"I'm going to the middle school to watch the sixth graders open their first-ever batch of Santa letters," I say. "Do you remember your first batch of Santa letters?"

"It was one of my first moments of real disappointment," she says.

"Sorry?" I say.

"You learn really fast that Santa doesn't exist," says Jessie.

"You're kidding," I say.

"Most of the kids say they're OK with it," she says, "but you know they're not. Because there we were, thinking something was up there, but in sixth grade we realize there's nothing. It's just us up there."

She says the children have no idea that they'll one day be obliged to become letter-writing elves. So that cla.s.s can come as a real shock to them. Although it isn't as bad as it could be. The school has rules: "If someone writes something like 'Dear Santa, my mom has cancer. Can you make it go away?' we don't deal with those. We give them back to the teacher." Jessie pauses. "I had written letters to Santa with really personal things in them. I told Santa I wanted a baby sister. The idea that some sixth-grade kids had read that. And suddenly you're in sixth grade, and you have this batch of letters on your desk and you're writing back: 'Yes, Santa's happy with you. Yes, you're going to get what you asked for.' It really ruined it for me. I felt like I was doing Santa's dirty work."

"Are you telling me that I'm about to go to middle school to watch a bunch of children be confronted, for the first time in their lives, with the idea that Santa doesn't exist?" I ask.

"Yes," Jessie says. "You'll probably see it in their faces. They prepare you for a few weeks before, but there's always that one person who's, like, 'Wait. What are we doing?' And that's the person you should be looking out for. The person who wasn't paying attention in cla.s.s until the letters are right in front of them. And then they're shattered. It's a weird experience."

I DRIVE to the middle school. In the cla.s.sroom Jeff hands out Christmas hats. He asks the children to think up elf names for themselves. Then he distributes the Santa letters. Of course I'm doing what Jessie told me to. I'm scrutinizing the children's faces. But they all seem quite excited.

Jeff instructs his elves not to write "Santa is going to give you everything you asked for." Instead he tells them to be more vague: "I'm sure you'll like whatever surprises you find under your tree. From all the elves at North Pole, and from Santa, Merry Christmas, and remember it's always better to be good than bad."

A dark cloud settles over the room only once, when one little boy reads out a letter that says, "Dear Santa, this year I would like to wear a lot of clothes and shoes, but my mom can't buy us a lot of clothes because she gets paid a little bit and she pays a lot of rent. Santa, that is my wish for Christmas. I know it may seem a lot for you but that is all I want for Christmas. To wear a lot of clothes."

LATER, after the children go home, I ask Jeff, "Do you ever get a kid saying, 'Hang on. If we're opening the letters, what does that say about ... ?'"

"Santa?" says Jeff. "Well, at eleven and twelve they're pretty savvy. They all know that Santa is basically Mom and Dad."

I give Jeff a quizzical look. Jeff gives me a look back that says, "Don't be silly."

Still, I can't help wondering if Jeff has inadvertently made a mistake getting his sixth graders to be letter-opening elves. My week in North Pole has made me suspect that the job can mess you up. There's poor Twinkle in the Lotto shop, constantly in tears, powerless to help. Then there's Jessie, realizing that if she was the magic, then the magic was rubbish.

THAT NIGHT, back at the hotel, the telephone rings. It's a man's voice. He says his name is Joe.

"My son was one of the ringleaders," he says.

Joe says he's willing to talk to me, but not at his house. I call Jeff. He says we can use the middle school.

And so that's where I meet Joe, on Sat.u.r.day morning, in the deserted cafeteria in the deserted middle school.

Joe's a soldier. "I was in Iraq when I got the word," he says.

"Where were you?" I ask.

"South of Basra," Joe says. "I'd been there quite a few months."

Joe says he was in the habit of chatting with his wife online early each morning, and one morning in April she typed into the chat box, "I've got to tell you something. We need to talk about Jack."

Jack isn't the boy's real name. He had just turned thirteen in April.

"He's OK," typed Joe's wife. "There's nothing physically wrong."

"I thought maybe he skipped a few days of school or something," says Joe.

But, instead, Joe's wife typed the news that Jack had got involved with a group of boys, and they had made a list, and Jack was "highly involved" with this, and their plan was to kill the kids on the list, and to do it in the cafeteria.

As Joe relays this to me, I look up with a start. This is where we're sitting: in the school cafeteria.

"Were they serious?" I ask.

"I've asked my son that point-blank," Joe replies. "I said, 'Would you have done this?' He said, 'Yes. I would have.' And he maintains that to this day. He says they would have done it." Joe pauses. "They were going to fire some warning shots," he says. "There were other kids that were indirectly involved-they'd been told about the plan: They were to get certain other kids out of the cafeteria when the warning shots were fired. My son was to go to the office with a rifle and disable the communications equipment, and then they were going to start shooting the kids from the list."

"How many kids were on the list?" I ask.

"Fifteen or twenty," Joe says. "And there was a comment on there: 'And all the other cool kids.' Who knows what that means? That's kind of open-ended, right? That's kind of subjective."

After Joe's wife told Joe the news of the plot, via the chat box, Joe sought emergency leave. He says it was hard to leave Iraq.

"I had a sense of responsibility to my comrades," he says. "You want to come home with your unit."

Sometimes, during our interview, Joe sounds like a soldier making a report to his commanding officer. He says things like "My son stated to me ..." and so on. But there are other occasions when he's doing all he can to stop himself from breaking down. I think he thinks he can conceal his broken heart better than he actually can.

Jack was in custody when Joe returned from Iraq. The charge was conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.

"I really didn't know how to react," he says. "Part of me wanted to grab him and shake him and say, 'What is your problem?' And the other part wanted to hug him and say, 'We'll protect you from this.'"

"What did you do?" I ask.

"I gave him a hug," Joe says. "I said, 'I love you,' and then I said, 'Sit down.' I could tell he was kind of scared. I asked him, 'Why would you do this?' He said, 'I don't know.'"

Joe says he doesn't know, either. It's not like Jack's a Goth, he says. Contrary to rumor, he's no Goth. "He likes to fish," says Joe. "He likes to go camping. He likes to make up his own jokes. The counselor is trying to figure out why they'd do this. These kids don't fit the mold. He doesn't come from a dysfunctional family. I mean, we have our dysfunctions, but he's not abused. I don't use drugs. I don't consider myself an alcoholic. I spend time with him. I coached baseball for him when he was younger."

Joe pauses. "We have rules. He doesn't dress Goth. He's not allowed to dress Goth. He's not allowed to have baggy pants that hang down. He's not allowed to wear his hat c.o.c.ked to the side and walk around looking like a little punk. We never let him have violent posters on his walls. He's not allowed to play violent video games. He's never been to the mall by himself. He doesn't have any CDs, like rap CDs, with violent themes. That kind of stuff just doesn't fit in with our lives."

As Joe says this, I think about my eight-year-old son, Joel. I always let him wear his baseball cap c.o.c.ked to one side. He has a Kill Bill poster on his wall. He listens to Eminem.

"My G.o.d," I think in a panic. "If Jack was going to kill everyone in his school without all those violent influences, what the h.e.l.l is Joel going to grow up to be? Or maybe it was the absence of all those violent influences that led Jack to want to commit ma.s.s murder. Or could it have been the town's Christmas theme? The elf business?"

"I guess that theory is as good as any theory." Joe shrugs. "The doctors and the counselors have no answers. I have no answers. The boy himself has no answers."

Then there's the other possibility: that Joe's months away fighting in Iraq did something to his son's psyche.

Joe sighs.