“I could envision it all to clearly: Stuart or Debbie finding the dented door off its hinges, lying in the snow. "She came in, ravaged the boy, stole plastic bags, and ripped off the door in her escape," the police would say in the APB. "Probably making her way to bust her parents out of jail.”

“We heard her come halfway up the stairs, where she must have seen the bedroom light on. Again, the normal parent reaction would have been to say something like, "You had better come out this moment or I am releasing the tiger!" But Debbie was not a normal parent, so we heard her gigle and creep away, saying, "Shhh! Rachel! Come with Mommy! Stuart is busy!”

“The locker at the end of her bed had no lock, and one of the hinges was busted. She opened it up.There was a thing in it.The thing might have been a sandwich at some point, or an animal, or a human hand...but what it was now was fuzzy and putrid.A minute later, Ginny was down the stairs, out the door, and gone.”

“Stuart's a wizard with those kinds of things," she said."What kinds of things?""Oh, he can find anything online."Debbie was obviously one of those parents who still hadn't quite grasped that using the Internet was not exactly wizardry, and that we could all find anything online. I didn't say this, because you don't want people to feel that they've missed something really obvious, even when they have.”

“She was standing in the airport of Copenhagen, staring at a doorway, trying to figure out if it was (a) a bathroom and (b) what kind of bathroom it was. The door merely said H.Was she an H? Was H "hers"? It could just as easily be "his". Or "Helicopter Room: Not a Bathroom at All”

“I envisioned huge piles of the Elf Hotel flying off the belt, taking down everybody in sight. I had seen pictures of that Elf Hotel - it had sharp candy-cane spires that could easily impale someone. If anyone was ever going to be killed by an Elf Hotel, it would be my parents.”

“He had let Aunt Peg live in his house and married her, so clearly he had a thing for flaky American types who liked to sneak off in the dead of night. That was, as Ginny remembered it, how America won the Revolution in the first place. The English walked around in bright red coats in straight lines and took breaks for tea, and the Americans snuck around dressed in rags and hid in trees and stole their horses. Or something. Whatever. She had to do this-it was her birthright. It was what George Washington would have wanted.”