Please?" Lexy asks, her mother kisses her too large forehead, runs her hands over her puffy cheeks. There isn't any one thing, not any single marker of her ugliness, only individual parts that don't seem to fit right. She has curves where straight lines should be, pocks along her chin, eyes that were too bright and big yet still not considered striking. She kisses her and holds her and says "no".
***
This is what you learn when you're young and don't quite look they way they want you to :
(1) The baker closes at four. If you're hungry, he will feed you, out of pity.
(2) Witches are everywhere. Witches understand. Witches will run their long, slender fingers over your lifeline, witches will whisper Take this as they press a small bag into that palm. Take this, it will help you.
(3) Beautiful women will look at you once, and never again. They fear you. They fear what you remind them, which is that beauty is unearned and hard-won. Beauty is unnatural. Beauty is arbitrary, but beauty means everything: you are here, you are alive, you are ugly, and they do not know what this means.
(4) Beautiful men will look at you, and look, and look, they will try to understand. They will say cruel things at first, because that is how men are taught to treat ugly things. Then they will taper into benign amusement, they will forget you are a person at all. They pour their darkest secrets into and not realize that you can hear them.
Lexy listens, and Lexy understands.
**
They say "ugly" but what they mean is "stupid", what they mean is "useless", what they mean is "defeatable".
"Be good, boys", she scolds a particularly loud table as she gathers their empty pints. The lights here are dim enough to ease the angled corners of her shoulders. They love her here, gentle dim Lexy, too ugly for marriage, such a shame. What a nice girl, our Little Ugly Duckling.
"Lexy!' Jonathan, the baker's son, says. "Have a sit, tell us a story."
'These tables aren't gon' clean themselves' " she answers, even as she sits. Jonathan always leaves his purse on the table, and the more he drinks, the less he pays attention to how much it weighs. 'What kind of story?"
"A good one," Jonathan insists. "make us laugh"
"Alright," she nods and leans forward, wrapping her fingers around his purse and holding it in front of his face. 'This is my dowry"
He laughs, his head thrown back, his eyes squeezed shut, and the stable boys laugh too. A dowry, for Lexy, a dowry! Lexy palms the purse, and replaces it with an empty one. A witch gave it to her, once, and said to her, This will come back to you, always, no matter how far you send it.
Lexy has given it to Jonathan the baker's son five times, he has always come back, confused, asking for his own. "I seemed to have stolen this from someone.' he laughs, nervous, "only...don't tell, Lexy, eh? I'll just leave it here, no harm done, eh?"
She tutted at him each time. "Watch those sticky fingers of yours, jonathan," she'd said. "They'll get the better of you one day, but it'll be our little secret."
"Last drinks on the house." Lexy says, whisking their glasses away.
**
A beautiful women will walk into any room, and have all eyes on her long legs, her round mouth, her startling eyes. A beautiful women will have them on their knees, saying yes. A beautiful women would say "I want..." and they would say "I will give you".
Everyone wants to please a beautiful women.
Lexy's first trip to the castle was with a hood over her head. Don't make them look too hard at you, her mother had said, her hands on her hips. And lexy loves her mother. Lexy loves her mother and her mother always tells her no.
