1269_UgliesFreeBook

198 Scott Westerfeld
opened one and pointed. Its strangely glossy pages were
covered with pictures. Of people.
Uglies.
Tally’s eyes widened as Shay turned the pages, pointing
and giggling. She’d never seen so many wildly different
faces before. Mouths and eyes and noses of every imaginable
shape, all combined insanely on people of every age.
And the bodies. Some were grotesquely fat, or weirdly overmuscled,
or uncomfortably thin, and almost all of them had
wrong, ugly proportions. But instead of being ashamed of
their deformities, the people were laughing and kissing and
posing, as if all the pictures had been taken at some huge
party. “Who are these freaks?”
“They aren’t freaks,” Shay said. “The weird thing is,
these are famous people.”
“Famous for what? Being hideous?”
“No. They’re sports stars, actors, artists. The men with
stringy hair are musicians, I think. The really ugly ones are
politicians, and someone told me the fatties are mostly
comedians.”
“That’s funny, as in strange,” Tally said. “So this is what
people looked like before the first pretty? How could anyone
stand to open their eyes?”
“Yeah. It’s scary at first. But the weird thing is, if you
keep looking at them, you kind of get used to it.”
Shay turned to a full-page picture of a woman wearing
only some kind of formfitting underwear, like a lacy swimsuit.