Beastly by Alex Flinn

really love me now? And maybe loving her back would be the hardest part of all.

    3
    Good to know: Doctors can’t cure you of being a beast.
    Over the next weeks, my father and I traveled all over New York and talked to a dozen doctors, who told us in various languages and accents that I was screwed. We traveled outside New York and visited witches and voodoo people too. They all said the same thing: They didn’t know how I’d become what I was, but they couldn’t cure it.
    “I’m sorry, Mr. Kingsbury,” the last doctor told my father.
    We were sitting in an office in the middle of nowhere in Iowa or Idaho or maybe Illinois. The drive had taken thirteen long, silent hours, and when we’d gotten off at a rest stop, I’d dressed like a Middle Eastern woman, with robes covering my body and face. The doctor worked at a hospital in a nearby city, but Dad had arranged to meet him privately at his weekend home in the country. Dad didn’t want anyone to see me. I looked out the window. The grass was a green I’d never seen before, and there were rosebushes in every color. I stared at them. They were beautiful, just like Magda had said.
    “Yes, I am too.”
    “We really enjoy you on the news, Mr. Kingsbury,” Dr. Endecott said. “My wife, especially, seems to have a bit of a crush on you.”
    God! Was this guy going to ask for an autograph, or suggest a threesome? “Could I go to a blind school?” I interrupted. The doctor stopped in the middle of his proposal, or proposition. “What, Kyle?” He’d been the only one to call me by my name. There was this voodoo guy in the East Village who’d called me devil’s spawn (which, I thought, was every bit as insulting to Dad as to me). I’d wanted to leave at that point, but Dad kept talking to him until the bitter end when – surprise, surprise – he couldn’t help me. Not that I really blamed anyone for not wanting to hang with me. I wouldn’t have wanted to hang with me either, which is why I thought what I was suggesting was so brilliant.
    “A school for the blind,” I said. “Maybe I could go to one of those.” It would be perfect. A blind girl wouldn’t be able to see how ugly I was, so I could turn on the Kingsbury charm and make her love me. Then, once I was transformed, I could just go back to my old school.
    “But you aren’t blind, Kyle,” the doctor said.
    “Couldn’t we tell them I am, though? That I lost my sight in some freak hunting accident or something?”
    He shook his head. “It’s not that I don’t understand what you’re feeling, Kyle.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    “No, really. I do, a little. When I was a teenager, I had a very bad complexion. I tried every medication and preparation, and it would get better for a little bit, then worse again. I felt so ugly and shy, I was sure no one would ever care for me. But eventually, I grew up and married.” He pointed to a picture of a pretty blonde woman.
    “Eventually meaning after you finished med school and made a ton of money so women would look past your looks?” Dad snapped.
    “Dad…” I said. But I’d been thinking the same thing.
    “You’re comparing this to acne?” Dad said, gesturing toward me. “He’s a beast. He woke up one morning, and he’s an animal. Surely, medical science –”
    “Mr. Kingsbury, you have to stop saying these things. Kyle is not a beast.”
    “What would you call it? What terminology is there?”
    The doctor shook his head. “I don’t know. But what I do know is that only his physical appearance is affected, what he is on the outside.” He put his hand on mine, which no one had ever done. “Kyle, I know it’s difficult, but I’m sure that your friends will learn to accept you and be kind.”
    “What planet do you live on?” I shouted. “Because it’s definitely not Earth. I don’t know anyone kind, Dr. Endecott. And what’s more, I don’t want to know anyone like that. They sound like losers. I don’t have some little problem.