Uglies

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Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Tally is an ugly, but only for a few more months. Her best friend, Peris, just became a pretty and moved to New Pretty Town with the rest of the pretties, but Tally is still stuck living in Uglyville. Luckily, she and Peris used to sneak out all the time and sneak into New Prettyville, but before, they were having fun. Now, Tally just wants to see her best friend for even a few minutes. He hasn't been paying much attention to her since the pretty surgery, mostly because he lives in a different town, but soon, Tally'll be pretty too and they can be together again. She manages to make it past several pretties, but that doesn't seem too difficult as they are all vapid and self-obsessed. A drum machine spitting out party masks drives down the street and Tally puts one on, making her look like a pig. Pretty fitting for an ugly.

Tally sneaks into a pretty mansion where a pretty party is happening, but uh oh, it's a White Tie Party. Tally’s muddy clothes and pig mask do not fit in and everyone notices. Soon, they start following, calling Here piggy piggy! Tally ignores them, though she does feel really stupid, and looks everywhere for Peris. She knows she'll be able to recognize him even though he'll probably look very different because he's her best friend. The pig chasers catch up to Tally and she runs onto an elevator to escape them, but she took off her interface ring before sneaking out so she couldn't be tracked, which basically means she's nobody. Someone else joins her on the elevator and, luckily for Tally, it's Peris. Unluckily though, he treats her like crap, at least until she's pretty, too, and dismisses her until she has her surgery in three months. He commands the elevator to go to the roof and tells Tally she can escape the party by jumping off. Don't worry, it's not quite as shitty as it sounds… There are bungee jackets on the roof for pleasure jumping and also in case of fire. Tally pulls the fire alarm, puts on a jacket and jumps.

Tally bounces down and through part of New Pretty Town and away from most of the onlookers, but because she pulled the fire alarm, there are wardens everywhere. Tally makes her way to the river, so close to Uglyville, but then she sees someone. Thinking it's a warden and that she's been caught, she apologizes, but the person is just another ugly, Shay. Shay also snuck over into New Pretty Town and now they're both stuck trying to get back home. Shay floated over the river on a hoverboard to get to New Pretty Town while Tally crossed an old bridge, and now she's teaching Shay the way. 

Tally and Shay become fast friends, literally, when Shay teaches Tally how to ride a hoverboard. It involves crash bracelets and a belly ring, both of which help maintain balance on the magnetized board. After a day of riding and falling, Tally and Shay discover they have the same birthday, so they'll turn pretty together, though they both promise that if they didn't, they'd both come back to Uglyville from New Pretty Town to visit each other. They spend some time computerizing future versions of themselves to imagine what they might look like as pretties and Tally has lots of fun, but Shay seems reluctant and really only wants to go out hoverboarding again, which they finally do. Shay wants to take Tally out to the Rusty Ruins, the remnants of an old city from back when everyone was ugly and stupid, ((aka our time)) and, though she's worried about getting in trouble, Tally finally agrees.

After boarding for a long time across the river, they finally make it to the Rusty Ruins. Tally has seen the ruins before on a school field trip, but being out here in the middle of the night on a hoverboard is different. Shay leads Tally to a rollercoaster that they ride on their hoverboards even though part of it is broken, making for a terrifying free fall that scares Tally. After their ride is finished and Tally has calmed down, she asks Shay who showed her the rollercoaster and she reveals that she has a friend, David, who did not have the pretty surgery when he turned 16 like they're all supposed to, and she wants to introduce Tally to him. Now. Unfortunately, after lighting a sparkler flare, David does not show up, so the girls head back home. 

Some weeks pass, and Tally and Shay visit the Rusty Ruins looking for David but never meeting him and also playing silly tricks on new uglies, kids (or littlies) who have just moved into the dorm with the other ugly teenagers. Tally is obsessed with becoming pretty in just two more weeks but Shay isn't so certain. She actually wants to stay ugly because, it seems, when you turn pretty, you don't just lose your ugly old face, you lose any sense of adventure or cleverness. 

