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 felt something. 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 a used secondhand gift. Somebody’s old junk. My Bratz doll is new. 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.