Mom takes me to Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. It's July, but the huge marble bricks inside remind me of the walls of an igloo and I wonder if my tongue would freeze if I were to venture a lick. But I'm instantly distracted: The seahorses are all wrong, with their tails on backwards so that they look like g's instead of the wise little q's I'd imagined. I rush over to the gray loafing lungfish, easily the homeliest creatures I've ever seen and read that their plain, loglike appearance is a camouflage, a defense, a disguise. So I tell the elderly lungfish that he is handsome, a perfect specimen, one of nature's finest partly because the other kids are yelling Ewww and pointing at him and partly because I know the secret now, as the little pre-readers do not: Underneath his disguise, Grandpa Lungfish must be beautiful.

A few rooms along, I encounter the Great Lakes invaders: carp. Not so spectacularly ugly as the lungfish, and billed as the most mundane of villains, the carp enjoy no hovering elementary school audience. They look lonely, so I pause to read their placard and learn that carp were introduced to the Great Lakes region and soon wiped out a number of native species by eating all their natural prey. So they are evil. But I'm nine and my sense of justice is more developed than my understanding of ecology. “It's not their fault!” I cry, and Mom is startled a moment as I sink to the floor. I smush my face to the glass and gaze at the flat eyes of the lowly, unloved fish and whisper, “You're okay, too.”