I have come to value far more than youth."

Now I was beginning to feel like the butt of an elaborate joke. "You expect me to believe this?"

"Believe what you like," Abuelo said. "Believe that the moon is cheese, the world is flat, and that I am just a crazy old man." Then he smiled, cupping my face in his hands. I wanted to back away, but I was transfixed by his eyes. "And now, my little mud hen, time for the unveiling."

He turned and shouted, "Uncover them!"

Then people all around the room, standing close to the walls, turned and tore off the white satiny cloths that covered the mir­rors. Suddenly light zigzagged in paths across the room from one mirror to another. Those mirrors were everywhere. There was nowhere I could look without seeing one. I closed my eyes and knelt on the floor, covering my face.

"Please don't do this," I said, my voice not much more than a whimper. "Don't you know what will happen?"

But the old man gently helped me up and moved me toward the mirrors. I still couldn't look at them.

"Come now, Cara," he said. "These mirrors will not hate you. They want to love you. Every one of them. Look at yourself."

I lifted my eyes to see my reflection, still believing that the mirror would shatter.

And the person I saw looking back was not me at all.

This face in the mirror―it could have been a relative: a sister I never had. The opposite of me. This reflection had my mother's graceful cheekbones, my father's soft eyes. A face with all the good genes that had been denied me was now peering at me through eyes that were perfectly shaped.

I reached up to touch my face. My skin was clear. No rashes, no pimples, no boils. Smooth and soft as the skin of a peach.

"You see?" said Abuelo. "The fire of beauty now burns within you."

I looked around for an explanation, but all I could see was everyone smiling at me. Happy for me. And most of all, Aaron.

Abuelo, still holding my shoulders, stood behind me as we gazed into the mirror together.

"The fountain's greatest gift is the gift of eternal beauty. There is a legend that the Angel of Death is beautiful, and she will never take the life of anyone more beautifid than she. This, I believe, is why we here in De León live forever. Not because the fountain makes us eternal, but because true beauty never dies."

I couldn't take my eyes off of myself. It was the first time I could truly look at my reflection. How could I be this beautiful creature?

Then I heard a gentle voice behind me. "I have something for you." It was Harmony. I turned to see her unfolding a dress. Sim­ple, clean, and, like all of their clothes, made from swan gossamer.

The old man stepped back, the women surrounded me, and there, within the cocoon of the women of De León, they took off my cotton dress and clothed me in the velvety white garments of the eternally beautiful. I felt like a bride.

Soon the band started up again, the room so much brighter now with all the mirrors. It seemed to be filled with a thousand people instead of just a hundred. Everyone danced in circles, catching their own gazes in the mirrors that had been covered since the day I arrived.

I danced with everyone who came for my hand, but mostly I danced with Aaron.

When the celebration was over, I walked back with him, arm in arm, down the winding path to my little cottage on the oppo­site end of the valley. Perhaps it was still the effect of the water, but I felt like I was hovering over the ground in a daze. I was my­self, yet I was not myself, and it felt wonderful.

He left me at my door with a kiss. This was nothing like that awful kiss I had stolen from Marshall Astor on homecoming night. Aaron's kiss was as perfect as he was. As we both were.

"You're truly one of us now," he said. "You always have been, you just didn't know it."

After he left, I closed the door, took off my beautiful dress, and slipped beneath the covers, for the first time feeling sheets against skin that wasn't pocked like the surface of the moon―a moon that, for all I knew, really was made of cheese, because all the rules that had made up the world I knew were now in serious question. Life was suddenly magical and full of wonder.

Right here, right now is my "happily ever after" moment, I thought. I would have been perfectly happy for time to stop and the uni­verse to come to a satisfied end.

But, of course, it didn't.

17 Postmortality

I won't try to explain what it's like to go from hideous to gor­geous. There are no words to describe the feeling―at least not in any language I knew... or at least any language I knew yet. Let's just say Miss Leticia had been right all along. I did have a destiny.

In those first days after the unveiling, I soaked in my new self, just as my skin had soaked in the water of the fountain. It was amazing how many mirrors there really were in De León, once they had all been uncovered―and I must have caught my reflec­tion in every one, preening like a model for the camera. I know it sounds awful, but I just couldn't help it. It's like I needed to see that beautiful reflection over and over again to make myself believe it was real. Hair like mocha silk; soulful caramel eyes; skin as smooth as my swan-gossamer gown; and a figure with all the right curves from whatever angle you looked.

