Not a Unicorn Read online

  “Because of me,” I say weakly.

  “No! Oh, no, sweetie, not because of you!” She pulls my chin toward her, and I reluctantly look her in the eyes. “Not because of any one thing.” She pauses. “Maybe because of your deadbeat father. But never because of you.”

  Mom got pregnant and married my father in college. She had a plan back then: to graduate and become an English teacher. Then I came and grew a horn, and we all know the rest.

  “You’re the one good thing in her life,” Grandma says. “I know that to be true. So just . . . don’t be so hard on her. That’s all.”

  I know Mom and Grandma mean well, but all their great life advice is for someone who doesn’t have a horn. The way I see it, I’ll only get what I want in this life—the things they want for me—when I’m without it.

  “And,” she says slyly, “maybe going to the state finals would be good for you, just like it was for your mom.”

  I sigh. “How do you know I’ll go to the state finals?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? I had a word with my crystal ball.”

  “Funny, Grandma,” I say, but we smile at each other.

  “It would be good for your mom, too,” Grandma says. “To see you up there doing what you love.”

  I flip back to the photo of Mom at her state finals. She looks so confident and sure of herself. Don’t they know that all I want is to feel like that?

  Other People’s Property

  Mystic sits at the desk next to mine in the middle of Coach Tuck’s class. Coach T., who teaches PE, history, and detention, gave Mystic detention as soon as we showed up late for PE. I guess you could call that the circle of life.

  That was yesterday, after I spent forever in Mrs. Whatley’s office trying to convince her that I did have a good reason for leaving school on my own. She, however, saw it differently. There’s never an excuse to leave school without permission! Something could have happened to you and the school would’ve been responsible! Don’t you know you could have come to me to deal with the problem instead! Blah. Blah. And blah.

  No dice. She may be the WORLD’S GREATEST MOM according to the coffee mug on her desk, but her only gift to me was a weeklong detention slip and a hall pass to the gym.

  Outside Whatley’s door, Mystic was leaning against the wall, waiting for me. A nice surprise, but a dumb one. We’d both be late for PE now, which would mean detention for both of us.

  Nicholas, on the other hand, does not have detention. Barry emailed Mrs. Whatley with some flimsy reason about why he left school early, and she bought it. Such is the circle life on Park Street with a stay-at-home dad.

  Detention is almost empty. Behind us are a couple of seventh graders I don’t know, and a solo sixth-grade hooligan wearing a hoodie near the door. Carmen is waiting outside in the hall. Not even she wants to be in the detention room.

  We’re supposed to do homework, but instead I’m drawing a distinctly nonmagical creature, a fox, on the back of an algebra handout.

  “What’s he doing here?” Mystic whispers. I look up: Noah is walking through the door.

  “You’re late, Mr. Samuels,” Coach T. says from behind his desk.

  “Sorry, Coach,” Noah answers. “I’ve never had detention before.”

  I can tell from the look on Coach T.’s face that he thinks that’s a dumb excuse. “Well, take a seat, rookie.” Noah’s eyes meet mine before he scoots into a desk a few rows ahead of us.

  Could he be in detention because of my stuffed unicorn? Nicholas said Noah yelled at Mrs. Whatley. Would she have thrown him in detention for that?

  I glance over at Mystic, who’s contentedly catching up on her math homework. Her pencil flits through problem after problem with the precision and speed of a hummingbird. “What do you think he got detention for?” I whisper.

  Coach T. lets out a “Shhhh!” before going back to grading the stack of papers on his desk, so Mystic just shrugs.

  I stare at the back of Noah’s head and wonder where my little unicorn is now. Probably at the bottom of a trash can, frightened and alone. Thanks again, Noah.

  Coach T. stands all of a sudden. “I’ll be back in a sec,” he says. “No talking, unless you want to add to your sentence.”

  As soon as he closes the door behind him, the seventh graders start whispering. I turn to Mystic, but she’s still engrossed in her math. There’s her usual stack of homemade bracelets on her arm. But there’s something else, too, tucked between her creations. Another bracelet. A really nice one. Gold with a pink stone in the middle.