With one week to go to the operation, Tally gazes out of her window across the river into New Pretty Town. She and Shay haven't spoken since Shay said she didn't want to become pretty, but soon Shay comes crawling through Tally's window. They apologize and things go back to normal for like two seconds because then Shay tells Tally she's running away. Several of her older friends did and now she's joining them, and she wants Tally to go with her. David knows of a place called The Smoke where runaway uglies live together, never getting the surgery to become pretty. Tally thinks Shay is crazy, but she's got enough supplies for them to run away together and is completely prepared. Tally turns her down.

The day finally comes for Tally’s operation. She's spent this last week alone, having imaginary arguments with Shay, convincing her to stay, thinking of the right things to say to convince her friend to become pretty. She's whisked away by a middle pretty to a hospital in New Pretty Town where they do all operations on littlies, uglies, new pretties, middle pretties and even late pretties from Crumblyville. In the hospital, a man comes to get her and he's a pretty, but like, too pretty? Scarily pretty. He tells Tally there's a problem with her operation and makes her follow him.

The scary pretty puts Tally in a fancy hovercar and takes her to another building where she is introduced to a woman called Dr. Cable. She is also scarily pretty and she tells Tally that she needs her help with a Special Circumstance: finding Shay and the others and the Smoke. Tally made a promise to Shay that she wouldn't say anything about her running away, but Dr. Cable tells her that if she doesn't help, she'll be ugly forever.

Tally needs time to think, so she's sent back to the ugly dorms where she feels like everyone is laughing at her and she cries a lot. Her parents come visit from Crumblyville and try to convince her to help out with the Special Circumstance and the Specials as they're called, the scary pretties, and even Peris comes to visit to convince her of the same thing and he's able to get through to her. Tally calls Dr. Cable and says she'll tell them what they want to know.

Tally is taken back to see Dr. Cable and she tells her about a note that Shay gave her before she left with instructions on how to get to the Smoke if she changed her mind. The instructions are coded though, and even though Tally thinks she can decipher some of the message, she pretends she has no idea what any of it means. Dr. Cable isn't convinced. She wants to send Tally off to the Smoke following the directions Shay left for her and gives her lots of supplies like food and a sleeping bag and a cool new hoverboard, and she also gives Tally a necklace that has a tracker in it. All she has to do is activate the Tracker when she gets to the Smoke and then everything will be fine. 

Tally sets off at midnight with instructions that no one know she is leaving. She follows Shay's vague and confusing instructions that lead her through the Rusty Ruins and into the wilderness, over rivers and flat rollercoasters, aka railroad tracks, and to the sea. Tally eats her food rations, which are all SpagBol, Spaghetti Bolognese, and rests and bathes in cold water, but she kind of enjoys herself along the way. Until she hears something overhead and knows she's not alone. Then she sees the fire.

The sound overhead is coming from a helicopter, though Tally has no idea what that is, and it's doing a controlled burn of a field of flowers that have completely taken over everything. This was mentioned in Shay’s directions, and the people flying the helicopter rescue her and take her closer to the Smoke and give her some better supplies, which is nice because the helicopter shredded her sleeping bag. They aren't part of the Smoke, but they help each other out. Tally hopes that through her long ordeal, the necklace Dr. Cable gave her will have broken, but if it did break, she would be ugly for life. She has no choice but to make it to the Smoke and betray her friend. 

Shay, David and some other uglies come to fetch Tally and check her over to make sure she's not spying on them. They find a tracker on her hoverboard but not the necklace one, which, whew!, but also that was probably planned for by Dr. Cable. Deciding she's okay, they take her into a valley and into the Smoke, which is very smoky. Shay shows Tally around a little and then takes her to the library to meet The Boss, a disgustingly old ugly, like forty!, to get a work assignment. While they wait on him, Shay shows Tally some ancient documents, called magazines, full of photos of all sorts of different uglies. Tally is a little enthralled but mostly disgusted by them, especially the super skinny ones called models. Soon the Boss comes and berates them for touching the magazines without gloves, but then he assigns Tally's job and they leave.

