This book is dedicated to my husband, Kevin,
who loves me in a T-shirt, a towel, or a tiara.
Contents
PART ONE: Fat, Black and Ugly 1
Chapter 1
“There’s a speed limit in this state, mister.”
3
Chapter 2
“If that’s all you’re getting from what I
told
you,”…
14
Chapter 3
“Woodburn wants to see you, Audra,”
Darlene Fuchs, the assignment…
28
Chapter 4
“Something fancy and hip. Fancy and hip,”
Audra sang the…
46
Chapter 5
Too trendy for words.
58
Chapter 6
“My God, Audra! Do you have any idea
what
time—”
73
PART TWO: Light, Bright and Beautiful 85
Chapter 7
“Audra, it’s Shamiyah Thomas again,
from the Ugly Duckling show?”
87
Chapter 8
“Audra! So nice to finally meet you!
Though I feel…
97
Chapter 9
“So which one was it? The Atkins or
South Beach?”
109
Chapter 10
“He’s kidding, right?” Audra swung her
face around the room,…
126
Chapter 11
“You want to bring some cameras into it,
fine with…
138
Chapter 12
“Marks!” 147
Chapter 13
“Shamiyah…it’s Audra.”
161
Chapter 14
Shamiyah stood at the baggage claim
when Audra arrived, looking…
166
Chapter 15
“So, Audra.” Dr. Anna Goddard crossed then
uncrossed her legs…
180
Chapter 16
“So. It’s tomorrow.” Edith’s voice was
heavy with the lateness…
198
Chapter 17
One big, oozing incision.
209
Chapter 18
“So what color are you now?”
224
Chapter 19
“Is that it?” Dr. Goddard nodded to
ward the thick brown…
234
Chapter 20
“Bradshaw…” 239
Chapter 21
“No excuses, Audra. It’s time to take
this
seriously—as…
245
Chapter 22
“Okay, I’ve got good news and bad news.”
259
Chapter 23
“Two minutes,” the stage manager hissed,
taking Audra’s gloved hand…
275
PART THREE: The Final Package 285
Chapter 24
“It’s amazing…amazing…” Penny
Bradshaw kept saying the word over…
287
Chapter 25
“You’re gonna need a new badge,
Marks,” Darlene Fuchs said…
296
Chapter 26
Audra knew the woman before she
entered the diner.
306
Chapter 27
Her mind was spinning with a million
thoughts: Ma, Andrew…
318
Chapter 28
“I’m sick and tired of being fat, black
and
ugly,”…
336
Chapter 29
“What’s going on with your face?”
Shamiyah asked, peering at…
356
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books By Karyn Langhorne
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
Fat, Black and Ugly
Chapter 1
Thursday, March 29
Dear Petra,
Greetings from your fatter, uglier sister! (I know, I
know—but I figure starting this letter like that will get
your mind off the chaos there in Iraq.)
Glad to hear that the latest violence has not
affected you or Michael. Me, the same as always:
work, home to help Ma look after Kiana (who, other
than missing her mom and dad, is doing fine), watch a
good classic movie (Double Indemnity was on last
night!), sleep and back to work.
Speaking of work . . . there’s a new guy. Girl . . .
smooth milk chocolate skin, eyes light as caramel . . .
delicious! Even a married woman like you would lick
her lips! Works the same shift I do, but he’s never said
a single word to me. Actually, he doesn’t talk much at
all. The strong, silent type, I guess. No one seems to
4
Karyn Langhorne
know much about him, so he could be married with
kids. Or he could be a snobbish jerk who thinks he’s
tougher than the rest of us because he worked at
Upstate Maximum.
Or maybe he just doesn’t like fat chicks . . . J I
wonder what it would take for him to acknowledge my
existence?
Oh well, that’s all from the home front. Let’s be
careful out there,
Audra
“There’s a speed limit in this state, mister.”
Anyone else would have told the kid to
walk, to stop speeding through the day room
like he needed Ritalin, but Audra Marks was too
bored to do what everyone else would have done.
Instead, when the kid passed her at run, hurrying
over to a gaggle of young men hovering over a video
game rivalry, Double Indemnity—that great movie
classic of greed and betrayal—rose to her lips. In
a blink, she was no longer Audra Marks, a big-
boned black woman in a size-too-small uniform,
but Barbara Stanwyck—a film noir princess hitch-
ing the hem of her slinky dress to flummox Fred
MacMurray’s careful cool with a shapely, ankle-
braceleted leg.
