Leslie Abbott is a high-school sophomore sitting in Geometry class, staring at x’s and y’s and z’s, and thinking about how everything equals something else in the end, how the world wants to make sense of itself through shapes, how measuring circumference is a lifelong chore of bra sizes and waist-to-hip ratios.
Leslie’s best friend, Janet, sits diagonally from her, facing the boy sitting in front of Leslie. Janet’s long bare legs point down, knees angled, ankles latched together so she can appear “not too easy.” They both know everything they do with their bodies is a signal, a symbol, a metaphor, open to interpretation.
She doodles in the margin of her notebook as the teacher talks about the order of operations, how adding and subtracting always comes last, after parentheses and exponents and multiplication and division. She thinks the simplest things should always come first, before the complicated pairings and powers that seem to rule the parallel world of the hallways. She outlines fat pyramids piled across lines, rhombuses receding into the distance, spheres stretching across the sides of her college-ruled paper.
She wonders whether everyone thinks she is too easy or not easy enough. Do they think she only has sharp corners, acute angles that aren’t cute? Is she so much less than Janet and Tina and Amy, with their obtuseness attracting the attention of every boy? Why can’t she make them see how special she is? She sighs, gnashing the long line of her pencil.
Leslie Abbott is bored.
She thinks, What isn’t boring?
She thinks, What would make Leslie Abbott less boring?
She thinks, Who is Leslie Abbott?
She turns the page, and a fresh set of lines and white space calls to her. She sketches a skinny isosceles. Then she curves the sides into spirals and scrawls flames flaring out of the tip.
Leslie Abbott, she thinks, is a unicorn.
Though she knows she is not a unicorn, not literally, she feels at her core that something is there. Something real about what she has thought. She draws her horse head beneath the horn, her long crimped mane, a single black-hole pupil peering back at her from the page.
Leslie Abbott scans the room to detect if anyone notices her transformation. Can they not see how long her horn has grown? How much she dwarfs the light from the fluorescent panels hanging from the ceiling? Can they not hear her confident snorts?
Everyone is still taking notes at their square desks. The teacher’s back is still turned. His voice drones on as he chalks letters and numbers on the rectangular board.
She waits for someone to realize she is a unicorn.
She fantasizes about an agent recognizing her at the mall this weekend for being her naturally beautiful self. How they will want to photograph her for the cover of “Sassy” magazine. How, surely now, she’ll be the envy of all the girls. Even Janet.
She draws her portrait across the entire page of her notebook. She adds tattooed crescent moons across her left hip and a smattering of asteroids over her cheeks. Her hooves are glittering moonstone, as are her teeth. She dips a wand into a tube of cherry lip gloss from her pocket and paints her mane. The sticky goo glistens like beetle shells.
Leslie Abbott is not boring, she thinks. Look at how amazing she is. Imagine all the things she can do, that only she can do, all the unicorn things she will do in her life.
She wonders if she can fly, if she can become invisible when she wants to be, if she can foresee into her future and love what she sees. She shades a graphite goatee onto her chin, shadows a barbed belt around her belly. She sniffs her arm and smells peppermint and petrichor.
She stands and stomps her foot on the ground next to her desk at the back of the room.
Everyone keeps writing; the teacher keeps talking.
She snorts and paws at the waxed linoleum with her sneaker, waiting for someone to acknowledge the noise she makes. She turns to her left, to the sound of birds cheeping outside, to a car thrumming down the street. In the parallelogram of the open window, she catches a glimpse of her reflection, her hair twisting in the breeze. A shimmering mist emerges from the horn on her forehead and quickly fills the volume of the room, obscuring everyone. She is indifferent to them. She grins, large teeth slick and glinting.
Leslie Abbott sits, limbs sprawling beyond the stable of her desk.
She thinks, I am a high-school sophomore and a teenage girl and a unicorn.
Now, she thinks, what else can I be?