After lunch in which Tally regales the Smokies with her valiant tale of her journey to the Smoke, David and Shay take her to work where they find railroad tracks that aren't useful to them and pull up the scrap metal to create new hoverboard paths. They also reuse the wood, which Tally appreciates because she was really worried about them cutting down real trees to chop up and burn. After a few hours of work, David makes Tally take a break and shows her a train tunnel that is now a mostly collapsed cave in the mountains, which she is baffled by, and then tells her a secret that he doesn't normally share with people new to the Smoke, but she seems so serious that he knows he can trust her. He didn't run away from Uglyville to the Smoke, he was born there. His parents were middle pretty doctors, but they left and somehow undid their operations, but David doesn't give details on how. 

During dinner, Tally tells everyone about the helicopter and that it shredded her sleeping bag and they're all mesmerized by her story. She feels bad that they all think she's so cool when in fact she is a liar and a traitor and a spy. Later that night, Shay takes Tally to a shop to trade some of her SpagBol for a sleeping bag and other supplies and while they're out, Shay confronts Tally about telling someone about the Smoke. She noticed Tally's necklace earlier and assumes that Tally met a romantic interest who gave her the necklace and that she told him about running away to the Smoke and left directions for him to get there, too. Tally tries several times to tell Shay the truth, she's not too far off after all, but she just can't do it. She also can't activate the tracker without ruining everyone's lives.

A little bit of time passes and David gives Tally a pair of leather gloves that he made when he was younger which is a Big Deal™. Tally knows that gifts aren't given lightly in the Smoke because everything has a use there, not like Uglyville or New Pretty Town where things aren't as special and you can get whatever you want whenever you want it. Tally works at cutting underbrush with one of the other runaways, Croy, and he questions how much SpagBol Tally actually had and if her journey to the Smoke was as wild and difficult as she has been telling them it was. She tries to cover it up by saying that maybe she brought more with her than she originally said, but he seems very suspicious of her, which he should because she's a liar and a traitor and a spy.

During lunch, Shay is weird with Tally and Tally is pretty sure Shay agrees with Croy that she's a liar and a traitor and a spy with all her SpagBol, but it turns out that Shay is jealous of her because of David's gloves. Shay obviously has a crush on David and David obviously has a crush on Tally, so Shay wants Tally to tell David about her romantic necklace and she swears she will. Uh huh, sure.

After a dinner all alone, David comes up to Tally and asks to talk to her. They go for a walk and he tells her how brave she is for coming to the Smoke on her own, even though it makes others like Croy not trust her. David is so impressed that Tally would drop everything just to make sure Shay was okay in the Smoke and he keeps heaping the praise on, so she has to go along with it. Plus, he's making her feel pretty tingly, and she even starts to think of him as pretty. She tries to tell him about her necklace, but like Shay, he assumes a love interest gave it to her and he might be coming to join them in the Smoke and of course she doesn't correct him because, you guessed it, she's a liar and a traitor and a spy. She tells David that Shay really likes him, but he says she's pretty loose with her interests and that she's not Tally, then he invites her to meet his parents.

David's parents, Maddy and Az, live outside of the Smoke and it has something to do with David being born away from the cities, but it's also much more serious than that. After a little bit of bickering about exactly how serious it all is, they finally tell Tally that they were middle pretty cosmetic surgeons in the same city she came from before they left. They began doing studies about pretties and discovered that those who had important and/or life saving jobs were the only ones who were not vapid and self-obsessed. They decided to do brain scans and found lesions on every single one of those stupid pretties and realized that the dumbing down was part of the pretty-making surgery, and they were told by Special Circumstances, who took all their research, that they were to forget what they learned, so they ran away instead. Yikes.

Tally asks Maddy and Az about how they undid their surgeries and they teach her about the plastics that they use to redo pretty bone structure and then transform new pretties to middle and late pretties. They use a moldable plastic that is degenerative in those surgeries and created a pill that would break down the plastic, returning their faces to what they would have looked like if they stayed ugly, more or less. Tally starts thinking about brain lesions and how she and Peris used to make fun of all the ditzy pretties, but after his surgery, he was exactly like them. Then she thinks about how, as uglies, they all trade insults all the time without it bothering them because as soon as they become pretty, all those insults will go away. The brain lesions would still be there though, making them all mindless idiots. Controllable mindless idiots.