I posed for Giancarlo, the portrait painter. "Venus herself would be jealous," he said, and Abuelo promised to hang the portrait in his mansion once it dried.

I visited everyone, spoke with everyone in De León those first few days, and if I had questions before, I had even more now. This time, though, everyone was much freer with their answers . . . although they all acted as if the answers should be obvious.

"If it's the Fountain of Youth and Beauty, why isn't everyone young?" I asked Aaron as I helped him prepare for a treasure hunt that would take the citizens of De León most of Sunday to complete.

"Nearest I can figure is that the water doesn't move time backward, it just stops it where it is. Whatever state you were when you drank, that's where you stay."

"So I'll always be sixteen?" I asked.

He laughed. "It doesn't stop you from growing, silly―just from growing old."

I didn't quite get it, until I remembered something I had learned in science―that there's a point for everyone where they stop growing up, and start growing old. "I think girls are sup­posed to keep growing until they're about eighteen," I said. "But boys grow until they're about twenty."

"So there you go," said Aaron. "We'll be eighteen and twenty forever. Once we get there, of course."

I laughed. Even the sound of my laugh had changed, filtered through a much more shapely mouth. Aaron looked at me and shook his head. "What is it?" I asked.

"Nothing. It's just that for all those weeks, I tried to imagine what you'd look like after visiting the fountain. I never even came close to imagining you the way you look now."

"What if it hadn't worked?" I asked him. "What if I had stayed ugly?"

"Why would you want to think about something like that?"

He grabbed me and tickled me in the ribs until I laughed, and forgot the question.

During one of my weaving sessions with Harmony and her friends, I asked about children again. I wanted to find out for myself whether the women of De León truly didn't mind being barren.

"Nature gives life in many ways," she said. "There can't be birth without death."

Gertrude nodded. "It would be unnatural."

It seemed strange to me that she would say something like that―after all, there was nothing natural about eternal life, was there? But then, if the fountain was a natural place, perhaps it was. Perhaps it was just a hidden side of nature.

"There are times I wish I could trade postmortality for the chance to have children," said one of the younger women. "But that's not a choice we have anymore. Postmortality is forever."

"Don't you mean immortality?" I said.

Harmony strung a fresh thread of gossamer into her loom be­fore answering. "Abuelo might talk of immortality, but none of us is truly immortal, Cara. We can live forever, but that doesn't nec­essarily mean that we will."

"I... don't understand."

"Flesh is still flesh," she explained. "We do not wither, but we do wear. We bruise, we bleed, we break, and if it's bad enough, we die."

"That's why we have to be careful," Gertrude said, and then went into the long tale of poor Virgil Meeks, who was gored by a mountain goat and died at the untimely age of 137.

I thought about this. "It's actually a blessing that the fountain doesn't make us truly immortal," I pointed out. "I mean, what's the value of life if you can't die? How could you ever appreciate anything? This way life is still precious."

"Postmortality", like everything else in De León, was per­fect―but there was still something about it that bothered me. "Postmortality is such an ugly word for such a wonderful thing," I told them. "Shouldn't it be called something better . . . like . . . oh, I don't know . . . Eternessence."

They all chuckled and repeated the word, trying it on for size. They liked it. They liked me. Now I had not only their accep­tance, but their approval as well.

I had finally stepped into that great destiny Miss Leticia had spoken of―and my destiny was perfection. But what happens once you've arrived at that final destination? What then?

I should have stayed content to be one of the beautiful people of De León, but each night, it wasn't the sense of belonging that filled me as I drifted off to sleep. More and more, my mind was filled with the faces of the people back home in Flock's Rest.

"It's natural to think about them at first," Aaron said. "Don't worry, it'll pass."

I believed him, but I had my doubts.

Abuelo called for me two weeks after my "unveiling." We met in his great ballroom. His throne room, now filled with a hundred mirrors: a grand reflectorium. Those mirrors would stay uncovered until the next poor unnaturally ugly soul found his or her way un­der Abuelo's wings―and I would probably be the one to lead the new arrival down the gauntlet of flowers, as Aaron had led me.

