Pip Bartlett's Guide to Unicorn Training Read online

  “It’s when it has bits of gravel in it,” said one. “That’s what I am talking about.”

  “Gravel? No, I was talking about silt. When it’s just a little gritty between your teeth.”

  “What about a good loam? Some fluffy muck is where it is at.”

  “None of you have said anything about clay.”

  I couldn’t tell if they were talking about lying in it or eating it.

  Anything but Rockshines.

  Reluctantly, I said, “You don’t have to help with this, Tomas, if you don’t want to. I was the one who agreed to help, after all.”

  Tomas didn’t reply, so I turned. And then turned again. “Tomas?”

  He was nowhere to be found. There were fewer people here than there had been when we first arrived in this area, but I still couldn’t see him among them.

  Then I caught sight of his bright blue backpack. He had let himself in among the Rockshines already and was, in fact, hugging one of them.

  I climbed over the temporary metal fence to join him. Tomas still had his arms wrapped around a Rockshine’s neck. His cheek was pressed up against its brown-gray or gray-brown cheek. The Rockshine looked bland. Tomas looked happy.

  “Tomas?” I asked. “What are you doing?”

  Tomas didn’t let go. “These are the best animals.”

  He didn’t normally make jokes, but I narrowed my eyes. “Are you being funny?”

  Releasing the creature, Tomas looked at its face. It sort of looked at his face, and also sort of at the ceiling, as its eyes were pointed two different directions. “These are my favorite. Look at them!”

  I was looking at them.

  Tomas hugged the Rockshine again. “They are the best. Look! He isn’t going to bite or gore or suffocate me! He’s just happy to be here! And I’m happy for him!” he said, tugging it even closer. The Rockshine strained to get back to its hay.

  I couldn’t decide which was more shocking: that anyone found the Rockshine to be the best, or that Tomas Ramirez was hugging a magical creature.

  “Well … I’m … glad you like them,” I told him.

  “What are they saying, Pip? Are they saying nice things? I bet they are.”

  The Rockshines, in true Rockshine fashion, were mostly just saying “Hey” to one another, and to the hay, and to me, and to Tomas, and to their feet. I told Tomas this.

  “Oh! Yes, here—have some hay!” Tomas said, unconcerned by just how little these animals had to say. Grabbing a handful of hay, he offered it to the nearest Rockshine, looking delighted when it mouthed it right out of his palm.

  I held out one of the rags. “Do you want to wipe its face?”

  Tomas tenderly dabbed its face. (“Look! It doesn’t mind at all!”) As he did, I noticed that the crowd around us was thinning. It felt, actually, like we were the only humans still left in this part of the arena. It took me a moment to figure it out—everyone must be headed to the center ring for round one of the Unicorn show!

  Grabbing a rag of my own, I moved quickly through the herd, wiping their eyes with a lot less affection than Tomas. Sometimes I moved too fast and I saw one begin to go invisible. I forced myself to move more deliberately; if the herd went invisible, we’d never be able to finish our task. And it wasn’t Ms. Gould’s fault that I wanted to be elsewhere. A promise was a promise.

  Which was hard to remember when somewhere, Regent Maximus was getting ready to go into the ring for the first time. I should be there.

  I had finished wiping down about twenty animals when I shot a glance back over to Tomas. He was still working carefully at wiping the stains off the first animal’s face. He kept pausing to pat it gently between its ears.

  I jumped as the Rockshine closest to me said, “Heyyy.” Its neighbor also said, “Heeeeyyyyy,” without lifting its head. The rest of the herd joined in: “Heyyy! Heeey. Heeyyyyyy.” Then Ms. Gould’s voice said, “I’m back! As you can hear—they know their mother, don’t they? Oh! You’ve done such a good job! Can I repay the favor?”

  The overhead loudspeaker announced, “Attention, Trident Guests: All Unicorns, please report to the main ring for round one of the Triple Trident.”

  “Tomas, that’s Regent Maximus!” I exclaimed so loudly that the three Rockshines nearest me immediately vanished. “I’m sorry, Ms. Gould, but we’ve got to go!”

