Shocktarts

Puck had been finding little gold stars lying around the house.
“Star!” he cried, every time he found a tiny twinkling thing on the ground.
“Those are from my room,” Carrie-Bri told him. “I put them all over my room so they would glitter for me.”
Puck liked this idea.
That morning, pretty much everyone was in the kitchen while Collette and Francis prepared to begin algebra. Carrie was squeezing fresh orange juice, and Joe and Collette raided the cheese swirls and Ghirardelli chocolate drops from the wine basket that RABO had sent Dad for Christmas.
“Try some of the chocolate,” Collette said to Carrie, offering her the tin.
“I never was into chocolate,” said Carrie, after trying a piece. “It was always Reeses peanut butter cups or sour things. Like those shock tarts we always got after swimming lessons.”
“I can’t believe we ate all those at once,” said Collette.
“Those things were painful,” said Joe.
“Yeah,” said Carrie, “I remember sitting in the bathroom sink looking at all the blisters on my tongue. One time I thought I had leprosy.”
For the afternoon, Collette joined Mom and Carrie on a jaunt to the mall for Dad’s Christmas present — a dark charcoal gray overcoat. And they picked out the perfect scarf for him, with vertical stripes of burgundy, golden yellow, and charcoal. They all agreed that he would look very sharp in it.
And the day was concluded under a warmer cold than the day before, and gray skies.