This whole game is just designed to make us hate ourselves.

—Shay, in Uglies

I am a natural born sidekick.

I say this with neither pride nor shame. It’s just a fact of my life that for every time I’ve been the star, there have been approximately 8 million more times that I’ve been the planet, circling in orbit around someone else’s bright flame.

Because I’ve been there myself, I pay closer attention than most to the girl behind the curtain. So I can admit, after close analysis, that in many ways Shay is the perfect sidekick for Tally Youngblood. In the tradition of all the greatest sidekicks (cf. Dr. Watson, Paris Geller, Mr. Smithers, Chewbacca), Shay’s overlooked and undervalued. And no matter what Tally does, Shay forgives her. She gets mad, she gets even—and then she comes back for more. She’s the wind beneath Tally’s wings. She’s a friend in deed to a friend in need. In good times, in bad times, Tally can always count on her, for sure, because that’s what friends are—

Well, you get the idea.

Just one problem with this neat equation: Shay’s not sidekick material. She obviously thinks she is. But Shay, who’s right about so much, is wrong about this. She’s not a sidekick, she’s a hero.

A hero with the misfortune to be trapped in someone else’s story.

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better . . . Not That Anyone Cares

We’ve all known girls like Shay, right? She’s that annoying kid on the playground, the one tagging along where she’s not wanted, convinced that you’re BFFs . . . and then, when you burst her little bubble with a harsh prick of reality, she’s the one who rats you out to the playground monitors the first chance she gets. Shay is the girl who won’t take no for an answer, the reason you have caller ID. If you’re her friend, you’re her property. If you’re her enemy? Watch out. You know that woman scorned you’re always hearing about? Her name is Shay.

Case closed, right?

Wrong. Here’s the thing about Shay: All that stuff you think you know about her? It’s total crap.

Because here’s the other thing about Shay: She’s awesome.

Not just awesome. More awesome than Tally. Not to mention smarter, savvier, sassier, braver, and bolder. Basically, she’s Tally-er than Tally. Not that it gets her anywhere. Let’s recap the events in this series, from Shay’s perspective: Shay blazes a trail for Tally, right up the side of a mountain. Shay extends a hand to Tally, and helps her to the summit. Shay and Tally admire the view, for approximately thirty seconds.

Then Tally pushes Shay over the cliff.

Lather, rinse, and repeat. (And don’t forget to get a little shampoo in your eyes, for that extra-fun burning sensation.)

Let’s start with Shay’s brain. Her big, bubbly brain, the one always digging for explanations in situations where other people (like, say, Tally) are content to kick back, munch on some SpagBol, and let the world pass them by. From the start, it’s obvious that Shay is more on the ball than your average ugly. When we first meet her, she’s far trickier than Tally. She knows how to hoverboard and, more importantly, knows that hoverboarding is the best route to freedom. Unlike Tally, who’s content to just enjoy technology without wondering how or why it works, Shay also understands the hoverboard mechanism. She knows how to trick its safety governor; she gets that it needs iron to run and understands how that affects where you can and cannot fly.

Shay knows it all—and she shares it with Tally, setting the tone for the rest of their relationship. Again and again, Shay figures things out and then explains them to her best friend. Not just small things, like how hoverboards work, but big things, like how society works. Shay is the one who sees through the pretty lie, back when she and Tally are still uglies. True, she probably didn’t figure it out for herself—she learned the truth from David. (This was back when David still acknowledged her existence.) But she gets points for recognizing truth when she hears it—unlike Tally, who hears everything Shay has to say, but chooses not to listen.

Similarly, Shay paves the way for Tally in Prettytown, encouraging her to be exactly the kind of bubbly Crim that Zane is looking for. Then, while Tally is off playing games with Zane, forgetting (not for the first time) that she even has a best friend, Shay thinks her way out of pretty-mindedness all on her own. Tally needs Zane to help her stay bubbly; Shay needs only herself. Tally says it best: “If Shay was hacking minders and scaling the Valentino tower, she was way ahead of the rest of them” (Pretties).