  We sprinted through the mostly empty corridors of the competition. It was impossible to even see the center ring, though, because the crowd of people around it had grown so thick. Tomas and I jumped up and down, trying to get a good view over all the grown-ups’ shoulders. No use.

  “Come on!” I said. I grabbed the strap of Tomas’s backpack to guide him through the crowd, ducking under people’s arms and swerving around baby carriages.

  Were we too late? Had it already started?

  We finally broke through to the front of the crowd. The Unicorns were only just starting to enter the ring from a gate over to the right. The announcer called out the first Unicorn’s name from a platform at the opposite end of the ring as Tomas and I jogged along the edge of the fence. The loudspeaker echoed all around, like a voice underwater. All I could think was how overwhelming this must seem to Regent Maximus.

  “Do you see him?” Tomas called up to me.

  “Not yet!” I called back. What if Mr. Henshaw hadn’t even been able to get Regent Maximus out of his stall? Faster, run faster!

  Reaching the end of the fence, we peered over it, trying to see down the line of Unicorns waiting to enter the ring. Tomas’s hair was all standing up again, but he didn’t bother to pat it down. Instead, he pointed. “There he is!”

  Regent Maximus stood at the very back of the line, just behind a very pale peach Unicorn with a tangerine-colored mane. Even from here, I could see his knees knocking in fright.

  “Regent Maximus!” I shouted.

  “Pip!” Mr. Henshaw said.

  “PIP!” Regent Maximus wailed.

  Thunderous applause welcomed the next Unicorn in line. The other waiting Unicorns all thrilled at the sound of adoration. With their perfectly coiffed tails and their coats curried until the building lights winked off them, they all looked just like the Guide’s illustrations of trained Unicorns.

  Regent Maximus, on the other hand, looked … well. At least he was clean. Mr. Henshaw had managed to finish getting most of the red Slurpee off his chest. His tail wasn’t brushed, but Mr. Henshaw seemed to have picked most of the straw out of it.

  But unlike the other Unicorns, Regent Maximus’s horn was pointed at the ground. He was so folded in on himself that he seemed half the size of the other Unicorns.

  I climbed the first board of the fence to get closer and asked Mr. Henshaw, “How is he doing?”

  “You can see him. Not grand,” Mr. Henshaw replied grimly. “Too bad he can’t be blindfolded. Come on, buddy, just one lap around the ring.”

  “Just one lap,” I repeated encouragingly so that Regent Maximus could understand.

  “A spiral of doom,” Regent Maximus sniffled. “Dooooooooom.”

  Mr. Henshaw couldn’t understand what his Unicorn was saying—it sounded only like a series of low-pitched whinnies—but he got the gist. He looked exasperated. “I’m not so sure he can manage the show-style walk. Or any walk at all.”

  In the ring, the Unicorn with the tangerine hair tossed his head back magnificently as he passed in front of the purple-cloth-covered table where Prince Temujin and the other judges sat. He chanted in time with his hooves hitting the ground: “I’m so pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty.”

  He seemed to be a crowd favorite—the people closest to him went wild and the ring was an explosion of photography flashes. As he minced out of the ring, I had to admit, he was particularly beautiful. His tail was so orange and bright I nearly had to squint to look at it.

  “Broken ankles, torn ACLs, hoof rot, twisted tibias,” Regent Maximus said, tossing his head with each word. It took me a moment to realize he was listing off all the bad
things that could happen to his legs.

  “This is probably pointless,” Mr. Henshaw said, as Regent Maximus nearly yanked the lead out of his hand when he said tibias. “The only way I got him over here was a blindfold; I should have known better.”

  Suddenly, an idea hit me. I remembered how we had blindfolded him with the scarf, and how I had wished that Regent Maximus could learn to ignore all of the sights and sounds of the show.

  I clambered over the fence.

  “Pip, what are you doing? We’re going in next,” Mr. Henshaw said. “Probably.”

  Taking Regent Maximus’s cheeks in my hands, I guided his quivering face so that he was looking at me. “Look at me, Regent Maximus.”

  His eyes rolled over to the ring, then over to the crowd.

  “Regent Maximus. Look. At. Me.”

