Duckling Ugly Read Free

time and ducked behind a tall gravestone. Cautiously, I peered out of the shadows to see them.
    Marshall Astor shook the spray can in his hand, then dotted the
I’
s and crossed the
T’
s of something nasty he had sprayed on a gravestone.
    Lately the gravestones had been smashed and defaced by kids too stupid to find something better to do with their time. I hated it, because spraying rudeness on tombstones was the opposite of what I did with brush and ink.
    I should have known Marshall Astor was the one who’d been doing it. And sitting right beside him on a little stone mourner’s bench was Marisol Yeager, his partner in crime. They were the undisputed king and queen of Flock’s Rest High. He was handsome, she was gorgeous, the world smiled on them, and they smiled right back. The way I see it, when you’ve got those kind of looks you have a choice: You can either use the brains God gave you, or you can skate through life on your looks and never let your brain develop much beyond dog intelligence. Marisol and Marshall had chosen the latter.
    “Ooh, this place is so spooky,” Marisol said. “I love it.”
    Marshall went on to another grave and shook his spray can, preparing for another round of vandalism.
    “Can I try?” Marisol asked.
    “Okay,” Marshall said. “But you got to think up something clever to write.”
    Marshall Astor was rumored to be distantly related to the famous Astors—you know, the rich ones who went down on the
Titanic.
If it was true, then some other distant cousins must have gotten all the money and class. Still, it had never stopped Marshall’s father from wearing the name like he was royalty—that is, until the day he had too much to drink, drove off a bridge into the river, and went down with the Buick.
    Marshall was half as smart and twice as useless as his father ever was—but he was strong, had a winning smile, and good hair in a stiff wind. Around here, that’s enough to make you mayor, which his father was until that fateful day.
    “How about this?” said Marisol, still pondering what to spray on the tombstone. “‘Why do I always wake up with dead hair.’ Get it? ‘Dead hair’?”
    Make that fly intelligence. Marisol had always been one of those baby beauty queens, with platinum blond hair that had probably been bleached from birth. Our hatred of each other was deeply ingrained, but I’ll get to that later.
    These two were the source of much misery around Flock’s Rest High. They were what I call
master-means.
Not master “minds,” because that would be giving them too much credit—but they did have a way of motivating other people to do their thinking for them.
    As Marisol sprayed her message on a nearby gravestone, I tried to figure out how I could get out of there without being noticed. It wasn’t dark enough yet to escape unseen, and I wasn’t quiet enough to slip away unheard. But maybe if I waited, the shadows would take over and I could scurry away before they started the make-out session that I knew was coming. Maybe the sound would startle them enough to make them leave and go swap saliva somewhere else, which was fine by me.
    But before I could plan a suitable getaway, Marisol came around the tombstone, looking for another one to spray, and saw me lurking there. She let out a scream that could wake the dead around us.
    I jumped back at that ear-piercing shriek, hitting a tree—but when I turned, I saw it wasn’t a tree at all. It was Marshall, who stood there like an oak.
    “Well, look what we have here,” he said. “Nothing to be scared of, Marisol. It’s just the Flock’s Rest Monster.”
    I grimaced at the nickname. It had been with me for as long as I could remember.
    My grimace must have looked like a wolf baring its teeth, because he said, “Look at that, I think it’s got rabies.”
    “What do you think you’re doing,” Marisol said, “spying on people?”
    “I wasn’t spying, I was just—”
    “You’re sick,” Marshall