Invisible Inkling

I Can’t Take All the Tutus

This year, I am nine and Nadia is sixteen. I’m not sure what I’m going to be yet, but Nadia is going to be a unicorn. Unicorns are very in this year. Not pretty unicorns with pink ribbons in their manes. Devil unicorns with red eyes and sharp teeth and blood dripping out of their mouths.

Nadia’s unicorn head has been hanging off her bedpost for a couple weeks now.

“It’s not safe out there with Nadia,” I tell Inkling. “She’s booed me two years in a row. She left me alone in the dark and took my candy.”

Right now it’s the Monday before Halloween. Inkling’s eating leftover Thai food and sitting on our kitchen counter. I can see the bits of carrot disappear as they slide down his gullet. “Can’t you trick-or-treat by yourself?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Only inside our building. My parents say if I go out, I have to be with a friend and his parents or they’re going to make Nadia stick with me the whole time. They say Brooklyn can be dangerous at night.”

Inkling and I are alone in the apartment after school. Well, not really alone. Mom is in her bedroom paying bills. I’m not allowed to disturb her.

“Go with Chin from downstairs,” Inkling says. “She seems nice. I bet her mom would take you.”

Chin is nice. But I know for a fact she’s going trick-or-treating with Locke, Linderman, and Daley, her three best friends. All girls.

Chin and I are building a Taj Mahal out of matchsticks together after school some days, and she’s a really good drummer and excellent at playing alien schoolchildren, too—but there’s a whole ballerina side to Chin that I don’t really get.

“No Chin on Halloween,” I tell Inkling. “I can’t take all the tutus.”

“How do you know she’ll wear a tutu?”

“Oh, she’ll wear a tutu, all right,” I say. “She’ll wear a tutu, and Locke will wear a tutu, and Daley. Linderman, I don’t know about for sure. But I wouldn’t put it past her.”

Inkling waves a piece of broccoli at me. “Trick-or-treating with tutus is definitely better than trick-or-treating with Nadia. That unicorn head she’s got in her bedroom is terrifying.”

“You went in Nadia’s room?”

“She bought new hair spray yesterday.”

Lately, Nadia is always yelling at me for going in her room. She says if I do it again, she’s going to snap my fingertips off like asparagus spears. Only, I never go in there.

Until now, I haven’t had any idea what she was talking about.

It’s Inkling. Looking for products to fluff up his fur. “Don’t go in her room,” I tell him. “It makes trouble.”

He ignores me. “Is she wearing only the head or does she have a whole unicorn suit?” he asks.

“A suit. Why?”

“Could be even scarier than zombies if she and her friends are making a whole herd,” Inkling answers. “I saw unicorns in Cameroon all the time. Those things are no joke.”

“Unicorns don’t exist.”

“What do you know? You didn’t know bandapats existed until I showed up.”

He has a point.

Inkling must be standing on his hind feet on the kitchen counter, because he puts his padded paw on my shoulder. “Unicorns are descended from the kangaroos of the redwood forests,” he says. “There was this famous bandapat, Lichtenbickle. He had a tame unicorn. But most of them are extremely bloodthirsty. It’s a little-known fact.”

“Hello? There are no kangaroos in the Cameroon redwoods.”

“Are too.”

“There are no Cameroon redwoods at all!”

“Oh please,” says Inkling. “There are whole parts of Cameroon that aren’t on North American maps. You think North American mapmakers care about getting details right in Cameroon? There are a million things left off maps all the time. Things left out of encyclopedias! Things not in books, or on the internet, or in papers of any kind!”

“But—”

“Think about it,” says Inkling. “Bandapats. And glacier pumpkins, right? So maybe unicorns. Maybe even ghosts!” He grips my shoulder dramatically.

“Maybe ghosts?”

“Yes. Maybe.”

A chill goes down my spine. I change the subject.