  His eyes rolled to me.

  “I’m not scary, right?” I asked.

  “Mmmmrmmm mrmmmm,” he said, which wasn’t really an answer. But I felt him stop quivering a little.

  “I want you to look just at me. No matter where you are in the ring, don’t look at anything else. Only me. Nothing can hurt you as long as you’re looking just at me. Don’t look anywhere else.”

  He started to roll his eyes away but stopped himself. “Really?”

  “Yes,” I said. And it wasn’t totally a lie, right? Nothing was going to hurt him in the ring either way. “Just keep your eyes on me. I’ll be right here at the gate. Tomas and I will wave—right, Tomas?”

  Tomas waved a little, like he wanted to show Regent Maximus he could do it. Mr. Henshaw looked dubious—probably he thought I was being silly by talking directly to his Unicorn. But even he could see that Regent Maximus had at least stopped shivering.

  The announcer’s voice split through the speakers. “Ladies and gentleman, that was Forever Sparkle Stables’ Forever Sunshine! And now our final entry in the Triple Trident! Callaloo’s Multicolored Lies the Head That Wears the Crown!”

  Regent Maximus entered the ring.

  I thought people were probably expecting an especially grand Unicorn, given how fancy Regent Maximus’s show name was. Probably they were expecting Jeffrey Higgleston’s Ideal Unicorn. But instead of prancing like a crown-wearer, Regent Maximus crept out from the gate, lagging behind Mr. Henshaw. He didn’t mince or toss his mane like the other Unicorns had; he crawled. Or at least, it was the closest thing to crawl that a Unicorn can do. Picture a lizard with really long legs—legs that, to his credit, he was lifting up as high as he could, in a sort of slinky version of the Unicorn show-style walk. He kept his glorious rainbow tail pulled tight between his legs, and his ears were so flat on his white head that he looked like he didn’t have any.

  The announcer’s microphone squealed as the audience fell silent. The judges glanced at one another warily, like perhaps they were being recorded for a funny joke video.

  To his credit, he didn’t stop. He kept his head arced around, so he could watch me as he slunk-pranced around the first half of the ring. But he didn’t stop.

  “Pip! I’m doing it! My ankles feel fine!” he squealed as he rounded the far side, near the judges. He rose a tiny bit, picking up his feet even higher, like he was gingerly stepping over invisible spiders.

  “You’re doing great!” I called to him. The crowd was so quiet that everyone turned to look at me. I wanted so badly to step back and disappear, but there was no way Regent Maximus would finish his lap if I wasn’t there. So, the same way he was focusing on me, I focused on him.

  “Come on, Regent Maximus!” Tomas yelled, much to my surprise. He didn’t like people looking at him any more than I did. “You can do it!”

  And to my greater surprise, the crowd laughed a little. And to my greatest surprise, they started cheering Regent Maximus too.

  “Come on, buddy!” a man near me said.

  “Halfway there!” someone else said cheerily.

  “Go, go, go!”

  “Show ’em how it’s done, Recent Masi—what was his name again?”

  Regent Maximus couldn’t understand them, of course, but he could tell they were cheering for him. He looked a little frightened by it, and for a moment, I thought he was going to break. I pointed to my eyeballs, and he focused on them. And this time, when the crowd cheered, he began to scurry a bit faster. A bit faster still. And a bit faster still, until he was almost walking beside Mr. Henshaw. Mr. Henshaw risked patting the Unicorn’s neck in support.

  The crowd cheered louder.

  Regent Maximus still had his eyes firmly locked on me, but now he had his ears up enough that you could at least see them. He was listening to the crowd and not spooking! He was doing it!

  I motioned him toward me enthusiastically, while Tomas clapped.

  He made it to the gate. He made it. Hurrying over, I hugged him tightly—

  “Careful, Pip! You’ll collapse my windpipe!” he said worriedly. “Now can I go back to the stall and look at my picture again?”

  “Absolutely,” I told him.

  Overhead, we heard the announcer’s voice booming one last time: “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give one last round of applause for your thirteen Triple Trident contenders! On to round two!”

  He’d made it through one round, anyway.

