Sometimes, it just felt like my bones were cracking apart. Like this shell that holds the mass of who I am broke right open, threw out all my small thoughts, all the revulsion toward my reality and the guilt—because how could there not be guilt when this was how I felt? How could I sit there and just feel unhappy by comparing the lives we were born into? That never felt right, but it was. It just was.

Still, I would not be helpless, so I just bent down on my broken knees and used my creaking arms to stuff the whole mess right back inside. I swelled up like a suitcase whose neatly folded contents had been thrown back in, worn and crumpled. I ate a sleeve of chocolate cookies, and two sleeves of the ones with the smiley faces on them. The vanilla cream inside bulged out of the eyes and the sugary smile on the cookie, so I licked the cream out of those first and then bit into the three layers of cheer-up. Cookie, cream, cookie.

I met those unicorns sometimes. I saw them on the holidays my parents took us on every few months, to resorts on the beach and city rooms with cloud-like beds. That was the only time we spent together as a family. I was always amazed when classmates worried about what a mother would say about an ink stain on a uniform or how a father would rage about a bad grade. My parents were almost never at home. I saw them rarely, at dinner, three or four times a week. It seemed so strange to me that there were mothers who saw what state their children came home in, who cooked lunch for them and knew what they were studying in class, or fathers who looked into their school books to check what grades they’d received. It seemed like an incredible, delicious violation of privacy, and I longed to be able to grouse about it with friends.