  Her eyes dart from her homework to me, and her sleeve comes down fast.

  It takes two seconds for me to put it together. “Is that Brooklyn’s bracelet?” I whisper.

  She ignores me as Noah looks our way. I wait for him to turn back around, then I whisper harder, “Mystic!”

  “No,” she answers quietly. “It’s nothing.”

  “No, it’s not!” I say, low but urgent. “That is her bracelet!”

  Her eyes fire back at me. “Don’t worry about it, okay?”

  Slowly, I turn back to my fox drawing. What does she mean, don’t worry about it? Did Mystic steal Brooklyn’s bracelet?

  Mystic has an invisible moat around her that keeps most people away. For a long time, her moat made me think she didn’t like me. She was friends with Nicholas, and I was becoming friends with him, too. But at that point, Mystic and I hadn’t gelled yet.

  Then one day, a few months after the Noah incident, we were walking down the hall when Robert Davis pretended my horn was a basketball net and his empty cup was a basketball. He shot and scored, landing the paper cup on the tip of my horn. I was embarrassed, but Mystic almost clobbered him. That was the day her moat disappeared, at least for me, and I was granted access to Castle Mystic.

  Anyway, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt her invisible moat, but I feel it rolling toward me now. The image of her plucking Brooklyn’s bracelet from a locker-room bench and secreting it away pings around in my head and can’t find a place to land. Mystic is stealing. I force Mystic’s gaze to mine. “Don’t lie to me.”

  Just then the door opens and quiet snaps over the room like a whip. Coach T. is back. He scans the room as if sensing words have been spoken here. “Twenty-five more minutes, people.”

  “Well, at least he got detention, too,” Nicholas says. We’re in Nicholas’s room doing homework on the floor next to his bed, and by “doing homework,” I mean Nicholas is rereading a back issue of Highwaymen while Mystic is helping me with algebra.

  Nicholas waited for us outside detention with Carmen. He didn’t know she was there, of course, and when we walked out, I caught Carmen snorting over his head and Nicholas eyeing the air above him suspiciously, like he was being toyed with by a ghost. I stifled a laugh, not wanting to encourage her.

  Ethan was waiting, too, standing by a Save the Date poster for the eighth-grade dance. He looked away when he saw Mystic and me, and he and Noah circled around me like I had leprosy or something, leaving hurt feelings in their wake. Carmen whinnied angrily after them.

  Now, sitting on the plush and unstained carpet on Nicholas’s floor, I look up from my algebra problem. “We don’t know that’s why Noah got detention. Maybe we’re jumping to conclusions.”

  “Uh, he stole your unicorn,” Mystic says. But her eyes drop as soon as the words are out of her mouth, and I see her sleeve is now securely covering her arm and all the bracelets hidden there.

  I gaze up at the solar system hanging from Nicholas’s ceiling. His parents have money. His sister, Sarah, goes to a fancy college. But Mystic, she’s more like me: not much money, single mom, a dad in Florida who drinks too much. And she has a little brother to protect from it all. I wonder if anyone else knows she’s stealing.

  “Ethan’s a dork,” Nicholas says to get a rise out of Mystic, but she doesn’t take the bait. He nudges her leg with the toe of his shoe. “Why are you all weirded out?”

  Mystic’s eyes shoot m
y way. “I’m not weirded out.”

  “Could have fooled me.” Nicholas shrugs and gets up, tossing me his Highwaymen. “We need snacks,” he says, and leaves the room.

  This is my chance. “You’ve got like two minutes to talk to me.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Mystic says, already on the defensive.

  I feel my mouth gape open. “What? Stealing? That is a big deal. You know that.”

  “I’m not stealing,” she says. “I’m just borrowing.”

  It’s her casual tone that freaks me out. “Yeah, right. Then you won’t mind if I tell Nicholas?”

  “Come on,” Mystic snaps, slipping into pleading mode. “I don’t want him to know. It’s seriously not that big of a deal. He won’t even care.”

  “Then tell me,” I say, holding my ground. “How long have you been stealing?”

