at the beginning, he recited the verses they had already heard on
Saturday and Sunday nights, arriving at that moment when Santa’s evil
twin stood at the kitchen door of the Stillwater house, intent upon
breaking inside.
“With picks, loids, gwizzels, and rocks, he quickly and silently opens
both locks.
He enters the kitchen without a sound.
Now chances for devilment truly abound.
He opens the fridge and eats all the cake, pondering what sort of mess
he can make.
He pours the milk all over the floor, pickles, pudding, ketchup, and
Coors.
He scatters the bread–white and rye and finally he spits right in the
pie.”
“Oh, gross,” Charlotte said.
Emily grinned. “Hocked a greenie.”
“What kind of pie was it?” Charlotte wondered.
Paige said, “Mincemeat.”
“Yuck. Then I don’t blame him for spitting in it.”
“At the corkboard by the phone and stool, he sees drawings the kids did
at school.
Emily has painted a kind, smiling face.
Charlotte has drawn elephants in space.
The villain takes out a red felt-tip pen, taps it, uncaps it, chuckles,
and then, on both pictures, scrawls the word
“Poo!” He always knows the
worst things to do.”
“He’s a critic!” Charlotte gasped, making fists of her small hands and
punching vigorously at the air above her bed.
“Critics,” Emily said exasperatedly and rolled her eyes the way she had
seen her father do a few times.
“My God,” Charlotte said, covering her face with her hands, “we have a
critic in our house.”
“You knew this was going to be a scary story,” Marty said.
“Mad giggles from him continue to bubble, while he gets into far greater
trouble.
He’s hugely more evil than he is brave, so then after he loads up the
microwave with ten whole pounds of popping corn (oh, we should rue the
day he was born), he turns and runs right out of the room, because that
old oven is gonna go BOOM!”
“Ten pounds!” Charlotte’s imagination swept her away. She rose up on
her elbows, head off the pillows, and babbled excitedly, “Wow, you’d
need a forklift and a dump truck to carry it all away, once it was
popped, ’cause it’d be like snowdrifts only popcorn, mountains of
popcorn. We’d need a vat of caramel and maybe a zillion pounds of
pecans just to make it all into popcorn balls. We’d be up to our asses
in it.”
“What did you say?” Paige asked.
“I said you’d need a forklift–”
“No, that word you used.”
“What word?”
“Asses,” Paige said patiently.
Charlotte said, “That’s not a bad word.”
“Oh?”
“They say it on TV all the time.”
“Not everything on TV is intelligent and tasteful,” Paige said.
Marty lowered the story notebook. “Hardly anything, in fact.”
To Charlotte, Paige said, “On TV, I’ve seen people driving cars off
cliffs, poisoning their fathers to get the family inheritance, fighting
with swords, robbing banks–all sorts of things I better not catch
either of you doing.”
“Especially the father-poisoning thing,” Marty said.
Charlotte said, “Okay, I won’t say ‘ass.”
“Good.”
“What should I say instead? Is ‘butt’ okay?”
“How does ‘bottom’ strike you?” Paige asked.
“I guess I can live with that.”
Trying not to burst out laughing, not daring to glance at Marty, Paige
said, “You say ‘bottom’ for a while, and then as you get older you can
slowly work your way up to ‘butt,” and when you’re really mature you can
say ‘ass.”
“Fair enough,” Charlotte agreed, settling back on her pillows.
Emily, who had been thoughtful and silent through all of this, changed
the subject. “Ten pounds of unpopped corn wouldn’t fit in the
microwave.”
“Of course it would,” Marty assured her.
“I don’t think so.”
“I researched this before I started writing,” he said firmly.
Emily’s face was puckered with skepticism.
“You know how I research everything,” he insisted.
“Maybe not this time,” she said doubtfully.
Marty said, “Ten pounds.”
“That’s a lot of corn.”
Turning to Charlotte, Marty said, “We have another critic in the house.”
“Okay,” Emily said, “go on, read some more.”
Marty raised one eyebrow. “You really want to hear more of this poorly
researched, unconvincing claptrap?”
“A little more, anyway,” Emily acknowledged.