My walk home from work didn’t go as planned.
After leaving the office almost two hours later, I found the sun had already slipped behind Pike’s Peak and the world had grown dark. Suddenly it seemed as if my perfect averageness no longer mattered. I knew that my face still represented my inner mediocrity with exactness. But with the shadows of buildings and trees and mountains, I could pretend to be anyone I wanted. As I passed between occasional streetlamps, I could be for all the world the most beautiful, immaculate, morally commendable girl on earth. Or, if I chose, I could be the most hideous, evil-drinking gargoyle anyone had ever known. No one could see me. I was everybody and nobody. Or so I thought.
I passed by a large shrub, shivering in the rain with my arms wrapped around my inadequate jacket. I looked forward to the warmth of the winter coat I planned to buy. A beautiful face would cost a lifetime of good deeds, and beautiful hair would cost hours of painstaking effort. But a cozy jacket that made the rest of me look less than hideous required nothing but the swipe of a credit card and a few hours’ pay.
A sudden rustling noise interrupted my thoughts. I jumped away from the sidewalk, pulled pepper spray from my bag, and pointed it at the thick, towering bush as if it were a monster preparing to engulf me body and soul.
A stray tabby cat emerged from the shadows, staring at me with wide, orb-like eyes, as if I had just intruded on its property. It maintained eye contact for several disconcerting seconds, finally decided I wasn’t a threat, and wandered back down the sidewalk.
I released my breath, immediately relieved by the air rushing back into my body, although my pounding heartbeat would take some time to slow down. I glanced quickly around me. At least no one had seen me look like an idiot. I mean, I felt justified being on my guard. All kinds of ugliness lurk in Springs at night, hidden from the cops’ revealing headlights. Even so, I had no desire to become known as the Twitchy Tabby Cat Blinder or some such ignominious title.
As I began crossing the next intersection and watched the cat disappear around the block corner and into the shadows, I vaguely wondered how Visage worked for animals. Was that cat considered beautiful—and therefore good—by its own kind? Did its whiskers become longer and more silvery whenever it gave extra attention to its litter, or did its hair become sleeker and more lustrous with every mouse whose life it spared? Somehow I doubted it.
Suddenly, bright lights from the next street to the right overwhelmed my eyes. I froze in panic. A voice yelled. The truck blared its horn and screeched as it made a desperate, futile attempt to stop. The wheels splashed water from a dip in the road. And then the moment of impact—except it came from the wrong direction.
A large body hurled me toward the opposite end of the intersection half a second before the car sped by. We both crashed onto the pavement, my shoulder breaking the fall.
Hardly able to process all that was happening, I shoved the dirty, hole-ridden trench coat off of me and rolled away, scrambling to my feet and raising my pepper spray, my limbs trembling like the arms of a massage chair. My left side ached and burned from the abrasive fall. The fresh rain smell and the water dripping from my hair did little to quench the anxiety seeping through my bones.
The figure in the tattered trench coat clambered back to his feet, appearing surprisingly unperturbed by the weapon I was pointing at him. He grumbled in a way that might have been laughter—I couldn’t tell. He stepped out of the shadows into the light of the streetlamp, revealing quite possibly the most hideous human being I had ever seen.
His wrinkled face—maybe late forties—was molded into an ugly grin. But with such gray, discolored, pockmarked skin, he appeared without humor, regarding me like a strangely cognizant zombie. His body was hunched over, his hair and beard long and unkempt, his eyes glazed with a bloodshot indifference. The man spoke, his voice deep and gravelly.
“Watch where you’re goin’, kid.”
My first instinct was to get away. But I realized that my way home was past the man in front of me, and Extrospect had locked itself when I left. So I just stood there for a moment. Maybe that was stupid of me, but I was still trying to wrap my head around what had just happened.
The zombie hobo smirked, appearing strangely pleased that I hadn’t run away screaming. He fell into a coughing fit and wiped what might have been chewing tobacco with the back of his hand, though unfortunately it just gave the disgusting mush a new home in his scraggly beard. “Don’t mind me, Alannah,” he said. “I’m just another ugly face.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was shocked—not just by my near accident, but that this stranger knew my name. Last I checked, I hadn’t been handing out my personal info like lollipops to random homeless people.
Metaphorical red flags were waving all through my brain. “How do you know my—”
As if in response, the wailing of police sirens sounded just a couple blocks away and around the corner. The flaring red-and-blue lights would illuminate every detail of every ugly night-prowling face they passed by. Within seconds, they would pass by the two of us and reveal my mediocre face—and the hobo’s condemningly hideous one.
For better or worse, the police had a simple system: Catch an ugly person out late at night, and there’ll be a 95% chance that individual is guilty of some kind of crime. Obviously, not every ugly person is a criminal, but when paired with suspicious circumstances, the cops considered it safe to justify arrest.
The man noticed the incoming police and turned to leave—only to trip over the same tabby cat, which yowled and sprung off into the dark. He grunted in pain as his body hit the pavement hard, his coat instantly soaked in the puddle next to the curb. The man began scrambling to get up, but as I glanced behind me in alarm, I realized there was no way he would escape in time.
Before my mind fully caught up with what I was doing, I found myself pulling the man to his feet.
I shoved him as hard as I could into another shrub before he could protest. He plummeted headfirst into the bushes seconds before the police car shone its headlights on me.
“Are you all right, miss?”
I realized I was still staring at the broad line of bushes where the hobo now lay hidden. The ugly man had, somehow, paradoxically, impossibly, done something good for me without hardly any change in his appearance. A dark splotch on his cheek might have become a little fainter, but otherwise the man had remained about as repulsive as they come. Appearance was supposed to reveal everything. How was someone as marked up as him capable of such selflessness?
But what did I care? After all, the gray splotches proved his guilt. The rational side of my brain tried to remind me that I should have been glad to bring this caliber of criminal to justice.
“I’m fine,” I said, averting my eyes from the bushes and focusing on the officer before he could grow suspicious of my strange fixation.
The policeman, helmeted like cops always are while on duty, regarded me from his driver’s seat. Though I couldn’t see his face, he appeared at ease with me while still vigilantly surveying the surrounding area. My face was far too clear to be considered a threat.
“Can I give you a ride home, miss? We’ve been getting reports of rough types roaming around these parts. It’s not safe to be out here past dark—especially alone.”
Still feeling shaken, I was relieved by the offer. Target could wait. “Yes, please.”
“Okay then. Hop on in.”
“Thanks, officer.”
I climbed into the backseat and rode away, leaving the city block with its silent secret.
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The Commonplace Notebook 