Once she was in the bathroom, she flipped on the light and closed the door. It was nice for once to have the bathroom to herself. There were a lot of people living in the big old house in addition to Sabrina and Daphne: Uncle Jake, Granny Relda, Puck, and of course Elvis, the family dog, who often used the toilet as a drinking fountain. And they all shared one tiny bathroom. The line was long and privacy was in short supply.
Sabrina unzipped the little black bag, revealing a personal treasure trove of makeup: tubes of lipstick and lip gloss, eye shadow, mascara, blush, and foundation, as well as a variety of barrettes she had purchased with her allowance at a local drugstore. She dug her hands into the bag and went to work.
First she tried to apply the foundation, but it made her look like a ghost. Then, she accidentally put on too much blush, giving her a look of perpetual embarrassment. The mascara was thick and gloppy, and combined with the eyeliner, it made her look like an angry raccoon. The lipstick was fire-engine red.
When she was finished, she studied herself in the mirror and nearly cried. She looked like the joker from a stack of playing cards. She was hideous and worse, hopeless. She would never learn to use this stuff. Frustrated, she washed it all off. It was times like this when Sabrina especially missed her mother.
Lately, Sabrina’s appearance had become more and more important to her. Though she didn’t fully understand the changes she was going through, she knew they had something to do with growing up. It seemed like yesterday when she couldn’t have cared less about what she looked like, but now she spent hours contemplating hairstyles. She gave serious consideration to whether her shoes matched her tops. It seemed as if all she could think about was how others might see her, and she hated herself for it. She had always detested girlie-girls, with their little dresses and hair in ribbons. They were so stupid and superficial. Unfortunately, she could feel herself becoming one of those girls. Each time she applied her lip gloss, she imagined another fleet of brain cells dying a horrible death.
Luckily, no one in her family had noticed her preoccupation with vanity—most importantly Puck. If he discovered she was visiting the bathroom in the middle of the night to primp and study her flaws, he would make fun of her until she was old and gray.
Abandoning her beauty regimen for the night, she washed her face and was about to shut off the light and go back to bed when she heard something bubbling in the toilet. The lid was down and she couldn’t see what was causing the noise, but she had her suspicions. Before Puck moved in with the family, he had lived in the woods for a decade. So modern conveniences mesmerized him—none more so than the toilet. He loved to flush it over and over and watch the water swirl down the hole and disappear. For months he was convinced that toilets were some kind of magic, until Uncle Jake explained how indoor plumbing worked. Unfortunately, this knowledge only increased Puck’s interest, and it wasn’t long before he was conducting what he called “scientific research” to discover what could be flushed down the tubes. It started out with a little loose change, but the items quickly grew in size: marbles, wristwatches, doorknobs, balls of yarn, even scoops of butter pecan ice cream swirled and disappeared. Granny finally put an end to it all when she caught Puck trying to flush a beaver he had trapped by the river. Ever since, the toilet had been coughing up Puck’s “experiments.” Last week Sabrina found one of her mittens inside. Now, apparently, something else was making its way to the surface. She bent down and lifted the lid, hoping it was the missing television remote control, which had vanished months ago.
But it wasn’t the remote control. Instead it was something so shocking she would have nightmares about it the rest of her life and an unnatural fear of toilets in general. Who would expect to lift the toilet lid and find a little man sitting inside?
“Who goes there?” he said in a squeaky voice. He was no more than a foot tall and wore a tiny green suit, a green bowler hat, and shiny black shoes with bright brass buckles. His long red beard dipped into the toilet water.
Sabrina shrieked and slammed the toilet lid down on the creature’s head. The little man groaned and shouted a few angry curses, but Sabrina didn’t stick around to hear them. She was already running down the hallway, screaming for her grandmother.
Granny Relda stumbled out of her room. She was wearing an ankle-length nightgown and a sleeping cap that hid her gray hair. She looked the picture of the perfect grandmother, except, of course, for the sharpened battle-ax she held in her hand.
“Liebling!” her grandmother cried in a light German accent. Liebling was the German word for sweetheart. “What is going on?”
“There’s a person in the toilet!” Sabrina said.
“A what?”
Before she could answer, Uncle Jake came out of a room at the end of the hall. He was fully dressed in jeans, leather boots, and a long overcoat with hundreds of little pockets sewn into it. He looked exhausted and in dire need of a shave. “What’s all the hubbub about?”
“Sabrina says she saw something in the toilet,” Granny Relda explained.