Text Leveling System

The Problem Child

RDQ:	2731	Max Word/Sent	49	Total Words	4320		Diff Words	1285
Lex	1020	Ave Word/.Sent	11	Hi Freq occurs	3182	73.7%	Hi freq	517	40.2%
AR	6.3	Long Sentences	17.2	Low Freq occurs	313	7.2%	Low freq	244	19%

HE DESCENDED FROM THE CLOUDS LIKE AN ANGEL, enveloped an a ray of light so brilliant that Sabrina and Daphne had to shield their eyes and look away. When he landed nimbly on the ground and smiled at the group, the light dimmed just enough so that they could see his face. The man he had been just moments before was gone, his flesh replaced by shimmering crystal, his eyes by blazing fires, like two small suns shining down on them all. But when he glanced over at Sabrina, she saw that his transformation hadn't robbed him of his quirky, mischievous grin. He stepped toward her with extended arms, and she stumbled back in fear. His smile quickly turned to a frown.
"What are you doing?" Sabrina demanded.
"I'm granting myself a wish, "he answered. "I wanted to be powerful enough to make the people I love happy. I've been miserable. Happy is better. You can be happy, too. Wish for something, Sabrina. Anything. I can make it happen. "
"But look at the cost!" Granny Relda said as she hovered over Mayor Charming's rapidly aging body. His beloved Snow White lay next to him, reaching with bony, arthritic hands to touch his wrinkled face. Everywhere Sabrina looked, Everafters lay struggling against the sudden onrush of old age. Many were in the final throes of death.
"Don't cry for them, " the glittery being said to the old woman. "The Everafters have had their day in the sun and it was a long, long day. With their power I can recreate this world as a paradise where `happily ever after' isn't just for a bunch of bedtime stories come to life. It's time for all our dreams to come true!"
Five Days Earlier
Sabrina opened her eyes and saw a monster hunched over her. It was nearly fifteen feet tall, with scaly skin, two black leathery wings, and a massive serpentine tail that lashed back and forth. Its feet and hands were enormous, nearly as big as its body, and its head, at the end of a long snake like neck, was nothing but teeth, thousands of jagged fangs, gnashing in her face. A drop of saliva dripped from the creature's mouth and landed on her forehead. It was as hot as molten lava. `JABBERWOCKY! "the monster roared.
Too afraid to move, Sabrina closed her eyes and did the only thing she could. She prayed. Please! Please! Please! Let this be a bad dream!
After a few moments she slowly lifted one eyelid. Unfortunately, the monster was still there.
"Fudge," Sabrina whispered.
"Well, good morning!" a boy's voice called from somewhere in the room.
Sabrina knew its owner. "Puck?" "Did we wake you? So sorry!" "Could you get this thing off of me?" said Sabrina. "It's gonna cost you."
"What?"
"I figure if I'm going to have to save your butt every time you get into trouble, I might as well be paid for it. The going rate for this kind of job is seven million dollars," Puck said.
"Where am I going to get seven million dollars? I'm eleven years old!"
"And I want all your desserts for the next six months," Puck added.
The monster roared in Sabrina's face. A long, purple tongue darted out of the beast's mouth and licked her face roughly. "Fine!" Sabrina cried.
Puck leaped into the air, flipping like an Olympic gymnast, and clung to a dusty light fixture hanging from the ceiling
above. Gathering momentum, he swung down feet first into the monster's horrible face. The creature stumbled back and roared. Using the monster's face as a springboard, the nimble boy flipped again and landed on his feet with his hands on his hips. He turned to Sabrina and flashed her a mischievous grin, then pulled her to her feet. "Did you see that landing, Grimm? I want to make sure you get your money's worth."
Sabrina scowled. "How long was I unconscious?" she asked. Her head was still pounding from the smack the beast had given her upon her arrival.
"Long enough for me to get old big-and-ugly here pretty angry," Puck said as the brute recovered and rushed at the children at an impossible speed.
Two enormous pink-streaked wings popped out of Puck's back and fluttered wildly. Before Sabrina knew it, he had snatched the back of her coat and was pulling her into the air, narrowly avoiding the beast's attack. The wall they had just been standing in front of wasn't so lucky. The force of the monster's assault sent it crashing down.
"I've got the big one," Puck said as he set Sabrina back down on the floor. "You take the little one."
Sabrina followed his gaze. In the far corner of the room was a
small child wearing a long red cloak that hung to her ankles. She sat on a dirty hospital cot next to the unconscious bodies of two adults, Henry and Veronica Grimm-Sabrina's parents!
