Diary of an Ugly Duckling by Karyn Langhorne Page A

People literally sell their very souls here and
    consider it worth the bargain.” She shook her head.
    “I’ve been here for almost eight years . . . and I some-
    times wonder if I’m one of them.” Before Audra
    could ask her any questions about herself or her
    adopted town, the woman frowned. “But you
    shouldn’t have needed any money. The room should
    have been totally comped—”
    “Yeah,” Audra said. “That’s what they told me
    when I went to check in. That everything was com-
    plimentary . . .” she grinned. “Except the tips.”
    “Well, there’s a few things a sister’s gotta handle
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    on her own. But for everything else”—she gave Au-
    dra a cynical eye roll—“there’s an expense account.
    Now.” She grasped Audra’s arm again. “Before you
    meet everybody, there’s some stuff they want you to
    do.”
    “What kind of stuff?” Audra asked, suddenly feel-
    ing on guard.
    “ Medical kinds of stuff,” Shamiyah said, waving
    her fingers vaguely as if she weren’t certain of the
    details. “Basically they want to do the whole exam,
    like you were going to be on the show. It’s pretty
    comprehensive—takes hours and hours—so we’d
    better get started.”
    Shamiyah steered her toward the elevator and along
    the third-floor corridor to a glass-encased office. The
    words alan bremmar, m.d., and herbert koch,
    m.d., graced the door, each man’s moniker followed
    by a long line of letters like a perverse alphabet soup.
    Through the glass, Audra could see an elegant recep-
    tion desk and an even more elegant receptionist.
    “These guys are absolutely the best ,” Shamiyah
    murmured as though it were a secret, guiding her
    through the glass doors with one surprisingly firm
    and determined hand. “They’ve done everybody .
    More stars than the Walk of Fame . . . Hi Maisy!”
    Shamiyah said with a gushing enthusiasm that Au-
    dra couldn’t decide was real or fake. “Here she is,
    Audra Marks! The Ugly Duckling candidate we’ve
    been talking about?”
    Maisy stretched her face into a smile, staring at
    Audra as though she were some interesting new
    species that required great analysis, while Audra
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    stared back at her with similar interest. Up close,
    Maisy had the look of someone who had seen a few
    cuts of the surgeon’s knife herself: her eyebrows
    were suspiciously high, her nose perfectly straight,
    her breasts impossibly perky. Add to that the warm
    glow of a paid-for tan, and the perfect lowlights of a
    custom dye job and Maisy looked fake right up to
    her enhanced eyelashes.
    “Nice to meet you,” she said in a voice far too
    high and girlish for her years, but pleasant enough.
    She stood up, showing them a lean figure clad in a
    tight black T-shirt and black pants in some clingy,
    sexy fabric that would have shown every bump of
    cellulite, if the girl had had any. “Carla—she’s one
    of our nurses—is waiting for you in Room One. But
    first . . .” She pulled a thick folder full of papers
    from the cubby beneath the elegant desk. “Papers to
    sign,” she said, handing them to Audra.
    “Good grief! More papers?” She shook her head,
    turning to Shamiyah in amazement. “My hand still
    hurts from the stack you sent over last night.
    Haven’t I released you people from all liability for
    just about every conceivable accident imaginable?”
    “I—I don’t know,” the girl said, looking gen-
    uinely confused. “But these are the medical forms
    so Dr. Bremmar and the others can do their prelimi-
    nary consultation. Did someone already send you
    these? Because—”
    “No, no,” Shamiyah patted the girl on the arm, re-
    assuringly. “The forms she got last night were from
    the Ugly Duckling show. Consenting to her appear-
    ance on the program, for the use of her image in
    promotion, release from libel and slander—stuff like
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    that. Not the same. She’s got to do these, too.” She
    cast a