  I never thought there would come a time when I was happy to be done with a day of magical creature showing, but I was feeling pretty good being back at the clinic after a long day of Rockshines and Unicorns. My ears were still ringing with the remembered sounds of animal and people noises—it was no wonder Regent Maximus was overwhelmed.

  Even Aunt Emma sounded tired as she walked into the house and sloughed off her bags by the door. “Pip, I hate to ask you to do more work, but do you think you could tend to the animals in the back cages while I work on a few of the patients that need my attention? Callie, can you order pizza?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Callie said.

  “I don’t mind,” I replied. It would be nice to do something in the relative quiet. I loved Aunt Emma, and Tomas was my best friend, and even Callie was all right when she wasn’t in a raging mood, but sometimes I just needed to have some absolute quiet or I started to feel a little strange.

  So I really didn’t mind cleaning out the cages in the back room. I went through all of the routines listed on the poster by the door.

  I also went through my routine, which was to run over all the facts I knew about the animals in the cages and see if I could use them to make them any happier. For instance, I knew the Short-Winged Salamanders liked to stay warm, so when I let them out of their cage to clean it, I plugged in a heating pad for them to cluster on.

  “Like summer!” one said, sounding pleased.

  “Like fire!” said another.

  “Like the sun!” said a third.

  “I’m burning!” said a fourth.

  “YAY!” they all said together.

  I sprayed down their cage and left the cleaner for a moment to soak in. While I waited, I removed a folded-up show bulletin from my pocket, the same as the one Marisol had shown me. I’d picked one up on the way out the door.

  Round two was “under saddle”—which meant Mr. Henshaw was going to have to ride Regent Maximus through the whole thing. I’d ridden Regent Maximus once before and had lived to tell the tale. But I could talk him through all the things that scared him. Mr. Henshaw didn’t have that ability.

  Still—between me, Tomas, and the Guide, surely we could train Regent Maximus up in time. We had to! Even if the round was too complicated for Regent Maximus to keep eye contact with us the entire time, he surely had to have gotten some confidence from surviving round one.

  Just then, Callie flew through the hallway door. She made an ew, gross face when she saw the Short-Winged Salamanders all lumped together; the Salamanders made their own version of the same face when they saw her.

  Callie purposefully looked away from them and told me, “Mom just got a call from the show authorities. Scandal, scandal
, scandal, at the show!”

  She didn’t say anything else, and I realized that she was waiting for me to reply. I echoed, “Scandal?”

  Callie folded her arms across her chest. “Yes! Someone waited until the show hours were over, and then snuck into the Unicorn barn area to cut off one of the Unicorn’s tails.”

  My heart chugged in my chest. “Not Regent Maximus!”

  “No, some Unicorn called Forever Shines the Sun or something like that— it was that pretty orange-haired one everyone liked in the first round. The tail was sawed right off—it’s just this long now, apparently.” She held her hands seven inches apart. “Scandal! Scandal!”

  “But why? Sabotage?” I asked.

  “Why else?” Callie asked. “It was one of the top Unicorns that got a haircut. Now all the others have a better chance of winning. Maybe your dear Mr. Henshaw did it, since there’s no other way that his Unicorn will win.”

  I frowned and began to collect my cleaning supplies. “That doesn’t seem like him.”

  Callie shrugged, aggressively unconvinced. She didn’t like Mr. Henshaw because he’d asked Aunt Emma out on dates a few times. Aunt Emma had turned him down, of course—she was still hoping my uncle Grady would be found, even though he’d been missing ever since he went out on a mission seven years before to prove Dragons still existed.

  I liked to think that I’d be unbiased when it came to Unicorn safety. But it just didn’t seem like Mr. Henshaw to cut off a Unicorn tail to get ahead in competition.

  “There are easier ways to win,” I said. “Like not buying a Unicorn like Regent Maximus.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s stuck with him now, isn’t he?” Callie said. “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. Even if Mr. Henshaw had lost his mind and decided to slash his way to the top, Regent Maximus was so far behind in the competition that Mr. Henshaw would have to cut off more than a few Unicorn tails to even stand a chance.

  That was what I told myself, at least.