By the time they’ve both become specials, Tally has fallen embarrassingly far behind. It’s not just that Shay is better at being a special—after all, she’s had more time than Tally to get used to her new life. But her superiority doesn’t stem from experience, or—as Tally assumes—a biological inclination toward special-dom. Shay is just smarter. She’s the one who comes up with the plan to break Zane out of the city, and she’s got every contingency covered. Poor, slow Tally is always one step behind. Take the Armory break-in: It’s Shay’s idea from start to finish. (Granted, this doesn’t turn out to be for the best in the long run, but it’s the only plan they’ve got.) As the action progresses, it’s Shay who figures out why her city is attacking Diego, and what needs to be done to stop the war. Again and again, Shay just knows—and when she doesn’t know, she asks.¹ Which is the smartest move of all.

Okay, enough, you may be thinking. So Shay’s got a high IQ. So what? She talks a good game, but what’s it all worth without a little action? A good ass-kicking’s worth a thousand words, right? And maybe you think Shay couldn’t kick her way through a paper wall.

Maybe your name is David. Or Zane.

“Don’t tell me Shay actually rescued you,” Zane says, his voice dripping with derision, when Tally reveals the real story behind the collapse of the Smoke and her return to Prettytown. How laughable, his tone says, that Shay could dream of doing such a thing!

As if Shay hadn’t proven herself to be every inch the brave, independent action hero that Tally’s made out to be. Let’s not forget that at the beginning of Uglies, when Shay and Tally are both equally alone in Uglyville, missing all their friends, it’s Shay who does something about it. Yes, Tally sneaks across the river—once—to see Peris. And she whines about it the entire way. Poor Tally, forced to do a trick without an adoring boy to applaud as she pulls it off. Shay, on the other hand, has been visiting Prettytown on her own for quite a while. She’s got a plan—escape—and she’s searching for a partner to help her carry it off. Tally, despite being just as lonely, spends most of her time gazing out the window, mooning about all the things she wants but can’t have (and this is Tally we’re talking about, so it’s an absurdly short list).

In the Smoke, Shay works the hardest, always choosing the nastiest jobs for herself. And once Special Circumstances arrive, Shay fights back with such tenacity that she’s the first victim of the pretty operation. It’s not the first time that Shay’s greatest strength becomes her greatest weakness—but we’ll get to that later. Because I’d hate to get distracted from the most crucial point of all, the one that none of Shay’s friends and enemies can seem to remember: Shay seeks out the Smoke on her own.

The very thing that Tally pretends to do—while in reality being blackmailed by Dr. Cable—Shay actually does. This isn’t just brave. It’s the bravest act in the entire series.²

The Smoke proves to runaways that there’s an alternative to turning pretty. Once you’ve seen the Smoke, you know you have a choice. After that, making the choice—staying—seems like the easy part. But before you’ve seen the Smoke, before your friends tell you what it’s like, the only world you can truly rely on is the one you grew up in. Anything beyond that is a fuzzy mixture of hope and fantasy.

But with nothing more to go on than the word of some stranger she’s met in the wilderness—and her own inner certainty that the pretty operation is wrong—Shay turns her back on everything she’s ever known. She walks away from her life, from her new best friend, from everything certain and easy. She jumps blindfolded into the abyss, and she does it without looking back.

And what does she get for her trouble?

Nothing.

Actually, worse than nothing: Her boyfriend insults her, then dumps her for her best friend—insisting it’s not because he’s fickle, it’s because Shay sucks, while Tally’s awesomeness is just too overwhelming to deny.

It’s hard to miss the fact that Tally is awesome. After all, every character tells us so. Dr. Cable, of all people, kicks things off for us in Uglies:

“But then Shay disappeared,” Dr. Cable continued. “She turned out to be trickier than her friends. You taught her well.”

“I did?” Tally cried. “I don’t know any more tricks than most uglies.”

“You underestimate yourself,” Dr. Cable said.

Right. Except for the part where she doesn’t. When it comes to Shay, Tally doesn’t know more tricks, she knows fewer. But Dr. Cable has spoken. You taught her well, she says, and labors under this misapprehension for the rest of the series. Tally is the ringleader, the troublemaker, while Shay just goes along for the ride (perhaps towed behind Tally on the hoverboard Shay taught her to ride).

Pretties begins on a similar note: It’s Shay who comes up with the idea to dress as Smokies for the costume bash, but is Zane impressed? No, because lucky Tally still has her sweater from the Smoke. You may think that owning a sweater isn’t much of a character-defining quality; Zane’s not so sure. “I’ve been waiting for someone like you for a long time,” he tells Tally in their first real conversation. “At least you took the chance, Tally,” he says, referring to her far-from-voluntary trip to the Smoke. “You were brave enough to find out for yourself.”