Too bad her captive audience didn’t get it.
“Huh?” he offered with the eloquence typical of
young men of a certain age.
“Speed limit. Forty-five miles an hour. And you’re
over it, sure as ten dimes will buy you a dollar.”
Puzzlement creased her listener’s face. He was
DIARY OF AN UGLY DUCKLING
5
literally her captive—an inmate named Carlton
Carter at the tail end of eighteen months for petty
theft. He stopped short, watching her intently, his
dark eyes skittering in his face, trying to decide if
she was hassling him for a specific reason or just for
general purposes.
Audra sighed. For the half instant before he
opened his mouth, she played out a scene from her
own secret fantasies—that she’d be answered with a
line from one of the old classics, from The Petrified
Forest and Mildred Pierce, Desk Set and All About Eve.
&n
bsp; It wouldn’t matter if he was nineteen or ninety, if he
was a convict or a conqueror, once he offered the
words like a magic kiss, Audra would lift eyes of
adoration to his face, violins would begin to play . . .
and they would live together happily ever after,
Clearly this kid wasn’t her guy . . . Audra shifted
her feet as though expecting to hear the telltale
shimmy of anklet beads colliding with each other
instead of the faint scuff of her orthopedic, regula-
tion black lace-ups. She put her hand on her ample
hip and leaned her sizeable frame close to the kid,
tossing her head as though it were covered with
Stanwyck’s flaxen curls.
“Look, kid,” she continued, mimicking the rapid-
fire delivery of a black-and-white film as the boy’s
brow crinkled in deeper confusion. “There are a lot of
losers in this mixed up, crazy world. Desperate peo-
ple, people willing to toss over their own mothers
just for a shot at the brass ring. One day soon, they’ll
spring you from this hole. But if you’re stupid
enough to commit another crime and end up back
6
Karyn Langhorne
here, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not to-
morrow, but one day soon, and for the rest of your
life—”
Audra stopped short. Crap, wrong movie. She cut
her eyes nervously at the young inmate, but the kid
obviously didn’t know the difference or much care.
She glanced around, wondering if anyone else had
heard the mistake.
Not likely.
Around them, the day room of the prison buzzed
with the chatter of men: young ones clustered around
video games, older ones gathered around card ta-
bles or the pieces for chess or checkers. Indeed, the
only person close enough to have overheard any of
Audra’s little bit of drama was that new corrections
officer—that very tall, very handsome, very built
brother named Art Bradshaw—but Officer Brad-
shaw was staring determinedly at a table of inmates
in the opposite corner. There was such a blank ex-
pression on his GQ cover-boy handsome face, she
was pretty sure of one thing: Even working the same
shift, in the same room, he didn’t even know Cor-
rections Officer Audra Marks existed.
When she turned back to him, Carlton was in-
specting her in minute detail. Audra saw herself in
the kid’s eyes: He must have preferred the long,
flowing, hair-weave look, because he seemed to gri-
mace at her short ’fro. And Audra already knew her
face was too full and her nose too flat—it seemed like
she’d heard those criticisms every day since she
was a kid—curses of a heredity she could only
guess at. But the bulk of her arms, the shelf of her
breasts straining against the crisp white cotton of
DIARY OF AN UGLY DUCKLING
7
her uniform and the thick roll of excess skin and fat
beneath them, her thighs straining the fabric of her
pants uncomfortably—those were her own doing.
And no, Carlton Carter wasn’t seeing Barbara Stan-
wyck . . . or any other starlet before 1944 or since,
Audra realized, with an unpleasant jolt back to real-
ity. Not for the first time this week, she wished she’d
really started that diet and exercise program she’d
been planning on starting since New Year’s . . .
Today, she vowed, starting at lunch. I’ll just have a
salad . . .
“Uh . . . Officer?” Carlton snatched at her atten-
tion, dragging it back to him and the present mo-
ment. “You done? Can I go?”
Audra sighed. “I’m trying to teach you something
here, Carter. I’m trying to teach you how to banter—”
“Banter?”
“Yeah, banter. It’s how you win a woman with
your words—”
“You mean my rap?” He shook his head, grin-
ning. “Yo, I don’t need no help with that—”
“Take that, you bitch!” someone behind her
screamed.
Audra’s fantasy faded like the trappings of Cin-
derella’s trip to the ball, leaving neither a glass
slipper—or even an ankle bracelet—to keep alive
the memory. Audra leaped to her feet, one hand on
her baton, the other on the service revolver snapped
tight into the holster on her right hip as she whirled
toward the sound. She touched a button on the
walkie-talkie at her hip, activating a speaker and mi-
crophone on her shoulder, following procedures on
reflex.
