them."
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"Where?"
"In the woods, down in the tenant house, wherever they wanted to play Prisoner."
"They did it to you, too? You must have been too little."
"Yeah," Cindy agreed. "But everybody took turns-it was part of the game." Cindy was
flattered that Barbara suddenly looked more interested.
"What was the game, really?"
"I don't remember all that much about it." Cindy tried, however. "John was king, and
Dianne was queen, of course. And Bobby was the general-we all had things to do. We had
maps of the country and everything."
"And that's when you captured prisoners?" Barbara said.
"Yeah," Cindy twirled a ringlet of hair in her finger again. She would have put it in her
mouth if it had been long enough to reach: instead she just tugged it down the side of her
face and stared off into space a little wistfully. "After a while it got boring."
"Then that's not what you're playing now?" Barbara was coaxing.
"Um mnnn!" Cindy was emphatic. She shook her head and continued to look off
somewhere above and behind Barbara's bed. ''I guess this is Freedom Five. Paul invented
it; it's more fun. We're a bunch of guerrilla fighters living in the woods and shooting people
and blowing up trains and stuff."
''Oh .... "
Cindy smiled down. It did seem to her that Barbara more or less understood what was a
rather complicated history. "And we kidnap hostages and take prisoners and torture them
and stuff. It's kind of fun."
"Fun!"
"Well"-Cindy was a little apologetic-"when it isn't your tum to be caught. Even then, it isn't
too bad most of the time. Paul's the really mean one though. When he's jailer, watch out."
"How?"
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"Oh ... he's always thinking up new things to do.
Once he tied me up so tight he even tied my toes together. Then he tickled me."
"But where were the rest of them?" "There. It was just my turn." "Didn't they do anything?''
"Yeah. After a while I started yelling and crying-I was littler then-and they had to let me go.
They were afraid I'd tell."
"Oh."
For a moment neither of them spoke. Pursuing her own thoughts, Cindy didn't notice at
first. When .she did, she resumed where-to her-they had left off.
"Paul likes girls' feet," she giggled. "He's the best at torturing."
"Real or pretend?" Barbara said levelly.
She really did understand, Cindy decided. That was just the way Freedom Five talked about
it. "Both," she said brightly.
"Well, they better not torture me!"
"No," Cindy conceded. "I guess not. Mommy and Daddy are coming home, and you have to
go back to college. It's too bad, though .... "
"What's too bad?" Barbara seemed like she was beginning to get mad slowly the way
grown-ups do.
Cindy sought to placate her. "I dunno. It's just
kind of fun having you here to play with us, too."
"I'm-not-playing." "Well, you are, sort of."
"I'm not at all. What I want to know is when you're going to let me go again. This hurts."
"Well, they won't do it until after tomorrow anyhow. I guess."
"Why tomorrow?" Barbara seemed to have calmed down again. At any rate she was·
sweeter.
"They're going to take off your nightie."
"What?" Barbara suddenly lifted her head from the pillow and stared straight at the little
girl. You could almost hear the individual letters coming out of her mouth: W-h-a-t. "What?"
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"It's just like the 'nitiation," Cindy jumped back a little.
Cindy could enunciate as well as anyone else and even be prim and clipped about it if she was
angry. When she was just noodling along, however, she slurred childishly (and sometimes to be
cute). "Guerrilla" came out at "gorilla"; "initiation" came out as " 'nitiation."
"We've all done it," she said. "It isn't all that bad anyhow. Well-it's bad when it's you and
everybody's laughing and all, but when it's somebody else, it's funny. Boys look-"
"Where did you hear this?" Barbara didn't raise her voice, but she suddenly had that adult
sound of now-you're-going-to-get-it.
Cindy got up off the bed and backed away to safety. "Bobby said so at dinner. He'd been
crying. They beat him up and made him promise to help."
"Well, that's the end!" Barbara 'looked up at her wrists in turn and jerked on her ropes angrily.
"You get Bobby in here right now, and I mean now, or I'll start screaming."
"But you're not supposed to be ungagged," Cindy quailed, her heart suddenly thumping. She
was thinking trouble ... trouble ... trouble.
"I said now!"
Cindy sighed unhappily. This was unexpected, uncontrollable. The other kids would get her for
it.
"Bobby! Bob-bee-e-e!" Barbara shouted. "Bobby, get up!" Then she screamed. It was not a
completely abandoned shriek-she had little practice at screaming-but it was loud enough for
openers.
Badly scared now, Cindy ran out of the room for Bobby, followed by another scream this time a
little higher. In the hall she all but knocked him down.
White, rumpled, wide-eyed and only half seeing and understanding, he more or less danced
back and forth from one foot to the other, trying to get by her. "What is it?"
"Hurry-yup!" Cindy said.
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"Is she loose?" Bobby pulled back sharply, ready to run.
"No. No! She wants to talk to you. Come on!"
Cindy finally got him moving, and together they stumbled into Barbara's room.
She was still wrenching at her cords and shaking the whole bed. "Bobby, let me go right
now. I mean it. Untie me." ·
Caught by the terrible unanswerable tone of adult anger and command and yet unable to
obey-quite Bobby froze.
"I said untie me!"
"The bottle, the bottle!" Cindy was quick thinking in her terror. "Give her the bottle of
stuff."
Instead Bobby turned on her-for once, he had lost composure-and began yelling, too. "You
ungagged her. You did it. Now we're going to get it. We all are."
Then Barbara screamed again. This time it was right on; it was abandoned and shrill and
animal and prolonged. It galvanized Bobby.
He ran over, pulled the pillow out from beneath Barbara's head, and threw it down across
her face and held it there. "The bottle's on the dresser. The dresser, not the vanity!"
Cindy turned around twice before she saw it. Behind her was a frightening chaos she
preferred not to see. The bed was tossing like something in a high wind. On it Bobby rode a
pillow life raft, his face lip-bitten and determined.