  “I haven’t been stealing. It’s just . . .” She looks away, then says quietly, “Brooklyn was so careless with this.” She touches the bracelet under her sleeve. “It was sitting on the bench for a long time. Not just a second like she said. And I had this thought like, why does she get to have so many nice things? And she doesn’t even take care of them. It’s not fair.”

  “So it’s fair for you to take it?”

  Her eyes are vulnerable in a very un-Mystic-like way. “Well, no, but . . .” It goes super silent between us, until she says, “I’m going to give it back.”

  “You are?”

  She nods. “It just felt so good on my arm.” Mystic rolls up her sleeve, and we both admire Brooklyn’s beautiful bracelet sandwiched between Mystic’s handmade ones. “I thought it wouldn’t hurt to keep it for a while. Make her miss it. Make her be more careful next time.” Mystic pauses, her eyes on the pink stone. “I was tempted to deconstruct it and use it to make new bracelets. But I guess once I did that, there’d be no going back.”

  “Myst, you’re really good at your jewelry,” I say. Mystic’s jewelry may be weird, but it’s also good. I guess it’s what you’d call original. “You don’t need her dumb mass-market thing.”

  “But just think how good I’d be if I had materials like this.”

  “Yeah, but you make so much out of so little. Don’t you think doing it your way is just . . . cooler?”

  “You think so?” Mystic smiles at me.

  “Yeah, I do.” I smile back.

  Mystic rolls down her sleeve, covering the bracelets. “Tomorrow,” she says. “I’ll leave it in the locker room tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I say, and, as if in triumph for my moral victory, my forehead pangs, throbbing right under my horn. I can tell Carmen feels it, too, because she whinnies from where I left her in Nicholas’s front yard.

  I gaze at Mystic’s beautiful, hornless forehead like it’s a bracelet left carelessly behind by a girl who doesn’t appreciate it. And I understand why she did what she did. Because if I could steal that, I’d do it in a second.

  Emails from Angela

  I wake up to see my mom standing at the side of my bed, staring at me. It’s unsettling.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I got a phone call a few minutes ago,” Mom says.

  I rub my eyes sleepily. “Yeah?”

  “From a Dr. Stein in Los Angeles.”

  I bolt up in bed and almost fall over. My horn tends to unbalance me when I move too fast. “Um . . . who?” I ask nervously. How did he call her? I never gave him a phone number.

  “He said he didn’t want to email me back because he wanted to tell me the news on the phone.” I can’t read her face. It’s tight, almost expressionless. “That’s strange, I told him. Because I’ve never emailed this man. I’ve never even heard of him. But he’s heard of me—and my daughter who has a horn on her head.”

  My heart is beating so fast. “Mom, what’d he say?” I know I’m in trouble but I’ll deal with that later.

  “About which part?” she says. “About you faking an email address for me? About you emailing him as if you were me? About—”

  “About my horn!” I practically shout. “Can he do the surgery?”

  She stares at me for a long moment. “First you skip school, and now you’re sneaking behind my back with this. I don’t know who you are anymore.” She pauses. “We have a plan, remember?”

  “We need a new one, remember?” I swipe back.

  She purses her lips together tightly, then gets up and stalks out of the bedroom.

  “Mom!” I call out after her. She doesn’t answer, so I jump out of the bed and rush to the kitchen, where Grandma’s eating cereal at the table, I’m sure wondering what all the fuss is about. “What did he say?”

  “He said that I did an excellent job getting him all the scans he needed. He said that I was a wonderful mother who clearly cares very much about her daughter. Oh, and he thanked me for my patience and apologized for everything taking so long.” Mom raises her eyebrow. “Because get this! I’ve been emailing with him since May! A whole four months ago. Did you know that? I sure didn’t!”

  “Who have you been emailing, Angela?” Grandma asks innocently.

  “Well, that’s the funny thing, Mama. I haven’t been emailing anyone! Jewel has!” Mom’s eyes pierce right through me.

