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Jeremy gave the throttle another turn. The wheels spun more furiously.

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

Jeremy’s father pressed a red button on the transformer to activate a whistle on the engine. “There’s so much more stuff you can get. Buildings and trees and little people. One boxcar has a trapdoor on the top and a giraffe sticks its head out and then drops it back just in time, and...”

Jeremy wasn’t listening.

He lay down on his side, ear to the floor, the train’s vibrations reverberating through the tracks and into the hardwood, buzzing their way into his skull. Every few seconds the train raced past, the engine chuffing furiously, the various cars in tow, the red caboose trailing, the glorious chorus of metal spinning on metal, the smell of ozone in the air.

Jeremy was mesmerized. He could lie here like this for hours, imagining himself in the cab of that locomotive, shoveling coal from the tender into the firebox, elbow on the window ledge, head poked out to view the track ahead, a red kerchief tied around his neck blowing in the wind, the world flying past.

It felt... magical. As though he and the engine had somehow become one and the same, fused together. He remembered that book his mother read to him when he was two or three, about that little engine that could. Jeremy was that engine now, and he could do anything.

“Have fun,” his father said, and went to the kitchen with Jeremy’s mom.

Jeremy tentatively touched his finger to the track, pulling it away a millisecond before the train swept past on its latest loop. He felt a small charge, that tingle again. He knew that wasn’t supposed to happen, but he definitely feltsomething. Maybe this train was different. Special, even—

“Oops,” said Glynis, kicking over the red boxcar and sending the entire train off the tracks.

Jeremy was so transfixed that the derailment hit him as though he’d been awakened from a dream. He looked first at the fallen train, then slowly turned his head to look up at his sister.

She said, “You got ausedsecondhand gift. Somebody’s old junk. My Bratz doll isnew. I’m gonna eat your Cinnabon.” She set her doll on the living room couch and disappeared into the kitchen.

Jeremy pondered his sister’s history of villainy as he looked at the devastation she had wrought, this scale train wreck. Telling him the truth about Santa and the Easter Bunny. The time she put rabbit turds in his ice cream. Stuffed a dead toad into the toe of his runners. Told everyone at school he’d wet the bed. That time she stole three dollars from their mother’s purse and, when it looked as though she might be found out, slipped the bills under Jeremy’s pillow. Their mother found them when she was changing the sheets. Jeremy’s protestations of innocence were to no avail.

Glynis was a very, very bad sister.

She was his tormentor. He was her victim. It had always been this way. He’d considered retaliation before, but anything he attempted would bring serious blowback from his parents. He couldn’t just hit her or pull her hair or put a snake in her underwear drawer. He wished he were more creative, that he could find a way to teach her a lesson without anyone tracing it back to him.

Then he rolled over and eyed the Bratz doll Glynis had left sitting on the couch, staring into the room with its dead eyes. And there, onthe floor, were discarded strands of green ribbon that had secured some of the now-unwrapped presents.

An idea was forming.

One day, his father had shared some old tapes of cartoons he’d loved as a kid. One was about a dumb Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman named Dudley Do-Right who was forever saving a girlfriend when she got tied to the railroad tracks by the nasty Snidely Whiplash.

Jeremy took the Bratz doll from the couch. Placed it across the track and secured it with the green ribbon. Then he put the locomotive and cars back onto the track.

See how Glynis liked it when hernewtoy got run over by hisusedtrain.

He cranked the throttle so hard the engine’s wheels spun as they sought purchase on the track. Only half a loop to go to make contact. There was no Dudley Do-Right coming to rescue Glynis’s Christmas present.

For a second there, as Jeremy looked into the face of the doll, he thought he saw the face of his sister.

That was not possible, of course. He blinked, and the doll went back to being a doll.

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

Jeremy hit the whistle button.

Woo-woo!

Rounding the turn. Almost there. The moment of impact a millisecond away.

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

And then,whomp.

What wonderful chaos. The doll was catapulted across the room, the flimsy ribbon cut by the loco’s wheels before the engine bounced off the track and landed on its side, taking the attached cars withit. It was, Jeremy thought, an epic derailment as good as any he had ever seen in a movie.