How Sabrina had gotten into this particular situation was a long, and almost unbelievable, story. It started a year and a half ago when her mother and father had mysteriously disappeared. The only clue the police had found was a blood red handprint pressed on the dashboard of their abandoned car. With nothing else to go on and no next-of-kin to step in as guardians, the police were forced to put Sabrina and her six year-old sister, Daphne, into foster care. That's when things went from bad to worse. The girls were bounced from one foster home to the next, each filled with certifiable lunatics who used Sabrina and Daphne as maids, gardeners, and once, as a couple of amateur roofers. By the time their long-lost grandmother had finally tracked them down, Sabrina didn't think she could ever trust anyone again. Granny Relda didn't make it easy, either. They hadn't been in the old woman's house ten minutes before she started telling incredible stories about the girls being the last living descendents of the Brothers Grimm whose book of fairy tales, she claimed, wasn't a collection of bedtime stories but a history of actual events. Granny Relda also told them that their new hometown, Ferryport Landing,
was filled to the brim with characters straight from fairy tales, who now called themselves Everafters and lived side by side with the normal inhabitants of the town, albeit in magical disguises that hid their true identities.
To Sabrina, Granny's stories sounded like the silly ravings of a woman who had forgotten to have her prescriptions filled, but there was a dark side to her story as well. These "Everafters" didn't just live in the town-they were trapped there. Wilhelm, the younger of the Brothers Grimm, had put a spell on the town to prevent the Everafters from leaving and waging war on humans. The spell could only be broken when the last member of the Grimm family died. Sabrina warned her sister that the old woman's stories were nonsense, but when Relda was kidnapped by a two-hundred-foot-tall giant, Sabrina could no longer deny the truth. Luckily, the girls found a way to rescue their grandmother and ever since they had taken on the family responsibility of being fairy-tale detectives, solving the town's most unusual crimes, and going head-to-head with some of its most dangerous residents. As they solved one mystery after another, the girls had started to uncover a disturbing pattern. Every bad guy they had faced was a member of a shadowy group known as the Scarlet Hand, whose mark was a blood red handprint just like the one the police had found in Sabrina and
Daphne's parents' car! Sabrina knew one day she would come face-to-face with the group's leader and her parents' kidnapper, and now, as she stared at the strange little girl in the red cloak, she was shocked. She had never thought the person behind all her misery would be a child.
Sabrina clenched her hands into fists, ready to fight her parents' captor, only to have a pain shoot through her left arm that nearly knocked her to the floor. It was broken. She shook off the agony and fixed her eyes once more on the child. The little girl was barely as old as Daphne, but her face was the twisted, rage-filled mask of an adult, barely holding back the insanity behind it. Sabrina had seen a man with that expression on the news once. The police had just arrested him for killing five people.
"Get away from my parents," Sabrina demanded as she approached the girl and grabbed her cloak in her good hand. "This is my mommy and daddy," the little girl shrieked as she jerked away. "I have a baby brother and a kitty-cat, too. When I get my grandma and my puppy, then we can all be a family and play house."
The girl raised her hand. It was covered in what Sabrina hoped was red paint. She turned and pressed it against the wall leaving the all-too-familiar scarlet print. The handprints were
everywhere-on the walls, floors, ceilings, windows, even on Sabrina's parents' clothing.
"I don't need a sister," the girl continued. "But you can stay and play with my kitty-cat."
She pointed at the monster, which was batting at Puck with its enormous clawed hands. The fairy boy was leaping out of the way of the beast's every swipe. He couldn't keep it up for long. The little girl's "kitty" was lightning fast. It whipped its tail at Puck, barely missing him and sending a dusty filing cabinet careening across the room. The drawers belched open and hundreds of yellowing documents spilled out.
Sabrina turned back to the little girl.
"Who are you?" she asked, but the child only smiled and reached into her pocket. She removed a small silver ring and slipped it onto her finger. A crimson light engulfed the little girl and Sabrina's sleeping parents.