Abuelo rose from his golden sofa and gave me a powerful hug. Then he walked around me, looking me over like I was a sculp­ture and he was Michelangelo.

"Harmony does good work, no? That gossamer gown is the finest she's made yet."

"It's beautiful," I said.

"Much love went into it. She has a special place in her heart for you, I think. Like a mother."

That made me think of Momma. Was Harmony taking her place? Was it okay to let that happen? One thought led to an­other, and in an instant my head was flooded with Flock's Rest.

"You are restless," Abuelo said. "I see this. And I also know why."

"You do?"

"It is because you have not found your place here. You have not yet found a task that fits you. Am I right in thinking this?"

I nodded, because he was half-right. I still hadn't found a pur­pose among the people here. It seemed to me all the good jobs were taken.

"I think I know something you can do for us. Something that will fill the coming years of your splendid eternessence."

I looked at him at the sound of my made-up word, a little em­barrassed. He laughed when he saw my reaction, then he opened his arms as if to hug me, but instead spun around, and in the mir­rors, his many reflections spun with him. "All this," he said. "All you see in the valley, it is a world unto itself. Do you not think so?"

I nodded.

"Well," he said, "a world needs a language, don't you agree? The people here come from all over the world. We speak English now because we are here in America, but we may not always be here. What we need is a language of our own. The most beautiful language in the world, like diamonds rolling off the tips of our tongues. I would like you to create this language for us."

My breath was taken away by the request. Create an entire language? Spelling was one thing, but this? "I can't do something like that!"

"You can," Abuelo said, with absolute certainty. "Because everything about you is beauty now. Your face, your voice, and the works of your hands. You will build us this language, and then you will teach us all to speak it... and to write it." Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a fresh bottle of ink, which he put into my hand. He had asked me to leave one wall of my cottage blank―now I understood why. But even so, creating a language was more than just inventing symbols and painting them on a wall. There was grammar and structure―languages grew over eons. No one person ever created an entire language.

"But... it'll take years."

"Indeed," he said. "Hundreds, perhaps. And now that you have been cleansed by the waters of the fountain, you have all the time you need."

And I realized he was right. Any task could be completed if there was enough time! "Thank you, Abuelo," I said, genuinely grateful, and excited about the task.

Then he kissed me on the forehead and turned me loose to begin.

I could have left Abuelo's right then. I should have―I was inspired―I was ennobled by this monumental task... but I hesitated. Abuelo had always treated me with kindness and wis­dom. If there was anyone I could ask about things, it was him.

I turned back to him. "Abuelo, I've been thinking more and more about the people back home."

His face lost a bit of its eternescent glow. Immediately I was sorry I had said anything. "You have only one home," he said. "Your true home. The place you came from―that is nothing more than the broken shell out of which you were born. A worthless thing to be ground into the earth and forgotten. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Abuelo." I left, vowing never to bring it up to him again.

I spent the rest of the day in my cottage, beginning to lay ink on the white wall. I wasn't bound by the seven strokes of Chinese writing, or even the twenty-six letters of English―I could do anything. I tapped into my inner self and began to experiment with shapes and swirls of a brand-new alphabet―and it was beautiful! It was true when Abuelo had said everything about me was beauty now, right down to my brushstrokes. I created sweeping patterns of motion, carving up the white wall.

Yet even in the joy and absolute freedom of this wonderful task, unwanted thoughts kept sparking up, like shocks from a faulty circuit. Thoughts like, Momma would be so proud of me, or Marisol would be so jealous, or Gerardo would be so impressed.

I hurled my brush across the room in frustration. It hit the wall and left an orphan comma. I didn't even know why I should care about Flock's Rest. I had a new family, I had new friends. I had Aaron, who was better than Gerardo in every possible way, and no room in my life for enemies like Marisol.

It's natural, Aaron had said. It'll pass.

And so I took a deep breath and didn't fight the thoughts. I let them come, waiting for the day they would go away. But they didn't. Instead they grew like weeds in a garden―and as any gar­dener can tell you, the only way to get out deep weeds is to go to the root.

"You can't."

"Who says?"

"You just can't," said Aaron, pacing the width of my cottage. "Those are the rules!"

"I want a reason," I told him. "If I had a reason, maybe I could accept it. Maybe."

