The Crime of the Century

Newsletter 2020-06-28

My 10-year-old got stabbed in the eye. Not the actual kid, but a picture of her on the cork board above her bed. It was a group photo from one of her extracurricular clubs in the Before Times, back when school was a place you went and not just something you did on your laptop before streaming cartoons for the rest of the day. Someone singled out Betsy in the picture and jabbed a pushpin right through her head. At the very least, it was an act of vandalism. At most, it was the first step of an elaborate hex. You can learn how to do anything on YouTube these days. Someone in this house was in big trouble. Betsy was unlikely to have stabbed her own picture, and the pigs don’t have thumbs. That left her three sisters as suspects. I had to get to the bottom of this. It wasn’t how I wanted to spend my Thursday night, but justice can’t wait. No one expects the Parental Inquisition.

My six-year-old, Lucy, emerged as an early suspect. She had a history of messing with Betsy’s push pins when she…