"Tell my grandma and my puppy that I'm coming and I'll see them soon. Then we can play," the demented child said in a sing-song voice. She raised her tiny hands and suddenly the monster stopped fighting. It turned to the girl and its ferocious face became calm.
"Kitty, we need to find a new playhouse. Burn this one down." The little girl giggled and then the world seemed to
stretch, as if someone were pulling on the corner of Sabrina's vision, and, in a blink, the strange child vanished into thin air, taking Sabrina's parents with her.
"No!" Sabrina cried and rushed to the empty bed.
The monster opened its enormous mouth and a burst of flame shot out. The folding blinds on the dingy windows ignited and flames crept up the walls, turning the weathered wallpaper into ash. The beast blasted another wall and then another, sending sparks and cinders in all directions. Within seconds the entire room was on fire.
"Sabrina, duck!" Puck shouted.
Sabrina did as she was told, just as the monster's molten spray shot out inches above her head. It roared in frustration and smacked Puck with its long tail, sending him flailing across the room where he crashed against a wall and tumbled to the floor. His shirt caught on fire and Sabrina rushed to him, patting out the flames before the boy was burned. Puck crawled to his feet once more and stepped between Sabrina and the monster, which stood over them, jaws dripping. The boy snatched up the little wooden sword he kept in his belt and bonked the beast on the snout. "C'mon, ugly. I'm just getting started."
But before Puck could take another swing at the hulking
thing, a terrible groaning sound came from above and a huge section of the ceiling collapsed right on top of the beast. The two children staggered back from the pile of smoldering debris that now stood where the creature had been. Puck grabbed Sabrina and dragged her to safety as what was left of the ceiling rained down around them.
"I think this party is over," he said.
"Wait!" Sabrina shouted. "There could be a clue here to where she took my parents."
"Any clue is kindling now," Puck said pulling her down a hallway. "If you get killed, the old lady will never let me hear the end of it."
They passed by open rooms with doors torn off their hinges. Inside, Sabrina saw hospital beds, rusty metal carts, and more sheets of yellowing paper scattered on the floor. Everywhere was the horrible red handprint.
What is this place? Sabrina wondered.
The children rushed on through the choking, black smoke until they found a door with the word Exit over it. When Puck forced it open, a blast of icy wind nearly knocked them both down and blew snow in their faces, blinding them. Puck shielded his eyes with his hands and peered between his fingers.
"We're in the mountains, I think," he shouted "Can you fly us out of here?" Sabrina said.
"The wind is too strong." Puck helped her out the door, wrapping his arm around her and guiding her through the snowdrifts.
They'd barely taken a dozen steps when the wall of the building exploded behind them, sending brick and mortar flying in every direction. Into the gaping hole stepped the massive, scaly foot of the creature. Its head followed, whipping around on the monster's long neck as its fiery eyes searched for the children. When it spotted them it let out a prehistoric roar that sent snow tumbling from nearby trees.
The children raced away, darting into the woods. The leafless trees provided few hiding places and no protection from the brutal wind, which felt like little razor blades cutting Sabrina's face. Their only choice was to keep running. She and Puck scrambled up some rocks to a clearing at the top of a steep hill. It was a dead end. In front of them was a four-hundred-foot drop to the Hudson Valley below. The whole town of Ferryport Landing was laid out before them. If Sabrina hadn't been sure they were going to die, she would have thought the view was rather nice.
"Puck, I ... "
The boy turned to her. "I know what you are going to say and I think it's an excellent idea. I'll leave you here and save myself." "That's not what I was going to say at all!" Sabrina shouted. "I was going to ask you if you had any ideas for getting us out of this."
"Grimm, you usually handle the running and crying part." Sabrina looked down the steep hill. It was covered in snow. "If only we had a sled," she mumbled.
Puck's eyes lit up. He turned around and got down on his hands and knees.
"What are you doing?" Sabrina asked.
"Climb on my back," Puck insisted. "I've got an idea." Sabrina was all too familiar with Puck's "ideas." They usually ended in a trip to the emergency room, but with the monster lumbering up the rocky hillside behind them, there were few options.
Sabrina sat on the boy's back with a leg on each side of him. "OK, what now?"
"Grab my tusk." "Grab your what?"
Puck turned his head toward her. His face had transformed into that of a walrus. He had two long tusks protruding from