Aaron threw up his hands. "Why can't you be happy with what you have here? It's more than you ever had in Flock's Rest, more than you ever could have there!"

"I don't want to leave," I told him. "I just want to visit. I want to go back and say good-bye. I owe my parents that much!"

"No one leaves!" he insisted. "And if Abuelo found out you were talking about doing it, he'd be furious!"

Aaron stormed away, then stormed right back. Frustration bordering on anger flared in his eyes. "I never should have told Abuelo to send you that note! I should have just forgotten about you, just like I forgot about everyone else!"

It stung to hear him say something like that, and I thought maybe there was still some ugliness in De León after all.

"I'm sorry," he said, after a moment. "I didn't mean it." But the damage had already been done.

Then I turned to see Harmony standing in the doorway. I was so used to leaving my door open, I hadn't thought to close it.

"May I come in?" she asked.

I nodded. I thought to pretend like nothing was happening here, but I realized that would be pointless. "So I guess you heard everything. . ."

She sat down in one of the chairs Willem and Claude had made for me and gestured to two of the others. "Come sit down. Both of you."

I pulled up a chair, and Aaron reluctantly did, too.

"Please talk some sense into her," Aaron said.

"It's not sense she needs," Harmony said. "It's perspective."

I didn't like being talked about in third person. "So are both of you going to run to Abuelo and tell him I was talking treason? Does he have a torture chamber beneath that mansion of his? Maybe something from the Spanish Inquisition?"

"Of course not," Harmony said with a calm to her voice that just made me feel even more tense.

"Hasn't anyone ever left this place?"

"No!" said Aaron. "Never!"

But Harmony put up her hand to silence him. She took a long moment to think before giving me her answer, and then she be­gan a tale she probably hadn't told for hundreds of years, if she'd ever told it at all. Her answer to my question was a thread as finely woven as her gossamer garments.

"I was one of the first settlers with Abuelo," she told us. "I've followed him from San Juan, to Tibet, to Lourdes, to this val­ley―and when the waters shift and the fountain moves else­where, I will follow Abuelo to that new place, too.

"The first time, when the fountain started to fail and we pre­pared to journey from San Juan, I feared that Abuelo was wrong. The fountain had grown shallow, our little hidden rain forest was dying―and I was convinced that the fountain was drying up for­ever. Abuelo said he could feel the pull―he knew where the fountain would next appear, but I didn't believe him . . . so I ran away. I went back to my family in the American colonies. And do you know what I found?"

"What?" I asked.

"My sister had died of old age. My nephews and nieces were all older than me. The world had moved on, and there was no place for me. I raced back to San Juan, as quickly as travel in those days allowed, certain that Abuelo and the others would be gone . . . and as I traveled, an illness overtook me. A fever that I was sure would kill me."

"A fever?" Aaron said. "That can't be. Once you've been touched by the fountain, you can't get sick―Abuelo told us so!"

"There is one sickness we can get."

"What is it?" I asked.

Harmony thought carefully about her answer. "Consumption," she said―but by the look on her face, I had a feeling it wasn't the same kind of consumption you read about in medical books. "Luck was with me," Harmony said. "When I arrived at our little settlement, they hadn't yet left. My illness passed, Abuelo forgave me, and we sailed across the sea. I made the harsh journey with them across the Himalayas, and I was the first one to see the new valley. Once I saw the valley, I knew that I would never doubt Abuelo again."

"I've only been here a few months," I reminded her. "The world may have moved on for you, but not for me. My family is still there."

"That is true," Harmony said. "But it still doesn't mean there's a place for you in that world."

"I don't want a place," I told her. "I only want to say good-bye."

"Even so, it won't bring you any happiness."

Then Aaron spoke up again, more gently this time. "I don't want you to go. It's a hard journey, and a hundred things can go wrong." He took both my hands. "In a while you won't care any­way," he said. "That place, and those people, will feel like part of someone else's life."

I knew he was right about that. "Maybe that's why I want to do it now."

Harmony considered it, and Aaron didn't seem so much an­gry now as scared―scared for me, or maybe just scared of losing me. "If I'm ever going to be happy here," I told him, "I have to see my family one last time." But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was more to it. It wasn't just that I wanted to see them. I wanted them to see me.

Finally Harmony sighed. "If you insist on going, we can't stop you. All we can do is warn you. Going back will not be what you expect. Things won't go any better for you than they did for me."