  I don’t have any defense but desperation. It’s weak, but it’s all I’ve got. “Mom, what else was I supposed to do? Just because you think it’s okay for me to have this horn for the rest of my life . . .” I’m surprised to find my voice wobbling. “It doesn’t mean it’s okay with me!”

  “Jewel.” Her voice lowers. “It’s too dangerous. That’s what all the doctors said.”

  “Not this doctor!”

  “That’s what concerns me.” Mom shakes her head. “You don’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand?” I feel like a bowling ball is lodged in my throat. “I wish you could have a horn on your head. For just one day. Then you’d know what it’s like to get stared at all the time. To almost kill someone because of this!” I point to the horn for extra emphasis.

  “That was an accident—”

  “It doesn’t matter! It happened. Everybody is always going to see me as the girl who gored Noah Samuels.”

  “Oh, honey. No they’re not.”

  I’m so frustrated I could scream. “Please, Mom, please! I’m sorry, okay. I shouldn’t have lied. I know that. But that’s how important this is to me! I’ve got one chance—maybe the only one I’ll ever get—to do something about this.” I stare into her eyes pleadingly. “Just tell me what he said.”

  Her pause makes me sweat, and when she finally speaks, she’s cautious. “Something about how the research he’s been doing is working. And that they’re ready for the next stage.” Her face crumbles. “He thinks he can do it.”

  Now I do scream.

  “But Jewel, no.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I told Dr. Stein everything. He knows you wrote the emails. And now he knows how I feel about it. You need parental consent.”

  “Which. You. Have. To. Give. Me,” I say, emphasizing each word. “Mom, please.” I don’t think I knew the meaning of “please” until right now.

  “Jewel, we don’t know anything about this doctor. Just because he says he might be able to do this doesn’t mean he can do it safely.”

  “But I told you! Dr. Stein is different. Do you know how many doctors I’ve researched? How many I’ve emailed?”

  Her eyebrows crease. “No, how many?” “A lot.”

  “How many is a lot?”

  “Seventy-four,” I say, more quietly.

  “Seventy-four!” she says, not quietly at all. “How long have you been doing this?”

  “A long time,” I say, not letting my eyes drift from hers.

  When Mom turns away, I look at Grandma, who’s staring at me in disbelief. Behind her, outside the window, is Carmen, and I wonder how much she’s heard. I go to the window and close the blinds.

  “Mom,” I try again, lowering my voic
e.

  She sighs and looks back at me. “Even if I said okay—which I am not saying—how are we supposed to pay for this?”

  “That’s the thing, Mom. I’d be part of his research project. We wouldn’t have to pay. They’d take care of everything.”

  “You’d be a guinea pig,” Grandma says.

  I look at Grandma. The confusion on her face has cleared. “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “They’d be experimenting on you,” Mom says. “That’s what that means. Our payment would be the risk you’re taking. The risk we’re taking. Something could go wrong. That’s why we wouldn’t have to pay.”

  “Yeah, but Mom,” I say, tears forming despite my struggle to blink them away. “What if something goes right?”

  “Jewel, honey, it’s too risky. I’d rather have you with a horn than no you at all.”

  I slap the side of my horn angrily, but that hurts only me. The desperation in my stomach crawls up to my lips. “Did you tell him no?”

  She nods. “I told him no.”

  The silence that descends upon us is heavy. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I can’t believe she would do this to me.

  Mom glances at her watch. “I’ve got to get to work. We can talk about it later.”

  “What’s there to talk about?” I say despondently.

  “When you have a child of your own, you’ll understand this.” She looks to Grandma. “Can you please talk to her?”

  I stand frozen at the counter while Mom picks up her purse and heads toward the door. After it closes, I hear Grandma say, “Jewel,” but it’s like she’s speaking to me from underwater. I go to our bedroom and shut the door.

  Frantically, I open my laptop and pray for a connection. I click on my email and start typing.

  Dear Dr. Stein,

  I know you spoke to my mom this morning. And I know she told you no. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lied to you. I shouldn’t have pretended to be her. But please, please, don’t give up on me. I’ve done the research. I know you’re the only one who can help me. I’m going to change her mind. PLEASE DON’T CHANGE YOURS.