Ugly Wishes: Chapter 1 - Gen 1

My name is Toby Ugli and I am Ugli by name and ugly by nature. Unfortunately, I was born this way, but I now know I am not on my own there are lots more just like me.

I now live in a small town called Jugville. We are a community of people secluded away from the world because we are so damn ugly. So I have been told this used to be a beautiful place to live once, but these days the ugliness of its inhabitants kind of distracts you away from the beauty of its surroundings.

I was born in Sunset Valley and my birth caused quite the scandal. My Dad, Marty Keaton, the famous up and coming sports star who played for the llama's, was married to Justine and they had a newborn son, called Freddiie. He went and had an affair with my Mom Summer, then along came me, my half brother Freddie is not that much older than me. The scandal rumbled on for years because not only was my Mom deemed a "one off" an "alien" by the way she looked, my Dad was living two lives for everyone to see. He stayed with his wife Justine and carried on seeing my Mom. Then along came my sister Tia, that was when everything changed, My Dad and Justine got divorced and he moved in with us. My parents got married, and my Dad took my Mom's surname "Ugli" I really never knew the reason why.

My Mom she never belonged in Sunset Valley and really should never have gone there, but really I should be grateful because I wouldn't be here otherwise. She was born here in this town and this is where she belongs in amongst her own kind. You see my Mom might look very odd to you, but to everyone in this town she is actually quite normal. The ugliness you see in her face is the "norm" around here, three generations of Ugliness have been born in this town.

Living in Sunset Valley was like living in hell. For as long as I can remember I was picked on, called names and tormented by other children because of the way I looked. Adults were not much better, it was not often an adult actually said anything, it was the way they looked and stared the expression on their faces said it all. In a way I was lucky that I inherited my Dad's skin colour because I was quite normal until they took a look at my face.
My sister got it worse than I did because not only did she inherit the Ugliness, she also inherited the odd skin colour which really made her stand out from everyone else. Alien skin colour that's what they called it and for a while I even started to believe it myself. As a young child I could see my Mom was different but I was too young to even understand why.

My little brother Mattie is probably the luckiest out of the three of us, he is just a little "mini Marty" as Mom calls him, he takes after my Dad in every way all but the colour of his skin, he does not have the oversized ears, eyes, nose and mouth like me Tia and Mom do, so he never really got the stick from the other kids that we did because he blended in with the other "berry" skinned kids at school so nobody really took that much notice of Mattie.

This is the science facility - and this is the place responsible for all the ugliness in this town. Years ago when my Mom's grandparents were young, there was a terrible accident at the science facility, a fire and explosion filled the air with toxic gases and debris that polluted the water. At the time nobody realised what was in the future for the inhabitants of this town until all the babies started to be born with deformities, oversized facial features that quickly became the norm for everyone's children and shaped the first generation of "Uglies" in this town.

Things were getting pretty rough for me and Tia, we thought primary school kids could be cruel, but when we became teenagers, the high school kids were downright cruel, even my half brother Freddie used to get stick for being related to the "freaks". Dad said enough was enough and after my parents put their heads together they decided the best thing for all of us would be to move away and for us to move to the town where my Mother was born, there they said we would have a happier life, but I was not holding my breath. He had hoped we could bring Freddie with us but Justine would have none of it, so we had to leave Freddie behind and up until we moved to this place Freddie had been my one and only friend.