8
Karyn Langhorne
“Control, this is 0847. Incident in the day room.
Backup requested, over,” she murmured quickly
into the device as the words, “Fight! Fight!” went up
like a grade-school chant, filling the room.
Art Bradshaw was already wading through the
sea of orange toward the brawlers and Audra dived
into the commotion. “Hey!” she hollered, dropping
her voice to its hardest, most authoritative edge as
hyped on the sounds of fists flying. “Get back! Back,
I said!”
“You heard her! Get back!” Bradshaw rumbled,
echoing Audra in a commanding chorus. “Out of
the way!”
The cluster of orange onlookers fell away at the
power of the man’s voice. Of course, it wasn’t just
his voice that parted the men like Moses at the Red
Sea: Audra noticed, not for the first time, that the
new corrections officer was very tall—at least 6 feet
5 inches in his socks, with the kind of thick muscles
that usually meant a man sweated for a living. Au-
dra glanced quickly into his face: It was smooth and
rich, chiseled sharp at the cheekbones and chin. Im-
possibly handsome. Prince Charming handsome.
Once again, he gave Audra not the slightest look or
word, ignoring her as thoroughly as if she didn’t ex-
ist, even though the two of them needed to act as a
team to resolve the conflict unfolding before them.
Two men lay tangled in each other’s arms, each
trying to beat the living hell out of the other. The top
man’s number was stenciled across the side of his
jumpsuit like a tattoo: MI 761098. Audra transcribed
DIARY OF AN UGLY DUCKLING
9
it in her mind to the face of a long, lean, don’t-give-
a-good-damn brother whose mama had named him
Princeton Haines, though he was neither princely in
manner nor smart enough for the college of the same
name. Even with only the back of his cornrowed
head visible as he wrestled with the man beneath
him, Audra knew his cocoa-colored face was con-
torted into the sneer it always wore. Unlike kids like
Carlton, there was no point talking to inmates like
Haines; odds were overwhelming that not only
would Haines likely return to Manhattan Men’s for
repeat visits when he’d finished this three-to-five,
but that he’d probably one day reside at Upstate, the
maximum security prison, for the rest of his life.
If the top man was Princeton Haines, the bottom
man had to be a new inmate he’d been exchanging
bad blood with for the past two weeks, a youngster
by the name of Garcia, who was working overtime
to create a bad-ass rep. An instant later, her suspi-
cions were confirmed as the two men shifted posi-
tions and the bottom man became the top.
“Break it up!” Bradshaw shouted, grabbing at
Garcia’s back and lifting him easily off the floor.
Audra slipped her baton back into its loop at her
belt and on the impulse of her training, grabbed
Haines firmly by the armpits and tugged him up-
ward with all her might, dragging him to his sur-
prised feet.
“Dag,” one of the orange-suited men muttered
from the cluster. “You see her lift him like he was
nothing—”
“That’s one strong-ass chick, man—”
10
Karyn Langhorne
“You sure it’s a chick? Looks like a dude to me.”
“Yeah man, one fat, black ugly dude, y’know—”
“Fat, black, ugly dude with tits,” another voice
chuckled.
Fat . . . black . . . ugly. The words shook her insides
like they always had, and she was nine years old all
over again, listening where she shouldn’t have,
hearing things that cut her to heart’s core.
Fat . . . black . . . ugly . . .
She jerked toward the voice, half-expecting to see
the ghost of her father, when—
Rip.
It was the most awful sound imaginable: loud
and insistent, more shattering than gunfire. It
seemed to echo in the room, reverberating, register-
ing in every ear with deafening meaning. Automati-
cally, Audra threw Haines roughly aside and heard
him crash against something, hard and loud. She
reached behind her, feeling for the tear and getting a
nice handful of her large, white, granny panty
underwear—as a flush of mortification heated her
face.
Her tight blue uniform pants had given up their
valiant struggle and ripped waistband to crotch
down the center butt-seam . . . in front of a roomful
of men.
An instant later the sound of laughter filled the
room, echoing in her ears as Audra spread her
hands over the tear, humiliation settling thick and
hot in her chest. The last remnants of the elegant
fantasy of the forties slipped from her mind as tears
bubbled just beneath her eyelashes.
DIARY OF AN UGLY DUCKLING
11
I won’t cry. I won’t cry . . . Corrections officers don’t