---- I've decided this will take place two years before Shay and Tally make it to the Smoke, in order for it to be up and running so that Mindelle can have her chance to experience the Smoke. Hope that's ok with everyone. Thanks a billion times over for the reviews!! ----

Mindelle knew no one was coming for her.

Only a handful of uglies were getting their operation in August, and they'd all gone off already. Ave and Towner had promised to meet her in New Pretty Town with a 'special surprise' – something Mindelle suspected was a car or an apartment. Chave and Jenay would be there too, and so would Bale, her only true friend (who happened to be two years older than her).

But first, Mindelle would just have to go across the river herself. Staring out her window at the lights of New Pretty Town, she had no desire to go. Mindelle had spent her entire life being the only pretty there was. Now suddenly she'd be swept into a pool o pretties. And what if she didn't measure up? What if she should have gotten that operation despite what everyone said?

Mindelle had to admit it. She was scared.

"A typical chicken you are," she cursed herself, still looking out her window – but not with longing, with contempt.

Mindelle thought back to when she was twelve years old, plastered for a couple of weeks on the front of magazines and on talk shows. How when she was fourteen the world picked up interest in her for another month. A natural pretty! Every headline proclaimed. Mindelle has despised the attention. If she went to New Pretty Town, then she'd just be average – just like everyone else.

Sure, the doctors had explained, she'd go for that operation when she was about thirty, maybe. To ensure that she stayed pretty – because everyone knew, you could be a natural pretty, but there was no escaping that epidemic of wrinkles and liver spots and false teeth.

Only Mindelle could see how everyone just did it so willingly. Why have yourself cut open like that? What if you died? And if you did die, she wondered, did they at least give you the grace of being buried a pretty? Or were you ugly – forever?

And yet why did it matter, anyway? She had looked in the mirror every day, at a face proclaimed pretty, and yet still managed to find flaws with herself. She figured it was just how you perceived pretty. And what if your idea of pretty was different than those doing the surgery? Then what?

Mindelle sighed and pushed herself up from the window sill. She looked at the hoverboard leaning against her wall. After she had moaned about being dead bored, one ugly had offered to teach her how to hoverboard in an exchange for beauty tips. The only beauty tips Mindelle had were brush your hair and take a shower, but she figured she could pretend in order to get the lessons.

Mindelle wasn't very good at hoverboarding – at all – because she had no sense of balance. It seemed to be that every other second the crash bracelets were saving her ass. But not only had the ugly taught her how to hoverboard, she had taught her how to trick the board. "It's one of the easiest tricks ever, anybody can do it," they had claimed modestly.

Mindelle didn't know if that was true. She had followed the instructions on how to trick her board easily enough, even jotted them down, but she had never attempted to do so. In her mind, if she couldn't even stay on the damn board then there was no way she'd pull off something like a trick.

Now Mindelle looked at her wall and clicked through all the entries that she had typed in, looking for on that vaguely reminded her of how to trick her board. She found it under the label, "Ugly Trick," and scanned through it quickly before going over to her board and fixing it up.

She remembered how the ugly had given her grippy shoes. Mindelle didn't have any now. She'd recycled them a while ago – or maybe the ugly had taken them back when she stormed off, dissatisfied with Mindelle's beauty advice. Mindelle hadn't blamed the ugly. She herself couldn't even understand why she did nothing at all and wound up looking so nice. The doctors had said it was genes, but if that was so, she couldn't understand why her siblings hadn't wound up pretty, too.

Now Mindelle went to the edge of her window, wearing some of her beat-up old runners and her clothes from that day. She hadn't gotten changed into her pajamas yet.

Her breath came out in pants as she pushed herself forward and jerkily began to fly. Her eyes were squeezed shut tight from nerves and now she opened one slowly, took a peek below her, and was so gabsmacked that she slipped and went spinning around, painfully being caught by the bracelets.

Mindelle found herself giggling, "Way to go," she spoke sarcastically, "You made it about two metres from your window."

Then she was off again, going for a little bit. "Fantastic, Min. You can do this," she whispered. Down below her a light snapped on in a window. "Gahh!" she wobbled and was flung off.

"Damn," she cursed, looking around. She still had only gone some metres away.

She went like that, all stop and go, so full of excitement that it wasn't until she spotted a familiar sight that she realized how far she had gotten. Her stomach lunged and her mouth went dry. Without the warning, she hadn't realized that she'd gone all the way to the Rusty Ruins.

Mindelle bit her lip, "Shit shit shit," she swore. Now what? She knew the way back – vaguely. Mindelle peered below her. What would it be like, she wondered, if she took a field trip all of her own?

After falling off six more times, she eventually found out that the ruins went much farther back than she had known before. And, at the top of one purely metal structure, she saw the flashing brilliance of a sparkler.

"Oh…" she whispered. Mindelle didn't want to get caught, but she was curious. "Curiosity killed the cat," she muttered to herself before luniticly responding, "Yet satisfaction brought it back."

And off she – not so elegantly – flew.