his mouth and a mustache of bristly, thick hair. His nose had shrunk into his oily black face and his eyes were large and brown. Sabrina cringed, but reached around with her good arm and grabbed firmly onto one of his tusks.
"Please don't do this," she whimpered. "This is such a bad idea."
"The only bad ideas are the ones never tried," Puck said as his body began to puff up. Layers of blubber inflated under Sabrina. Puck's shirt disappeared, replaced by a super-slippery skin. "Keep your hands and feet inside the ride until we come to a complete stop," he shouted. "Here we go!"
Puck leaped forward just as the beast reached the top of the hill. The boy's slick walrus body rocketed down the steep slope toward town. Sabrina held on for dear life.
They zipped between trees and bounced over jutting rocks. Sabrina turned back, confident the monster wouldn't follow them on this desperate flight, only to see it plowing down the hill after them, knocking over trees as if they weren't even there. "JABBERWOCKY!" it screamed.
Puck the walrus raced down the bank of a frozen stream, ramping off a rocky outcropping and soaring into the air. The children fell for what seemed like forever, then hit the ground hard, narrowly missing the spiky branches of an oak tree.
Sabrina turned again to mark the monster's progress. It too used the rocky ramp and sailed into the air. Flapping its wings, it soared higher and higher; then a strong wind knocked it off course and it slammed hard against the mountainside. Moments later, Sabrina lost sight of it completely, though she could still hear it braying in the distance.
"I think we lost it! We're safe!" she cried, just as the ground leveled off. Unfortunately, Puck's slippery body was still zipping along as a four-lane highway of speeding cars appeared in front of them. Unable to stop, Puck skidded into the traffic, spinning several times as he tried to avoid a pickup truck. The startled driver slammed on his breaks. Tires squealed and bumpers crunched. Shrill horns filled the air, but the children still couldn't stop. On the other side of the road was another steep hill. They whipped down it, heading right for a ramshackle old barn. Its doors were wide open, and they slid right in, crashing at last into the far wall of an empty stable.
"Let's do it again!" Puck said, laughing so hard he rolled over on his fat, blubbery side. Giggling, he transformed back into his true form-an annoying eleven-year-old boy.
Sabrina held her sore arm and gazed around at the barn. A few bales of hay sat in the corner and an old plow lay rusting on
the ground. Several windows high on the wall were wide open, allowing the snowstorm to blow inside. It was a great place to hide, if they didn't freeze to death in the process.
"Grimm, you look like you fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch," Puck said when his giggling was finished. Sabrina's head hurt too much for her to come up with a snarky comeback. She was exhausted and her arm felt as if it were ready to fall off. Puck must have sensed how desperate she felt, or maybe he just heard her teeth chattering, because he did something so un-Pucklike, Sabrina couldn't believe it. He got up, sat down behind her, and let his enormous fairy wings sprout from his back. Then he wrapped them around her to keep the bitter cold away. It was the first truly nice thing the so called Trickster King had ever done for her. Instinctively she wanted to tease him for this rare moment of compassion, but she bit her tongue. Knowing Puck, he'd storm off and she'd die an ice cube.
"What was that thing?" Sabrina asked.
"It's called a Jabberwocky," Puck said. "Two tons of teeth, tail, and terror. From what I've heard, they're impossible to kill. But don't worry, Grimm; it's gone. It had its share of the Trickster King for one day."
"We need to get help," Sabrina said, shivering.
"I'm on it," Puck said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small wooden flute, and blew a couple high-pitched notes. Within seconds, a swarm of little lights flooded through the open windows and surrounded the children. They looked like fireflies, but Sabrina knew better. They were Puck's pixie servants-or, as he called them, his minions-and they did whatever Puck asked of them, especially if it was mischief. They buzzed around their boy leader and waited for instructions.
"Go get the old lady," Puck said to them, "and bring me something to start a fire."
The pixies buzzed and darted out through the barn windows. Moments later a wave of them returned carrying tree limbs and dead leaves. These they arranged in a pile in front of the children and then zipped away again. Soon, a second swarm returned carrying a single bottle of root beer, which they gently placed in Puck's hands.
