Disclaimer: I am the proud owner of one (1) petrified balloon, seven (5) purple socks, two (2) imaginary hamsters, seventeen (17) broken CD's, and the rights to zero (yet) Scott Westerfeld novels. If I actually make any money off this, I swear it was unintentional.

As I watched, they stood in the glow of the firelight under the early beginnings of the sunset. They were talking softly, softly enough that I couldn't make out what they were saying. Not that I wanted to, that is. I didn't want to get any closer, just to enjoy this last moment looking at my Tally, and remembering.

Then they moved together and kissed.

Oh, lovely.

Pretty, actually.

And so the gorgeous, special Princess Tally Youngblood was swept into the arms of her charming, pretty Prince Zane. And they lived happily ever after. Wasn't that just adorable? She gave up everything to get her guy back, and she came to love him exactly the way he was. Love overcomes all barriers, right?

Yeah, right. Note the conspicuous lack of other characters in this story.

Like the failure to mention the poor little unwanted ugly boy standing in the background.

But what does it matter? The Special princess got her Pretty prince in the end. I was just waiting for the two of them to get on a hoverboard and ride off into the sunset together, and they probably would have, except that they hadn't grown up on a steady diet of Rusty fiction like I had, so they didn't know that that was how it was done.

It would have been just ironic if they had taken my hoverboard.

Yeah. But you know what? I'm not the gorgeous one, so I'm obviously some kind of villain in this story. I was really only pretending to love Tally, to keep her away from her true love, as they had been searching for each other their entire pretty little lives and didn't know it. Right?

Never mind that I was the one who loved her before she was all "Tally-wa" and "bubbly" and "Crim" and "Special." Never mind all that I had done for her.

Never mind all that she had done to me.

That's not to say that I really wanted to be pretty. I didn't. No, really. The idea holds no appeal to me. None.

Not anymore, that is. Because, you know what? I wanted to find some girl who wouldn't judge a boy on whether he had the latest fashion in clothes, or had the prettiest splurges splashed all over his face. I wanted someone who saw beneath those superficial masks of splendid, stunning beauty.

You know, I thought for a while I'd found that in Tally.

Funny, that.

I sometimes wonder if maybe it was my fault. Maybe if I'd come for her sooner, maybe if I'd said something differently…

Maybe if I'd forgiven her.

Well, it's a bit late now, isn't it? She's gone, meandering off into the sunset with her Pretty boyfriend holding her Pretty hand and talking to her with his Pretty voice. I'm not jealous. I just thought that maybe she put a little less weight in appearances. At very least she could have talked to me, talked to Zane, told me before just kind of dumping me without warning.

Okay, okay, I get that she had no memory of the Smoke when she was a Pretty, and, as such, being a new Pretty and all, it was only natural that she acquire some arm candy to carry around, at least for a while.

But after they were cured, after she cured herself, you would have thought that, remembering me, she would have had a little talk with her boy-toy: okay, it's been nice, and we still need to work together, but, just so you know, there may be some slight complications with this relationship, as first I have to go break up with my other, ugly boyfriend, but I'm sure he won't mind, seeing as I killed his dad and pretty much accidentally destroyed his life and all.

That is, assuming she remembered me at all. Big assumption, that.

But what did it matter, if she had no time for another random Ugly? Let her have her Prince Charming. I wanted no part of that kind of life.

I'm probably the only kid born in the last three centuries who didn't grow up wanting, eagerly waiting to be Pretty. I only ever asked about it once, and never again.

I still remember the day I approached my parents with that particular question. We had recently been getting a whole host of people joining the Smoke, and in this batch were a handful of my parents' former colleagues, people who had had their legions taken out for their jobs, and had started to rebel.

Obviously, they were Pretty.

These were the first Pretties I had ever seen, except faded memories of my parents when I was very young, but then I'm not even sure I have those, because parents are gorgeous in the eyes of every toddler, no matter what operations they might have had in the past.

I was about six at the time, and these Middle Pretties, this new race, fascinated me. I asked my parents how their faces got to be like that, and that was when they first really explained to me about the operations that went on in the cities, the things that were done to people's brains as well as their faces.