True enough . . . if you replace the word “Tally” with “Shay.”

Zane thinks he sees something uniquely bubbly in Tally, but in fact it’s Zane who is bubbly—Zane who, like Shay, has the inner strength to break free of his pretty programming (though he gets some help after this from the lesion-eating nano pill). Tally allows herself to be dragged along with him, but that doesn’t make her strong.

It certainly doesn’t make her special.

I Know You Are, But What Am I?

Let’s say Shay really is Tally-er than Tally. That begs the obvious question: If Shay’s not a loser, why does she always lose? True, it’s possible to be awesome and still shoot yourself in the foot. Take the tortoise and the hare. Super speedy, super lazy hare takes a nap, while slow and steady tortoise inches past for the win.

Except in this case, it’s more like some third party (let’s call him David) knocked out the hare with a tranquilizer dart, then airlifted the tortoise to the finish line.

Yes, Shay has flaws. Who doesn’t? But Tally has all the same flaws, and more—not that anyone notices.

What’s that? You stole your best friend’s boyfriend?

Betrayed the Smoke out of cowardice and selfishness?

Got your best friend turned into a brain-damaged pretty and your boyfriend’s father killed?

No worries, Tally. Not your fault!

No matter what she does, Tally’s cheering section excuses her. “Don’t let Shay make you feel bad about us, Tally,” Zane tells her (Pretties). He and David repeat this so many times, in one form or another, that they should just save time and get it tattooed across their foreheads.

But they’re not content with ignoring Tally’s mistakes and misdeeds. In order to fully cleanse her, all her sins must be placed on the head of some poor scapegoat.

Enter Shay.

David would have us believe that Shay only came to the Smoke because she had a sad little crush on him. But it’s Tally who rejects her beliefs for a boy. And she does this not once, not twice, but three times.

She’s all about turning pretty . . . until she falls for David.

She’s all about staying pretty . . . until she falls for Zane.

She’s all about being special, and devoting herself to Shay and the other Cutters . . . until it comes down to a choice between Shay and Zane. Only Shay, blinded by loyalty, could have been surprised when Tally chose the boy. The rest of us saw it coming from a mile— or at least two books—away.

Then there’s the cutting. Midway through Pretties, Shay gets bubbly enough to escape from her pretty-minded haze. Once she realizes Tally won’t help her, and that she can’t replicate Tally’s path to bubbliness, she decides to forge her own. Here’s where things get sticky. Shay figures out that extreme experiences will make her bubbly, so she does the most extreme thing she can think of: she starts cutting herself.

When Tally witnesses this for the first time, “a shiver went through [her].” She reacts like Shay has turned into a raving lunatic: “Shay began to speak, facing upward, addressing the flag overhead like a crazy person.” As the other Cutters emulate Shay, “their faces transformed to become more like Shay’s: ecstatic and insane” (Pretties).

Now, I’m not saying this was a good plan.³

But where does Tally get off, acting like Shay’s turned into some insane cult leader who’s going to bring down civilization with a flick of her knife? Especially since a few pages later, Tally and Zane find themselves outside the hospital, needing to fake an injury, and so Zane punches his fist against a metal ambulance rack so hard that he breaks his knuckles. Crazy? Not as far as Tally’s concerned: “For a moment, she’d thought Shay’s insanity was contagious. But a wounded hand was a plausible reason for their wild ride here”(Pretties). (Admittedly, she’s not particularly pleased a few chapters later when he wants to risk cutting off his hand in order to secure his freedom . . . but she never thinks he’s insane.) The assumption here is that Zane has a reason for his self-injuring behavior—just as both Zane and Tally are justified in starving themselves. It’s the only way to stay bubbly.

Which, by the way, is the only reason Shay’s slicing her arm open.

Obviously, we can agree that cutting yourself is, by normal standards, capital-B Bad. Newsflash: So is starving yourself. But we’re supposed to accept that Tally and Zane are just doing what they have to do. We’re told that, starvation or no starvation, Tally is a hero for throwing off her pretty programming without the benefit of the nanos.

When Shay does exactly the same thing, she comes off as a psychopath. Because her cutting is somehow inherently worse, an act beyond redemption?

Or because it’s Shay, so it must be suspect?

According to some people, everything Shay does is suspect.

And by some people, I mean David.