"You have served me well, minions," he said unscrewing the top and tossing it into a corner of the barn. He chugged the whole drink and tossed the bottle aside.
"Ahhhh," he said as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
"Was that refreshing? I'd hate for you to be thirsty. Maybe
you would like a sandwich, too," Sabrina snarled. Puck was always thinking of himself.
"Keep your pants on," the boy said. "Something has to be done to keep you from turning into a Grimmsicle."
He unfolded his wings, stood up, and leaned over the pile of timber. His eyes were watering, apparently from all the gassy soda, and suddenly he opened his mouth wide and belched. The burp was deep and guttural and, much to Sabrina's surprise, accompanied by a fireball that shot out of the boy's mouth and ignited the firewood. Sabrina felt the fire's warmth immediately.
"I didn't know you could do that," she said.
"Oh, I'm full of surprises," the boy said proudly as a rumbling sound came from his belly. "Want to see what I can do out the other end?"
The little pixies buzzed and twittered. To Sabrina it sounded as if they were laughing.
"Uh, no thanks," she said, edging closer to the fire.
"Suit yourself," he said and then turned to his small servants. "I need you to go back to the road and wait for the old lady. Come and get me when she arrives."
The little lights blinked on and off, as if to say they under-
stood, and zipped away. When they were gone, Puck wrapped his huge, fairy wings around Sabrina again.
"I'm sorry we couldn't save your parents," he whispered. Sabrina wanted to cry. She had been so close to rescuing Henry and Veronica and they had slipped through her fingers. How was she supposed to fight the little girl in the red cloak who obviously had magical abilities and controlled a hulking freak with a zillion teeth? Sabrina was just an ordinary eleven year-old girl. She was powerless. She looked over her shoulder at Puck. He was a fairy-a creature of pure magic. Puck could turn into all kinds of animals, he could fly, he had pixie servants, and now, apparently, even his obnoxious bad habits were useful. The boy was overflowing with power and it gave him a fearlessness Sabrina envied.
"I'd prefer if we kept the heroics to ourselves," he said now, interrupting her thoughts. "The last thing I need is you yapping to everyone in town about me being a hero. I am most definitely not a hero. I'm a villain..."
"Of the worst kind," said Sabrina, finishing the boy's sentence. "I know." Puck, a.k.a. the Trickster King, had made it clear on numerous occasions that he was one of the bad guys, but lately it seemed that he was always saving the day.
"And don't you forget it!"
"How could I?" Sabrina said. "You tell me every ten minutes." Puck didn't respond, and for a long moment the children were silent.
"Still, thanks for saving me," Sabrina said as she felt herself drift off to sleep.
"No problem. I'll just add it to your tab," he replied.
When Sabrina woke, she was in a hospital room with a clunky plaster cast on her broken arm. Her little sister, Daphne, sat on the edge of her bed, busily scribbling GET WELL SOON! on the cast with a black marker.
Daphne had been through a lot in the last year and a half; both of them had-the orphanage, the insane foster families, their nasty caseworker, giants, monsters, and mayhem. Through it all, Sabrina had protected her little sister the best she could, growing up fast so that Daphne wouldn't have to. It was worth it to keep the ever-present smile on her little sister's face.
"Hey, monkey," Sabrina said.
Daphne screamed with joy and hugged her sister tightly. "Are you OK?" Sabrina asked.
"I'm fine," Daphne said, kissing her sister on each cheek.
"And Granny Relda?"
"She's good. She went to get a cup of coffee. She'll be right back."
"Mr. Canis?"
Daphne's eyes welled with tears.
Sabrina hugged her sister to comfort her and to prevent the little girl from seeing the tears rolling down her own cheeks. Mr. Canis, a.k.a. the Big Bad Wolf-and her grandmother's best friend-had been trapped in an explosion that had blown up the girls' elementary school. It was part of a plot by Rumpelstiltskin, in disguise as the school counselor, to break through the barrier that kept the Everafters in Ferryport Landing. He had used the students' anger to turn himself into a human bomb, and Sabrina had been the greatest source of his power.
His plan had failed, thanks to Mr. Canis. And it was when Sabrina realized that her anger might have killed their friend that she used some borrowed magic to wish herself away from the destroyed school and to wherever her parents were. That was how she'd found herself face to face with the Jabberwocky and its mad mistress. And now she knew that Mr. Canis really was dead.
She hugged her sister harder. "It's going to be OK," she said.

