Jeschonek Buzz Scanlan, the ten-year-old terror of Titusville, Florida, slammed down the lid of the white metal mailbox on the front of his house. Then he kicked the white siding below it so hard that he left a dent in the vinyl. And he kicked it twice more after that. Each time, the dent got deeper and his angry cries got louder. "Not there!" He scrubbed his fingers in his jet black rat's nest of hair, then smacked the mailbox with the flat of his hand. "It's not there!" He might have been the nastiest kid in the neighborhood, but he was right. Buzz had dug his dirty paw through every square inch of that mailbox and found nothing. The thing he should have found, the thing he'd been expecting, wasn't there. It was a good thing Buzz didn't have a grenade launcher just then. He was mad enough to use it. Because for the first time in five years, he hadn't gotten his special "present" on Christmas Eve.
