But the boys? Who were these boys? She should have been worried. She had met them, but she hadn’t paid enough attention. One was tall and thin and had longish (but seemingly clean) hair, and the other was short and a little stocky and had a shaved head. Both wore flannel shirts over white T-shirts and jeans with holes in the knees and Converse high-tops. They didn’t smell like smoke, their pupils weren’t dilated. They spoke little, and always smiled at her when she answered the door. They were always happy to see Robin. They both gave her high fives. They looked Jewish. Ethan and Aaron, Aaron and Ethan. How was she supposed to remember which was which?
Robin screamed at her the entire evening the boy went to the hospital, pleading, then demanding, that Edie let her go visit him. On her knees in the living room, with Richard sitting on the stairs, his presence pointless as usual, his elbows on his thighs, his chin in his hands, contributing absolutely nothing to the conversation. “She never listens to me anyway,” is all he said. Worst parent on the planet. All he knew how to do was bark orders and walk away. He didn’t understand that his daughter was smarter than that, that she wasn’t a dog. And Edie thought she knew how to handle Robin perfectly, but this, this hysterical girl, all Edie could do was try to hold her. When Robin was a toddler and she wasn’t getting what she wanted, she used to hold her breath until she turned blue. Edie had always ignored those antics, until once she passed out, and Edie never ignored her again, but Robin never held her breath again either. Both of them had learned. But here she was, unleashed, uncontrolled. She was not blue, though. She was bright red.
“It’s not our place,” said Edie. “He needs his family.”
“I’m one of his two best friends in the world,” said Robin.
Her hair had gotten so long this year, that’s what Edie was thinking while watching her daughter, hunched over, bawling. What a pretty girl she’s turned out to be. She reached out to touch her daughter, and Robin, at last, accepted her mother’s embrace.
That was two days ago, and now he was dead, and Robin had never gotten to say good-bye, but what would she have been saying good-bye to anyway? Edie remembered sitting at her father’s bedside before he died and wishing she hadn’t been there because he wasn’t as she wanted to remember him. His skin went from gray to blue to white, as if something were passing through him and then out again, like a small wave at low tide teasing a shoreline. Mourning was an awful feeling, a relinquishment of the soul. She would rather do anything but mourn.
Her daughter finished her cookies, got up from where she was sitting to take some more, and Edie stopped her and said, “Just take the whole thing. I’ve got more.” Robin gave her a dark look but took the entire package and returned to her seat.
“They were the only friends I had, Mom. Do you know that I don’t have any other friends?”
No, Edie didn’t know that.
“I have no one now.” Robin started to weep. She wept and ate.
“Hey, there are a lot of nice kids who live around here,” said Edie, not knowing if it were true or not.
“They’re all huge assholes,” said Robin. “They don’t like any of the bands I like and all they care about is what kind of jeans they’re wearing, which I can’t even fit into anyway. And they’re completely mean to me. They used to pick on me all the time until I met Aaron and Ethan.” She hiccuped. “And now they’re g-o-o-o-ne,” she wailed.
Edie noticed that Robin had only one row of cookies left to consume and wished she had three to five of them sitting on the table in front of her.
“I mean, don’t you get sick of it?” said Robin.
“Sick of what?”
“Sick of this,” said Robin, and she waved her hands in front of her body.
Edie stared at her blankly.
“Being fat? Come on, Mom. You and me. We’re fat.”
“I don’t like that word,” whispered Edie.
“You should hear what the kids say to me at school,” said Robin, suddenly motivated by something other than sadness, something new and cruel, a taste that was better than all the processed sugar in the world: bitterness. “They’d say it to you, too, but like ten times worse.” She put another cookie into her mouth, barely chewed it, and then it was gone. “Because you’re fatter than I am. So there’s more to say about you.”
“I’m sorry I disappoint you,” said Edie, crushed and crumpled, letting herself feel that way, letting herself sink down low.
“You don’t disappoint me,” said Robin. “You disappoint yourself.” And then she opened her mouth as if she were about to say something even worse, as if she were about to roar, but all that came out was a pile of dark, chocolate vomit, which landed in a thick puddle on the kitchen table. Robin stared at it, and then vomited again, and Edie began to gag, too, but somehow restrained herself from letting loose entirely, from freeing whatever was trapped inside her gut.
After that day, Robin grew thin quickly. She went to the boy’s funeral a week later, and the next morning she got up early and went for a jog around the block. A few weeks more, and she joined the track team. It seemed like it was only a matter of months before she looked just like all the other children in the neighborhood, while Edie remained exactly the same, alone at the kitchen table, surrounded by all her worldly pleasures.
The Golden Unicorn