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: No support

Dialog: Multiple speakers

Dialog: Broken dialogue

Dialog: Unlabeled Speaker

Vocabulary: Many difficult words

Language: Many descriptive words

Sentences: Many Long Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Some implications

Complexity: Several unrelated ideas

Concept: Fanciful

Author's purpose: Implied

Mature Concepts: With some uncommon experiences

Features

Topic

Good/Evil

*Fictional Ideas/Charac

Low Frequency Words

abandoned	abilities	accompanied	actual	aging
agony	albeit	amateur	apparently	approached
arthritic	assault	bales	barrier	belched
blubbery	borrowed	braying	bristly	brutal
brute	burp	busily	c'mon	cabinet
captor	careening	caseworker	certifiable	chugged
cinders	compassion	confident	controlled	counselor
creature's	crimson	cringed	daphne	dashboard
debris	demented	deny	descended	descendents
dingy	disguise	disguises	disturbing	documents
drawers	edging	elementary	emergency	engulfed
enveloped	envied	everafters	excellent	exhausted
familiar	ferocious	ferryport	fiery	filing
fixture	flailing	foster	gaping	gardeners
gathering	gazed	giggling	glittery	gnashing
gonna	granting	grimm	groaning	group's
guiding	guttural	gymnast	handprint	handprints
hinges	hovered	hulking	hunched	identities
ignited	immediately	incredible	inflated	inhabitants
insane	insanity	instinctively	instructions	interrupting
jabberwocky	jagged	jutting	kidnapped	kidnapper
kin	kindling	knocking	knowing	lashed
leathery	luckily	lumbering	lunatics	magical
marker	massive	mayhem	minions	mischief
mischievous	miserable	misery	mistress	molten
moments	momentum	money's	monster's	mortar
mountainside	mustache	mysteriously	narrowly	nimble
nimbly	numerous	obnoxious	occasions	onrush
ordinary	orphanage	ourselves	outcropping	overflowing
paradise	particular	peered	pixies	plaster
playhouse	powerless	prehistoric	prescriptions	process
progress	protection	protruding	provided	puck
pucklike	pure	quirky	ramping	ramshackle
ravings	razor	recreate	refreshing	rescuing
residents	respond	responsibility	roofers	roughly
rumpelstiltskin	sabrina	sabrina's	saliva	scaly
scarlet	scowled	scrambled	section	sensed
servants	shield	shielded	shimmering	shrill
shrunk	situation	skidded	smacked	smoldering
snarky	snarled	snatched	soared	soaring
source	spiky	springboard	sprout	squealed
stable	staggered	startled	streaked	surrounded
swarm	sword	terror	throes	timber
transformation	transformed	trickster	truly	twittered
unable	unbelievable	unconscious	uncover	unfolded
unfortunately	unscrewing	veronica	vision	waging
walrus	warmth	warned	weathered	whimpered
whipped	whipping	wilhelm	worth	wrapping
wrinkled	yapping	younger	zillion