John looked odd for a moment. "I didn't." "Then you couldn't have done it," Dianne said.
"But I did."
'
Dianne looked at Barbara and bit her lip. "Well, you did something anyway."
"Are you going to let her get up?" "We ought to feed her."
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"She's going to be mad again .... "
"Oh." Dianne seemed to think for a moment.
Then she shrugged, still upset. Going over to the bed, she removed Barbara's blindfold:
Cindy watched her and saw that Barbara's eyes were wet, not with sorrow, not with
happiness, nor with any other emotion she had ever seen before. Maybe what men and
women did, hurt.
"Vmnn-umnnn!" Barbara couldn't talk, but she did. She looked at Dianne, raised her
head, looked down at herself, over at the door, and back up again. She wanted to go to the
bathroom. Even Cindy could understand that, and so could Dianne.
"We'd better let her get up."
John, who had watched this a little embarrassed, seemed somewhat relieved. Barbara
wasn't mad at him, Cindy thought, or at least anger wasn't the thing she felt most.
"Go get the others," John said, and Cindy went, taking time only to toss her towel across
the doorknob.
Using the normal, drawn-out manner, Freedom Five shifted Barbara to her feet and led her,
rope around the throat, to the bathroom. She didn't fight now, but when they got her
inside, she began to make sounds again. She bent low and rubbed her taped mouth on the
wash basin. She wanted to be ungagged.
"Do you want to go to the toilet or not?" Dianne
said.
More hopeless sounds. Dianne just shrugged.
Barbara gave her a look of anguish that even Cindy could feel. Then Barbara sat down on
the toilet and all except Dianne went out into the hall. Afterward they could hear a great
deal of water splashing and bathing inside. Eventually Barbara came out again shuffling,
hobbled-and they led her back to her room and tied her to the chair by the vanity.
Dianne fixed her a sandwich, a good one for a change. It was chicken, white bread, and
mayonnaise, and it smelled good to Cindy, who was getting hungry again as she did hourly.
When Barbara was ungagged
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however, she didn't use her free hand to eat it. Instead she said, "Dianne, you've got to
untie me now. You've got to."
Dianne said nothing. She was standing to Barbara's right, near but not leaning on the
vanity.
"That boy raped me," Barbara said. "You know about that; you're a woman. I've got to wash
myself out or something."
"Don't you use the pill?" Dianne said with curiosity.
"No, of course I don't. Do you? Does anybody?"
Barbara wrenched at her ropes angrily. "Dianne, unless you're married or you're set on
going to bed with every boy you meet, there's no need to."
"I thought all girls who went to college did." Dianne seemed to consider this a most odd
piece of information. She regarded it with scholarly surprise.
"Dianne, it doesn't make any difference one way or the other. What makes a difference is
that I may be pregnant by that boy. Already pregnant. It only takes one sperm cell to
fertilize. You've got to let me go now. You've got to let me try."
Dianne remained silent, but Cindy thought that she looked aware, concerned about
Barbara in some way.
"Dianne?'~
"How could he do it?" Dianne remained quite puzzled about it.
"He did."
"Did he?" Then Dianne looked down at Cindy and said with a rather quaint prudery,
everything considered, "Well, never mind. We can't let you go. You know that."
"Why?" Barbara was on the edge of crying. "Dianne, he could make me have a baby. The
baby would live to be someone like you or me or any of us. You know, can I make it any
clearer? You've got to let me get out of here and douche or something."
"I can't." For the first time, Dianne didn't use the word "we" when speaking of Freedom
Five's joint action. She took the decision to herself, and Cindy
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thought-also for the first time-that Dianne was a very strange girl.
Barbara accepted the ruling in silence.
"Do you want your sandwich or not?" Dianne said.
"I'd throw it up," Barbara said. Her head dropped forward, and Cindy thought she might
really begin to cry, but she didn't-quite. "Just go away and leave me alone."
A few minutes later, with a display of temper on both sides, Freedom Five gagged their
prisoner again, forced her to bed, and tied her down. Very tightly. The sandwich sat
uneaten and drying in the air; eventually Bobby and Cindy split it between themselves and
washed the plate clean.
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5
As on the night before, it was hot, still, and humid. The marsh mosquitoes-obviously infuriated-
whined about his bead. And again, as on the night before, the end-of-day squall bad gathered,
threatened and then dissipated without giving rain. Remnant clouds sat high in the distant
darkness, a castle of corridors and halls through which dim lightning and dull thunder wan-
dered without giving any true action. Unlike Cindy, John Randall had never had any
superstitions about storms. Instead, he cast a sailorly eye aloft and concluded that the rain, if
any, would fall on the lower Eastern Shore or even drop wastefully into the ocean beyond. He
dismissed the intruding consideration and returned to his first-it could be said his utterly con-
suming-passion. Barbara and/ or the thoughts provoked by her.
Considering that he had helped capture a girl and hold her prisoner, that he had raped her,
that the punishment for this was going to be so severe that he had literally destroyed himself,
he was singularly elated. He. had broken out of the prison of childhood; he was no longer
someone just to be ordered around, he had solved what he too considered the "mystery." He
could do it from here on as well as any grown-up--he could fuck: what all the others talked
about-and he had done it. With a defiant, self-immolatory glee, he was absolutely delighted
with himself. He had executed a real, fundamental, human act: he had entered life in
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spite of them all. (Them be defined as adults-those tedious, living pains-in-the-ass who held
you down so long and took such pleasure in doing it.) And he had sampled something of
love as well, not simply the physical side, but the spiritual and revelatory side, too. He saw
now-at last-the possibility of falling in love himself someday. To that extent, his thoughts
were both characteristic of the male and quite uncharitable.
When he had lain beside /and then atop Barbara, he had loved and admired her-quite more
than that, he had been nearly rabid with passion-but the insertion accomplished, the deed
done, everything had faded rapidly. Old Barbara's body was pretty much OK; what you
could expect, he guessed; but in retrospect, he had to remember that under the tape and