Diana Peterfreund - Rampant

For Dan. For Everything.

Unicorns are in the world again.

P ETER S. B EAGLE,

The Last Unicorn

Note: The unicorns in this book are real; they populate the legends, histories, and religious texts of Europe and Asia.

I WILL NEVER REALLY LEAVE , said the unicorn. Diamond sparkles floated from the tip of its glittering silver horn. I will always live in your heart.

I swallowed the bile rising in my throat and forced myself to continue reading.

Then the unicorn turned and galloped away, its fluffy pink tail swinging merrily as it spread its iridescent wings to the morning sunshine.

Oh, no. Not wings, too.

Every time the unicorns lavender hooves touched the earth, a tinkling like the chime of a thousand fairy bells floated back toward the children.

Shuddering, I raised my head from the picture book to look at the rapt, upturned faces of my charges. Bethany Myerson, aged six, was holding back tears as the unicorn bid good-bye to its new friends. Brittany Myerson, aged four, was chewing on the tail of her stuffed poodle.

And I, Astrid Llewelyn, aged sixteen, just wanted the brats to go to sleep. I think thats enough for tonight, huh, girls?

No! They shrieked in unison.

I sighed and returned to the saccharine story. I usually like babysitting, but taking care of the Myerson girls is intolerable. Always with the unicorns in this house. Each kid has a half dozen plush or plastic horned beasts lying piled on her bed, and Bethanys bedroom is even ringed with a wallpaper border of unicorn heads with shimmering eyes and horns that glow in the dark.

I could hear Lilith now: Well, kiddo, at least it means theyve been decapitated.

My friend Kaitlyn has a mortal fear of clowns. Her mom took her to Ringling Brothers circus in her formative years, and this white-painted thing with a huge blue wig and a bulbous, blinking red light for a nose scared the crap out of her. She wont even go to the state fair, and were in high school. Parents can really scar a kid with stunts like that.

Sometimes I wondered if my mother, Lilith, understood the kind of damage she was inflicting on me with all her delusional stories about bloodthirsty unicorns. When I was six, and all my friends wanted to play unicorns and run around the playground on imaginary horned mounts named Rainbow and Starlight and Moonbeam, do you think I was the most popular kid in school?

I briefly considered giving the Myerson kids the same lecture Id given the other first graders on the playground:

Unicorns are man-eating monsters. They dont have wings, they arent lavender or sparkly, and you could never catch one to ride without its goring you through the sternum. And even if it somehow managed to miss your major arteriesand it never missesyoud still die from the deadly poison in its horn. But dont worry. My great-great-great-great-great-aunt Clothilde killed the last one a hundred and fifty years ago.

Except now I guessed it would be more like a hundred and sixty. How time doth fly in a unicorn-free world. Also, now I no longer believed my moms horror stories.

After several more pages of cotton-candy torture, the book ended and I firmly tucked Bethany and Brittany into bed. At last. Lulled into soporific splendor by the lackluster adventures of Sparkle the Unicorn and his merry band of Ritalin dependents, the girls soon drifted into the Land of Nod.

Good riddance.

I wished I could forget my early indoctrination and act sanguine about these namby-pamby unicorn stories. But one-horned beasts of any stripe still gave me the willies.

My mother considers herself a militant purist. She believes that this so-called revisionist unicorn history is a disgrace to the sacrifice of our ancestors. That we should be honoring their memories by promoting the truth about these vicious beasts.

These vicious, extinct beasts, I reminded her whenever I was feeling particularly cheeky. Usually, I didnt deign to answer at all. Id long ago learned that indulging her fantasies meant chaining myself to her lifestyle.

I set up my trusty baby monitor, closed the bedroom door, and called Brandt on the cell phone Lilith finally got me last winter. Theyre asleep. You can come over now, but I have to meet you outside.

This was more for my protection than out of consideration for the slumbering children. First of all, I dont know how much more I could take of the unicorn-inspired decor. Their toys were all over the house. Second, Brandt and a couchor worse, an empty master bedroomwere a very bad combo. He morphed from vaguely risqu fling to bad-boy octopus man whenever he was in the vicinity of any marginally promising flat surface.

I was far less interested in protecting my virtue than I was in not giving it up to a boy who couldnt pass intermediate French.

But despite his problems with the Gallic tongue, Brandt was not lacking in other characteristics prized by that culture. Like the kissing kind. A few minutes later, I was sitting on the front porch of the Myersons house, waiting for him to arrive and wondering what would happen when he did. The forest smelled wet and moldy tonight, and someone in the neighborhood must have had a fireplace going. In the gloom beyond the oblong bit of lawn illuminated by the house lights, I watched the trees swaying in the night breeze. They flashed the white undersides of leaves at me, then the dark tops, moving in a strange, solemn rhythm beyond my comprehension. I stared at them for a while, hypnotized, then suddenly shivered. When you sit in the only lighted spot in an area, you cant help but think something is watching youtrees, little night critters, ravenous insects swarming just beyond the reach of your eyes.

The hairs rose on the back of my neck. Something was watching me. I glanced up at the bedroom window, half expecting the pale face of one of the Myerson girls to be pressed up against the glass, despite the lack of noises coming from the baby monitor. But no one was there. Still, the fear didnt dissipate. I turned my attention to the fringe of woods, as if Id be able to see little cartoon eyes blinking out at me from the darkness.

Silly Astrid. No more unicorn stories before bedtime , I thought in my best impression of Lilith. She was probably at home reading up on unicorns in one of her many rotting old bestiaries. Its her favorite hobby, but she considers it serious research.

In the eyes of her family and the university discipline department that pulled her academic funding around the time she got knocked up with me, my mom iseccentric. Unbalanced. They mean nuts . By the time I was born, it was bye-bye Ph.D., hello career of short-lived stints in every field from medical transcription to window washing. My uncleher brotheralways said my mom had so much potential . Too bad about the crazy.