Uglies by Scott Westerfeld Page B

smiled. “I know. I just had to ask again before I . . .” She pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to Tally.
    â€œWhat’s this?” Tally opened it up and saw a scrawl of letters. “When did you learn to write by hand?”
    â€œWe all learned while we were planning to leave. It’s a good idea if you don’t want minders sniffing your diary. Anyway, that’s for you. I’m not supposed to leave any record of where I’m going, so it’s in code, kind of.”
    Tally frowned, reading the first line of slanted words. “‘Take the coaster straight past the gap’?”
    â€œYeah. Get it? Only you could figure it out, in case someone finds it. You know, if you ever want to follow me.”
    Tally started to say something, but couldn’t. She managed to nod.
    â€œJust in case,” Shay said.
    She jumped onto her board and snapped her fingers, securing her knapsack over both shoulders. “Good-bye, Tally.”
    â€œBye, Shay. I wish . . .”
    Shay waited, bobbing just a bit in the cool September wind. Tally tried to imagine her growing old, wrinkled, gradually ruined, all without ever having been truly beautiful. Never learning how to dress properly, or how to act at a formal dance. Never having anyone look into her eyes and be simply overwhelmed.
    â€œI wish I could have seen what you would look like. Pretty, I mean.”
    â€œGuess you’ll just have to live with remembering my face this way,” Shay said.
    Then she turned and her hoverboard climbed away toward the river, and Tally’s next words were lost on the roar of the water.

OPERATION
    When the day came, Tally waited for the car alone.
    Tomorrow, when the operation was all over, her parents would be waiting outside the hospital, along with Peris and her other older friends. That was the tradition. But it seemed strange that there was no one to see her off on this end. No one said good-bye except a few uglies passing by. They looked so young to her now, especially the just-arrived new class, who gawked at her like she was an old pile of dinosaur bones.
    She’d always loved being independent, but now Tally felt like the last littlie to be picked up from school, abandoned and alone. September was a crappy month to be born.
    â€œYou’re Tally, right?”
    She looked up. It was a new ugly, awkwardly exploding into unfamiliar height, tugging at his dorm uniform like it was already too tight.
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œAren’t you the one who’s going to turn today?”
    â€œThat’s me, Shorty.”
    â€œSo 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