I understood enough to grasp two facts completely: (1) There was an entire population, a whole race of people out there that were as pretty as that, and normal people, (people like me) thought that they were ugly because of all that beauty, and (2) It was possible to have that kind of pretty face without the legions that my parents spent so much time fighting the effects of.

So, I asked if I could look like that someday.

Duh, to use Rusty terminology.

Maddie almost started crying, and told me that she loved me exactly the way that I was, and what kind of mother had she been if she had raised her little boy thinking that he was ugly and she was no better than those people from the cities… It was a long time before Az got her calmed down. And then he looked at me, and knelt down next to me, and looked me in the eye.

He made me promise that, no matter what, even if it seemed like a good idea at the time, no matter if everyone else was doing it, no matter what the people told me, I would not, would never, ever get that done to me. It would destroy me, he said. "It's not a way to make people look attractive, to make them happy. It's a way to make them look alike, to make them singular-minded and away from free thought," he told me.

And so I promised.

And I never forgot.

Not that I ever really wanted it again, after I considered what he had said. When I first saw New Pretty Town, I knew that he was right. Sure, everyone there was almost painfully beautiful, so gorgeous it was hard to look at them, but they were all alike. They were all pretty in the same way. Blue or green eyes, light-blonde-to-medium-brown hair, same face shapes, sizes, same everything.

Not only did they have no minds of their own, they had no faces of their own.

But there was no way that I could tell Tally that, now that she was about to go cavorting off with her little "Zane-la" or whatever it was she called him. For just a fraction of a second, I pictured myself standing there, holding her hand, and it being like it was before, when we were just two Uglies without a place in the world except with each other.

I entertained the notion for just a second, but I couldn't maintain it without picturing myself pretty and bubbly and fake, and her calling me, I don't know, "Davey-la" or something equally ridiculous.

Because that would seem to be the only type of thing that got her attention nowadays.

Maybe she's not as totally cured of the bubbleheadedness and the Special attitude as she (and Zane-la) would like to think, I thought, but I knew that I was grasping at straws. At some point, a time had come, when she had remembered me, and remembered Zane-la — and chosen her pretty, bubbly little Zane-la.

I was sitting there, silently watching them, when another, darker voice inside me whispered another idea, one that I couldn't quash, no matter how hard I tried, because it simply made sense: it could also be that she's really not as shallow as all that, and you're just telling yourself that because you don't want to face the fact that, back at the New Smoke site, she was forced to choose between you – and she chose him because he's a better person than you.

I was gloomily considering all the merits of the wonderful, almighty Zane-la over yours truly (besides appearance, that is), and didn't even hear someone come up behind me, which was unusual for me. She put a hand on my shoulder, and I tried to half-turn to see who it was – she stopped me.

"Getting a taste of our own medicine, are we?" The cold, mechanical-sounding voice has less inflection than it should.

She continued on as if she hadn't felt my involuntary shudder. "She never did think of you after he showed up, you know. Even after they were cured, after they were – icy, all she talked about was him. All she thought about was him. You should have seen her on the way here – 'Ooooh! Is Zane all right?' 'I have to help Zane.' 'Let me bend over backwards to nurse the boy who hates me now!' 'Oh, does Zaney have a little boo-boo? Quick, call in the red alert and stop the entire process!' 'Let me risk my life for my darling baby.'

"That night when you caught up to us, she looked forward to chasing you. When she found out it was you, her adrenaline was off any human scales. She wanted you, David, wanted to kill you, to hurt you, but never remembered what happened between the two of you — "

"Shut up," I muttered darkly. Really, not the person I wanted to talk to right now.

"She forgot you David, the instant another, better boy came along, just like another time I can remember – when was it?" she said mockingly, her voice rising in pitch and volume. "Oh, yes, there was that time when that girl Shay got dumped in the dirt, you know, there's a remarkable resemblance here, except that Shay-la doesn't have any feelings, does she?" She gave a very strange, bitter laugh. "Shay-la has to cut her own skin to even feel alive, so what would she care? What would she – "

Tally's voice cut off Shay's rapidly becoming crazed rant. "Shay-la? Is that you? Shay-la?"

Shay disappeared into the woods, shrinking back as only a Special – former Special, I corrected myself – could.

And I stood unnoticed and watched my life go by in an odd reddish blur from the setting sun.

The sky was the color of cat vomit, after all.