Full disclosure: I hate David with the passion of a thousand fiery suns all going supernova at the same time. No one is a more egregious Shay-basher. No one insults her as cavalierly, as unfairly, as gratuitously—with as little reason. By which I mean, no reason. But because David speaks with authority, both literal and moral, his words carry weight.

David is more than just the de facto leader of the Smoke—more, even, than the sole reason that the Smoke exists in the first place. To the refugees from Uglyville (and to the reader), he is the personal embodiment of everything the Smoke stands for. More to the point, he’s an embodiment of the ideals they’ve chosen to embrace, at the expense of everything they’ve ever known or valued. David is their redeemer, a mythical figure who appeared in the Rusty Ruins, revealed a hidden truth, and led them to salvation. Everything the uglies think they know about the world, they know because David told them. By definition, the population of the Smoke is made up solely of uglies who trust that David knows best. Anyone who didn’t trust David more than their parents, more than their teachers, more than the lessons they’d been taught every day of their lives, anyone who didn’t believe that David knows best, would have just stayed home.

And because David knows best—because, out in the terrifyingly alien world of nature, wild-child David still holds all the knowledge and so all the power—David’s renunciation of Shay is a turning point for both the book and the character. Which is why it seems appropriate to pause here and examine just how much David’s behavior sucks. (The official amount would be: a lot.)

It’s a character assassination in two acts.

Act one: David meets Tally and, like a child confronted with a shiny new toy, decides that she’s The One. “You’re different from the rest of them,” he tells Tally, without any reason to think so. “You can see the world clearly.” Tally’s been in the Smoke for less than one day when David decides that she’s a superior class of runaway. “Even Shay, who really believes the operation is wrong, doesn’t see how deadly serious the Smoke is.”⁴

David goes on to confide his deep, dark secret—that he was born in the Smoke. Under normal circumstances, he’d never reveal this to someone that he’s just met, but Tally’s different, remember? He senses she can be trusted. Of course, when Shay—who actually knows Tally—decides that she can be trusted and leaves her directions to the Smoke, that’s considered a foolish betrayal.⁵ How dare Shay decide that Tally’s trustworthy? Only David is qualified to make judgments like that! Oh, and maybe Tally is too, since (as far as David knows) she left a set of directions for her boyfriend. But that’s okay, because Tally’s different. Tally’s special.

Act two: In typical guy mode, David decides he’s a good guy, and good guys don’t just ditch their girlfriends on a whim. Good guys have good reasons—so David invents one. He tells himself the following story: Shay sucks.

Specifically, Shay chickened out on running away to the Smoke the first time around, and thus is doomed to suck for all eternity: “I always figured she would [back out]. She just wanted to run away because her friends were.” David goes on to say, “I almost told her to just forget about it, to stay in the city and become pretty” (Uglies).

And here we have the fount of my undying hatred. Thirty-seven words of total, rage-inducing crap. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

1. “She just wanted to run away because her friends were.” We know David doesn’t believe this, because a few pages earlier he admitted that Shay “really believes the operation is wrong.”
2. Not that Tally bothers to mention it, but she knows—and we know—that Shay never wanted to be pretty. If she’d really just wanted to run away because her friends were, why cling to the idea after her friends were gone? Why not just enjoy life with her new best friend, and allow the city to make her pretty, right on schedule? And speaking of why’s . . .
3. If Shay’s such a pathetic follower, why would she run away to the Smoke on her own?
4. David’s so disgusted with Shay for being a coward—yet somehow fails to notice that (according to Tally’s story) Tally chickened out on her first chance to head for the Smoke, too. So why is Shay a coward and Tally a hero?
5. Let’s say David really believes that Shay was just copying her friends (although he doesn’t). Let’s even say that he’s right (although he’s not). So what? He believes the same thing about Tally, that she only came to the Smoke to find Shay. According to David, this makes Tally a good friend. And yet, apparently, it makes Shay a weakling deserving of brain damage.
6. Another why: If David believes all this, why date Shay in the first place? Sure, he brushes off his relationship with Shay, acting like it’s all in her head. But throughout the series, Tally and Shay refer to the fact that he was indeed Shay’s boyfriend. So either Shay is completely delusional, or David’s a complete asshole.

You can probably guess where I stand.

