1269_UgliesFreeBook

UGLIES 97
“So how come you look so sad?”
Tally shrugged. What could this half-littlie, half-ugly
understand, anyway? She thought about what Shay had
said about the operation.
Yesterday they’d taken Tally’s final measurements,
rolling her all the way through an imaging tube. Should she
tell this new ugly that sometime this afternoon, her body
was going to be opened up, the bones ground down to the
right shape, some of them stretched or padded, her nose
cartilage and cheekbones stripped out and replaced with
programmable plastic, skin sanded off and reseeded like a
soccer field in spring? That her eyes would be laser-cut for
a lifetime of perfect vision, reflective implants inserted
under the iris to add sparkling gold flecks to their indifferent
brown? Her muscles all trimmed up with a night of
electrocize and all her baby fat sucked out for good? Teeth
replaced with ceramics as strong as a suborbital aircraft
wing, and as white as the dorm’s good china?
They said it didn’t hurt, except the new skin, which felt
like a killer sunburn for a couple of weeks.
As the details of the operation buzzed around in her
head, she could imagine why Shay had run away. It did
seem like a lot to go through just to look a certain way. If
only people were smarter, evolved enough to treat everyone
the same even if they looked different. Looked ugly.
If only Tally had come up with the right argument to
make her stay.