Later, on their way back to the Smoke, David tells Tally she's beautiful, which she struggles to understand because no, she's definitely ugly, but he convinces her that her actions make her beautiful and then they kiss. Tally regrets it because of Shay and her crush on David and because she's a liar and a traitor and a spy, but David thinks she pulls away because of whoever gave her the heart pendant, which yeah, she is, but then she knows exactly what she's supposed to do. She rushes to a fire and throws the pendant into it, proving to David that she likes him and doesn't want anything to do with whoever gave her the pendant anymore. She thinks burning the necklace will break it and Special Circumstances and Dr. Cable will have no way to find them without it. She is wrong.

The next morning, Specials are everywhere, the Smoke is on fire and Smokies are either trying to escape or bound and captured. Tally sees the Boss hiding with a duffel bag full of magazines that he's trying to keep safe and a canister of pepper dust to use as a weapon. Tally ends up with the pepper canister and is meant to create a distraction so the Boss can escape. Tally gets captured almost immediately, though she manages to pepper a Special, but instead of incapacitating them, the Special shrieks an inhuman shriek, calling others to help. 

Tally is handcuffed and put with other captured Smokies, and Croy is there, thinking he was wrong for doubting Tally since she clearly put up a fight. Shay is dragged in soon after and she knows Tally is responsible for the Specials’ ambush. She also knows that Tally stole David away from her. The Specials scan each of the Smokies with plans to return them to the cities they ran away from, but when they get to Tally, they cut her cuffs and congratulate her on helping them find the Smoke. No!!! She destroyed the necklace! She didn't want any of this to happen at all! 

The Specials take Tally to the library to see Dr. Cable. Tally pretends to be on their side, lies about how long it took her to arrive in the Smoke, and tells Dr. Cable that she activated the pendant the night before and hid it so no one would think she was involved. Dr. Cable is impressed with Tally's self-preservation but asks her to retrieve the necklace because she doesn't want to leave any traces behind. Thinking quickly, Tally tells the guard who has cuffed her again and is escorting her that the necklace is on the roof, which, conveniently, is where the hoverboards are stored to recharge in the sunlight. After several fake stumbles, Tally manages to escape on a hoverboard. She rushes across rivers and railroad tracks, narrowly escaping the Specials in their hovercars, and makes it to the cave David showed her earlier.

And he's in there! David is so happy to know that Tally escaped and asks her what happened. She explains everything, well, not that she's a liar and a traitor and a spy, but everything else. They decide they have to go back to the Smoke to find his parents. The Smoke is in complete ruins and it seems that everyone is gone. They discover that the library has been burned to the ground, which, of course it would be. The Specials don’t want there to be any record of life before the pretty surgery. Tally wonders if the Boss managed to escape with his magazines, so they go try to find him. First they find his bag of magazines and then they find the Boss, dead. David really wants to find his parents now, so they head out of the rubble toward his family home.

His family home is also rubble. Tally goes inside to look around and luckily doesn't find any human remains, so it seems that David's parents were either taken or escaped. David knows they were taken because his father had a very special knife that he would have taken with him if they left and he uses it to try to cut the handcuffs the Specials put on Tally, but can't. He notices that she has two sets of cuffs on and that one has been cut. He questions that, but Tally can't tell him that the Specials cut her first set when they took her to see Dr. Cable. That would mean having to explain that she's a liar and a traitor and a spy. She says that she cut them open on a rock. She may be a liar and a traitor and a spy but clearly she's not good at it. David goes along with this and takes Tally to his parents’ hideout where they kept supplies in case of this exact emergency. They have been prepared for a long time. 