When I’m Wrong, I Say I’m Wrong . . . Good Thing I’m Never Wrong

I don’t know if you’d call it a desirable talent, but Shay has a special flair for holding a grudge. We’re talking world-championship levels of grudge-holding. And she’s certainly not shy about declaring revenge when she thinks she’s been wronged.⁶

And make no mistake, she has been wronged—most of the time, by Tally.

Tally and her flock of admirers like to act like all the bad things Tally’s done were beyond her control (for the good things, of course, she wins full credit). But if you examine each major accusation Shay makes against Tally, they all end up being true. Despite the fact that Tally—for all her self-flagellation—refuses to take responsibility for any of it.

“I never meant for that to happen.”

Here Tally’s referring to the theft of Shay’s boyfriend—but it’s basically the story of her life.⁷ She pretends she had no choice when it came to David: “Without even trying. She’d shafted her best friend.”

Oh, really, Tally? You’re so head over heels in love with the boy you’ve known for two weeks that no force in the universe, and certainly not the force of your meager self-restraint, is strong enough to keep you apart? Even though you know that you’re about to break your best friend’s heart?

This, not her betrayal of the Smoke to Dr. Cable, is Tally’s true treason. Arguably, Dr. Cable didn’t give her a choice. David did. Tally could have walked away.

She didn’t.

Instead, she told herself she had no option but falling into David’s arms. What’s loyalty in the face of (two-week-old) love?

Tally wields the same “I didn’t have a choice” stick when it comes to responding to Shay’s accusations in Pretties. After finding out that Tally shared her lesion-curing pill with Zane rather than with her best friend, Shay freaks out. Tally can only stammer in response, “There wasn’t time . . . I didn’t even—”

Of course, we the reader know that Tally and Zane had to pop the pills to avoid detection; there was no time to save one for Shay. But are we meant to think that Shay’s being unreasonable? That she’s holding Tally to an unfair standard because she doesn’t understand the situation? That yet again poor Tally has accidentally, through no fault of her own, found herself at odds with her beloved best friend?

I’m not buying it.

Tally may not have had a choice once she was on top of that tower with the pills in her hand . . . but who told her to go up there with Zane in the first place? Who told her to confide in a boy she barely knew, leaving her supposed best friend out in the cold? Tally may not have chosen Zane over Shay in that crucial moment— but she chose Zane in every moment that came before it. She had a choice; she chose the boy. She makes the same choice again in Specials, choosing to follow Zane and the other Crims instead of sticking with Shay and fulfilling the mission of the Cutters. And this after Shay has risked everything to give Tally what she wants (i.e., Zane).

“It didn’t seem fair,” Tally thinks, when Shay calls her on this. “When had she even had a chance to be selfish? Ever since Dr. Cable had recruited her other people had made most of Tally’s choices for her.”

There’s something extremely peculiar about the so-called hero of this series—a series which celebrates the triumph of personal choice and the freedom of thought—constantly asserting and embracing her lack of agency. Tally is venerated as the figure who gave people their minds back, allowing them to choose their own destinies. But Tally seems to live in a state of denial that she has any choice of her own: “And yet she and Shay always seemed to wind up on opposite sides. Was that a coincidence? Or was there something about the two of them that always turned them from friends into enemies?”

Yes, there was—and its name was Tally.

But Tally prefers to believe that, “Maybe they were like two different species—hawks and rabbits, say—and could never be allies.”⁸ How convenient. Because if it’s true, she’s not to blame. Despite all the ink spilled describing how guilty Tally feels for everything she’s done, how much she regrets the pain she’s caused, the fact is, her words are empty. I’m sorry, she says, over and over again, but can you really blame me?

I had no choice.

Zane backs her up—right before he loses his life, because of Tally.

David backs her up—after he loses his father, because of Tally.

Only Shay—who, not incidentally, has lost everything that matters several times over, because of Tally—calls her on the truth: “You have to stop trying to run away,” she says, after it becomes clear that their raid on the Armory caused a war, “and face what we started.”

Shay’s greatest strength—along with her greatest weakness—is her inability to hide from the truth.

Tally lies about everything, to everyone. She lies to save herself (e.g., when she’s spying on the Smoke for Dr. Cable), she lies by staying silent (e.g., whenever she lets one of her boys believe she’s braver and stronger than she knows herself to be), and when nothing’s at stake, she lies out of habit (e.g., when she’s exaggerating the hardships of her journey to the Smoke). Worst of all, she lies to herself: “I kind of like being fooled about some things.”