I thought about her story. She had traveled a much greater distance, and at a time when travel was much more difficult. She had left with no plan to return, but I would have a plan.

"Two days to get there, one day to say my good-byes, and two days to get back," I told them. "I'll be gone for five days, that's all."

"A lot can happen in five days," said Aaron, but there was a sad resignation in his voice, because he knew I had made up my mind.

I planned to go on foot, but Aaron, as opposed as he was to it, had a better idea.

"If you go on foot, you could freeze to death. We don't have any clothes here warm enough to see you over the mountains. It's best if the monks take you."

"But don't they serve Abuelo? They'll never do it!"

He gave me a halfhearted grin. "The monks won't ever know they're taking you."

He explained how, once a week, a group of monks arrived on a hillside to the east to deliver supplies and take away the garbage that could not be composted.

On this particular week, I would be part of the garbage.

Harmony went to visit Abuelo that morning, to make sure he was distracted and his eyes weren't on the hillside as Aaron and I climbed out of the southern tip of the valley. I took off my gossamer gown and dressed in something more "earthly" for my journey, and Aaron brought along a burlap sack. Anyone who saw us making our way up the hillside would think we were just taking out the garbage.

This spot to the east and high up the hillside was the only place where mountains didn't rise too high to climb. Grass still grew there, but it wasn't as lush and green as it was lower in the valley. This grass had turned yellow, and spots were turning brown. As I looked back into the valley, I could see a thin rim of yellow grass that circled the entire valley of De León. I had never noticed it before. Aaron knelt down and rubbed his hands across the yellow grass, a look of worry on his face.

"This is a bad idea," he told me, in a last-ditch effort to change my mind. "No one in Flock's Rest deserves your good-byes."

"Wouldn't you have wanted to say good-bye to your parents?" I asked him.

"No," he said―but I could tell he wasn't sure if he meant it.

At the crest of the hill were a dozen sacks, like the one Aaron carried, all filled with the trash of De León.

"Five days," Aaron reminded me. "That's all you get." He opened his sack to show me that sewn to the inside were furry animal skins that, unfortunately, still had some of the animal at­tached. "I know it's not pretty," he said, "but it's the best I could do on such short notice. It'll keep you warm for the journey." It didn't look all that different from the bag of roadkill I had once carried out from my room.

"Thank you," I told him. It was all I could do not to lose my breakfast.

"You should wear a heavy winter coat when you come back," he told me. Then, looking around to make sure no one had followed us up, he gave me instructions for my return. "Be careful that no one from the outside world sees you. Come the way you did the first time―follow the path behind the old bill­board."

"How far?" I asked. The night of my arrival had been such a blur, and I had passed out by the time the monks had found me. I had no idea how far De León was from civilization.

"Twenty miles," he said. "But it feels like a lot more because it's almost all mountains. As you get closer, you'll see the monastery on top of a hill, but whatever you do, don't go near it, because the monks won't know you're one of us if they see you. It's their duty to make sure no one from the outside ever finds us, and they take their job very seriously, if you know what I mean."

I nodded. These so-called monks sounded more like ninjas, but I kept my opinion to myself.

"Turn west at your first glimpse of the monastery," Aaron continued. "There's no path after that, but if you follow the set­ting sun, you'll come to De León. Good luck."

He hugged me tightly, like he had changed his mind and wasn't going to let me get into the sack.

"I'll be back before you know it. I promise."

"I don't think I'll sleep until you are."

I gave him a kiss that wasn't long enough for either of us, then I stepped into the fur-lined bag. Aaron covered me with trash, just in case the monks looked inside, then he tied the sack closed.

Only after I was tied into the bag and I couldn't see him did I hear him say: "I love you, Cara."

And then he was gone.

After he left, I sat there for hours, waiting for the monks to ar­rive, afraid to move the slightest bit in case they might be close enough to see. As I waited, I kept playing in my mind the last thing Harmony had said to me before she had hugged me good­bye and hurried off to Abuelo's that morning.

"Do not linger in the outside world," she had warned me. "Say your final good-byes quickly, and come home to us."

"What will happen if I stay too long?" I had asked. "Will I turn ugly again?"

"I don't know," Harmony had answered. "But I do know there are worse things than being ugly."