Tally and David gather up all the supplies and head out on hoverboards for Tally's city, hoping to make it there in time to stop the pretty operations that will surely be happening to the people from the Smoke. Their trip will take them ten days though, because they have to travel different routes and they have a lot of supplies. One time, when they stop to rest in the husk of a Rusty city, they talk about what killed all the Rusties: a virus that attacked petroleum and caused it to explode when it came into contact with oxygen. Well that sounds absolutely horrible. There's always something that ends major civilizations, and Tally asks David if he has any idea what would make their current civilization crumble. He's got an idea. 

After several more days of travel, they make it through the Rusty Ruins and Uglyville to the Special Circumstances building. There's not an easy way in that wouldn't get them caught, so they decide to launch themselves from hoverboards and land with bungee jackets that they go to the art building to steal. They get their jackets and then work on a plan to get the Specials out of Special Circumstances so they can try to rescue their friends, if any remain unpretty. Luckily they spot some uglies trying to summon David in the Rusty Ruins with a sparkler just like Tally and Shay did not much more than a month ago. The uglies agree to help.

The next night, the uglies spell out THE SMOKE LIVES in sparklers which is enough of a distraction to get three hovercars of Specials out to investigate, giving Tally and David a chance to fall from their hoverboards wearing bungee jackets to the roof of Special Circumstances. They make their way inside and down the elevator shaft and all the way down to the bottom floor of the building where they find rooms labeled for interrogation and isolation and detention and then they hear Dr. Cable’s voice. David thinks it's weird that Tally knows who Dr. Cable is, but when she opens the door and comes from the detention room, David knocks her out. Unfortunately, another person is with her. Shay. And she's pretty.

Fortunately, Shay is pretty, meaning she's also an idiot. She seems completely fine with Tally and David being there and having knocked out Dr. Cable. She says that Dr. Cable brought her there to talk to the Smokies and asks if David knows that Tally was working with her. He's gone to try to rescue the others and Shay tells Tally that her secret is safe. She's being really weird, but that's probably normal for a new pretty. David and Tally manage to rescue everyone they can, including his mom, but not his dad, who Maddy reveals is dead. They use an unconscious Dr. Cable’s eye to activate the elevator and get to the roof. Maddy sends Croy off in one direction on a hoverboard while the others take off in another. 

Summoning the hoverboards that Tally and David rode in on set off all sorts of alarms and Specials come running, creepily fast, but luckily, everyone gets away, for now. Tally and Shay ride off together, Tally apologizing for accidentally betraying the Smoke and finally explaining what she did and what happened and not meaning to summon the Specials when she destroyed the necklace. Unfortunately, Shay is a pretty and brain-damaged into not caring about Tally being a liar and a traitor and a spy. At least Tally finally told someone though?

They all meet up again the next night in the Rusty Ruins and David tells Tally that Maddy was able to disable the tracking part of a tablet she took from Dr. Cable and get lots of the information she and her late husband were working on, plus information about the lesions and turning pretties into specials and also about them not having lesions. Maddy is confident she can cure them. After some time, Maddy makes some pills that she is 99% sure will cure the lesions, and all the while, the remaining couple of Smokies rescue uglies and bring them over to their side and also, all the while, Shay complains about being surrounded by uglies and not being able to take a shower or go to parties. It's exhausting. 

Tally wants Maddy to give Shay the pills to cure her brain, but Shay is happy being pretty and doesn't believe that the lesions are real. Maddy refuses to give the pills to Shay without her consent, though. After all, she was a doctor and took the Hippocratic oath. Tally tells Maddy that she can test her pills on her. She will turn herself in, become pretty, David can rescue her from New Pretty Town, and then Maddy can give her the pills. David is furious. He doesn't want Tally to turn herself in, so she finally tells him the truth about being a liar and a traitor and a spy. He storms off, but hopefully he'll come around to the plan and rescue Tally eventually. Finally, Tally, with some help, writes herself a letter explaining everything about her ugly-desire to be brain-cured after she becomes pretty. She and Shay leave the Rusty Ruins and head back into town and are immediately caught by authorities. Tally proudly declares who she is and that she wants them to make her pretty.