Shay, on the other hand, would rather be miserable than be fooled. In Specials, Tally gets nostalgic for the easy life in Prettytown. Shay’s not having it: “It was bogus,” she says. “I’d rather have a brain.”

Tally’s lies smooth her way to redemption. Her lies lead her to David, to Zane, to the wild, to freedom. But Shay takes the opposite path. It’s her hatred of hypocrisy, her rigid honesty, and her demand for authenticity that allow her to break free of the system in both Uglies and Pretties. Unlike other uglies, she doesn’t want a pretty face; she doesn’t want to be anyone but who she is. For Shay, honesty is always better than dishonesty, even when it’s ugly.

As the truth usually is.

It Takes Two to Make a Dream Come True—But Only One to Make a Happy Ending

Seconds later, two faces appeared on the screen. Both of them were Shay, but there were obvious differences: One looked wild, slightly angry; the other had a slightly distant expression, like someone having a daydream.

—from Uglies

When we first meet her, Shay’s a reasonably happy, well-balanced character—until she collides with Tally Youngblood, who forces her to make a choice between the two sides of herself, the fighter and the dreamer.

We all know Shay’s a fighter. Increasingly, over the course of the trilogy, we come to know her as embittered and aggressive, lashing out at anyone who doesn’t live up to her high standards. Tally earns a reputation as a fighter as well (despite the fact that most of her battles are fought by accident); unsurprisingly, she’s seen as someone who chooses the right fights, while Shay always finds herself in the wrong. And the more things go wrong for Shay, the harder she fights. But until it overwhelms her, Shay’s defiance defines her, pushing her to break the rules and crack the system. “I don’t want to be pretty,” she tells Tally at the beginning of Uglies, the first time they argue. In Tally and Shay’s society, you’d have to be a fighter to dredge up the courage to say these words. More than that: Only a fighter would even think them.

The dreamer in Shay may be less apparent, beaten down by the course of events, but we can see her in Shay’s early adventures with Tally (the playfulness with which she springs the surprise of the rapids and the roller coaster gap, the proclivity for wild storytelling that leads Tally to doubt tales of David)—and, more dangerously, in Shay’s perception of her new best friend. Shay idealizes Tally, as she’d idealized David before her, seeing in both of them a kindred spirit, someone who would do anything for her, repay loyalty with loyalty, ignoring any and all evidence to the contrary. The dreamer in Shay, the naïve idealist, believes in such a thing as best friends, and she’s determined to do whatever she can to make the reality of Tally fit the mold of the fantasy.

For Shay lives in a world of ideals. It’s true that she’s brave to have left Uglyville and set off in search of the Smoke with no evidence that it existed, but she did have an advantage over some of her more timid friends—Shay, the dreamer, is always all too ready to believe her own stories. She tells herself fairy tales: the tale of her new, perfect best friend; the tale of a handsome prince waiting to sweep her away; the tale of a bright, shining land of possibility, where she would finally feel at home. “It’s not like here, Tally,” she explains dreamily early on in Uglies, before she knows anything about the Smoke beyond what she’s been told. “They don’t separate everyone, uglies from pretties, new and middle and late. And you can leave whenever you want, go anywhere you want.” Shay doesn’t need evidence that the Smoke exists—she has faith. She believes in it, just as she believes Tally will eventually join her there. Just as she repeatedly, mistakenly, believes that Tally will live up to the dream of Tally, the best friend who will never betray her.

But Tally does betray her, again and again, pushing Shay over the edge. Forcing her, as she forced her that day in front of the wallscreen, to choose.

She chooses the fight.

She fights because the world is imperfect, because it never measures up to her exacting standards—and because the deck is stacked against her from start to finish. The fight nearly destroys her, but it’s also what saves her.

One could argue that Tally is able to reprogram her brain again and again because her personality is fungible. Even before the operation, she’s the perfect pretty, acting without thinking, avoiding conflict at all costs, accepting whatever truth she’s told. As Shay points out, she’s also always been a perfect special, protecting herself at all costs, leaving destruction in her wake. Perhaps the surgeries weren’t doing anything more than enhancing tendencies that she already had, making it easy to accommodate her personality to the results. The operations didn’t change her so much as they just made her that much more herself. Shay, on the other hand, can’t accommodate herself to anything. She’s stubborn, she’s rigid, and she’ll never bend, only break.

Which, in the end, allows her to break free.

