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.
"You'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.
"Yeah."
"Aren't you the one who's going to turn today?"
"That's me, Shorty."
"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.
The imaginary conversations were back, but much worse than they had been after Peris had left. A thousand times she'd fought with Shay in her head - long, rambling discussions about beauty, biology, growing up. All those times out in the ruins, Shay had made her points about uglies and pretties, the city and the outside, what was fake and what was real. But Tally had never once realized her friend might actually run away, giving up a life of beauty, glamour, elegance. If only she'd said the right thing.Any thing.
Sitting here, she felt as if she'd hardly tried.
Tally looked the new ugly in the eye. "Because it all comes down to this: Two weeks of killer sunburn is worth a lifetime of being gorgeous."
The kid scratched his head. "Huh?"
"Something I should have said, and didn't. That's all."
The hospital hovercar finally came, settling onto the school grounds so lightly that it hardly disturbed the fresh-mown grass.
The driver was a middle pretty, radiating confidence and authority. He looked so much like Sol that Tally almost called her father's name.