Still, breaking free of an oppressive system isn’t enough to fix Shay’s problems. She needs to break free from the anchor that’s been dragging her down since day one: Tally. Technically, an injection of nanos gives Shay the happy ending she deserves. But no nano would be powerful enough to turn embittered, vengeful Shay into the happy, healthy warrior we see at the end of Specials. Something else must have happened.

Something did.

Midway through the story, Tally chooses Zane over the Cutters. For Shay, this is finally one betrayal too many. She walks away from the sham of a friendship, and when next we meet her in Specials, she’s a new person. A better person.

Because of the nanos? Maybe. But not just the nanos. It’s as if finally walking away allows Shay to unite the two halves of herself that Tally split asunder. Now she can be a fighter and a dreamer; she can be whole. She can be free. Once Tally’s not around to force her to choose, she can choose for herself. She can tell a new story, and in this story, she’s not the sidekick. She’s the hero.

I don’t know about you, but that’s a story I’d like to read.

1. Now, we rarely if ever get to see Shay track down the answers she hungers for (except for the several noteworthy confrontations she has with Tally, desperate for the truth), but Shay’s breadth of knowledge (about hoverboards; about the mores of the city; about the Armory, from the inside out) is proof enough that, off-screen, she’s busy digging deep for answers. This is a society that depends on no one caring enough to ask questions; it’s no wonder Shay always finds herself the odd man out.
2. Wait a minute, you say. Shay didn’t flee to the Smoke because she was brave, she fled because she had a crush on David. And how do we know this? Because . . . well . . . David told us so. But outside of David’s (self-serving) claims, there’s no evidence that Shay was running toward David rather than away from being pretty. But David wouldn’t lie, right? Well, we’ll get to that sooner or later. Probably sooner.
3. I’m forced to admit that, smart as she is, Shay’s plans rarely rise above mediocre, and they usually hover somewhere in the neighborhood of disastrous. Tally, on the other hand, often prefers not to make plans at all. She’d rather follow someone else’s lead.
4. Just to be clear, the reason Shay doesn’t see how “deadly serious” everything is—the reason no one does—is because David and his parents refuse to tell them! David knows that the pretty operation creates brain lesions, and yet he chooses to keep this information to himself. Why? Because he and his parents fear that one of the runaways might return to the city, taking the secret with them. David’s solution? He reveals the secret to someone who’s already admitted she’s considering a return to the city. Smart, David. Very smart.
5. It’s true that Shay—who did make a good faith effort to introduce Tally to David—promised him she wouldn’t tell anyone about the Smoke. But was she given a choice? Given the benefit of the doubt, Shay’s act could even seem heroic. She broke her word to save her best friend from the pretty operation. But this is Shay. She’s never met the benefit of the doubt.
6. Although let’s not overlook the fact that she rarely follows through on any of those threats—instead, grudge or not, she always throws herself into yet another doomed phase of friendship with Tally. While it’s true that, in one sense, Shay carries out the ultimate revenge by making Tally a Special, it soon becomes clear that Shay sees this less as a punishment than as a reward. Shay’s “betrayal” is in fact nothing but an ill-fated attempt to cement her relationship with Tally. Specials believe that everyone else is pathetic and beneath them; Shay wants to rescue Tally from this hellish life of ineptitude. “I’m sick of all the mix-ups and bad blood between us,” she says, just before taking Tally down. “From now on, you and I are going to be best friends forever” (Pretties). Tally interprets this as a threat, but I would argue that in Shay’s Special-twisted mind, it’s a sincere and hopeful promise.
7. Let’s not forget, this isn’t the only time Tally steals one of Shay’s potential boyfriends. Although it’s glossed over, it seems clear that Shay is nurturing a serious crush on Zane—note “Zane’s praise lighting her face up like champagne.” Of course, once he meets Tally, even the minimal praise he spared for Shay trickles to a stop.
8. This isn’t the first time that Tally has found it convenient to rely on the crutch of biological determinism. In Pretties, when Peris backs out on escaping the city, Tally doesn’t try very hard to talk him out of it. Despite the fact that he’s her (former) “best friend forever,” despite the fact that he was a much trickier ugly than she was, criticizing the pretty operation in much the same way Shay used to, despite the fact that many of the characters we know and love, Zane included, back out on their first opportunity to run away, Tally just writes off Peris for good. “Maybe some people had always been prettyheads, even back before the operation had been invented. Maybe some people were happier being that way.”