with now. The reality of time.
Dianne understood it.
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"Leave her alone now," she had said. Dianne had been angry all day, but now she was cooling:
Barbara could almost see her slipping into the calm obedient role she would play when she got
home ball an hour later. "Leave her just like that. No letting her go or anything just because
she makes a little noise .... "
"Chicken," John added.
"OK, OK, I won't." Bobby sighed.
"You better not." Paul, whose game with the knife bad seemed to very nearly put him over the
edge, was writhing beside Bobby.
"I said OK."
"All right then, let's go. We're late." And Barbara had watched them leave. She was broken,
and they didn't care. She was broken, and that wasn't the point at all.
Tiredness verging on exhaustion prevented her from speculating specifically on what the true
end of the game would be (since even she realized it must end). In place of particular ideas,
her mind raised up only a general aura of dread. The morning's aborted struggle had polarized
her own and the children's position. Yes, they were-to anyone outside of their own circle-a cold
and unfeeling little group, and they had progressed almost smoothly, almost naturally, from
the idea of capturing Barbara to the execution of the idea and steadily to the abuse of her.
Until today, however, the process had been gradual, one in which tormentors and victim alike
knew that forbidden things were being done. A wordless but agreed-upon limitation as to what
could be done to her lay upon the house.
From the morning's battle on, however, a brutal streak-something beyond idle torment-had
emerged in them. She bad not believed that they, or anyone else outside of fiction, could
actually tie a person's arms up behind her and then enjoy the consequent agony, but yet they
had done it to her. She bad not believed that just kids-John and Paul-were capable of real feroc-
ity, the one by rape and the other by torture, and yet they had so spent their summer's
afternoon with her.
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She could not have believed that another girl, like Dianne, could condemn her to a night in
this position, and yet, of course, Dianne bad done so and shown every satisfaction in the
act.
They were capable.
Barbara's mind only reluctantly supplied the end of the thought, They were capable of
anything now. They might not even know it themselves-in fact, Barbara guessed they did
not-but they were capable of doing anything, including killing her. They might not know
they could, and she did not know if they would. To that extent, they were all adventuring
together.
And still the minutes and the half hours ticked on.
Barbara could no longer entertain herself with imagination or even fuzzy speculation-what
various people would say or do if they knew of her plight, for example. The faces most
easily summoned up-Terry, her mother, Ted, Daddy-all hung mistily unrealized and just
beyond her vision, and with the failure of this picture-making, imagining function, she was
wholly and finally isolated. Her world shrank until it included only her own, central,
anguished, and most selfish self, and the bright, pretty, fleeting ring of children around her.
At dark, before Bobby went to bed, he came down and did a surprising thing: he took pity
on her. He came into the cellar room as if fresh from a struggle with his conscience; be
appeared guilty. Nonetheless, he untied her left ankle so that she could lower it to the floor
and support her weight on both feet. After consideration (and walking around her a couple
of times) be untied all the ropes except the ones that held wrists and elbows together
behind the pole; then he pulled over the picnic bench to which she had been tied in the af-
ternoon, and allowed her to sit down on it.
Though he retied her body to the pole afterward, he did not do it as tightly and as
thoroughly as before. It hurt, of course-everything they did, hurt-but relatively she had
more comfort than at any time since she had been taken. She stretched her legs and
thought. Though he had been the one to put the chloroform rag
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over her mouth and so sentence her to this week of misery, it was strangely enough
Bobby-uniquely Bobby-who had never intentionally hurt her or shown any indication of
doing so. (Even Cindy had hit her a harmless but vindictive little blow this morning.) More-
over, unlike the other two boys, his reaction to her nakedness was one of shyness and
aversion; he was always reluctant to touch her even when he had to. If there had been no
other difference, this would have made him the most normal of the five to Barbara's way of
thinking.
As she watched him, moreover, it also struck her that he was the most tired and afraid in
the group. He no longer seemed to like any of this. He didn't seem to like keeping her or
hurting her, and he probably didn't like the idea of his parents coming home just three and
a half days from now (to her it seemed forever, but to him it would likely seem like
tomorrow). Most of all, he obviously did not like the darkness settling around the house
outside. For a small boy, he was under considerable strain, and he showed it. When he had
finished knotting the ropes and had stood back to check it all, Barbara saw that he was
somewhat pale in spite of the constant sun each day, and when he gave the guard to Cindy
and left, he looked really weary. Barbara watched him go.
Maybe he had come down here to free her and then could not make himself do it. Maybe
she had an ally left in Freedom Five after all. Certainly he was behaving quite differently
tonight.
But Bobby. If she couldn't talk to him (he would never ungag her again-her own fault) or
use her sex on him as she had tried to do with John, how could she persuade him to let her
free? Play sick? Moan and groan a lot?
She had nearly fallen asleep thinking about it-chin down on chest, things beginning to blur-
when suddenly, Cindy began screaming almost beside her ear. The child was pointing her
arm and screaming at Barbara as if she should be the one to do something
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about something bad, and Barbara-startled-tried. She wrenched at her ropes and tried to get
up before her waking senses returned and the true situation reimposed itself. Then, obediently,
she turned her head as far to the right as she could and looked down Cindy's pointing finger at-
did she mean the window? If so, there was nothing to be seen but a square of darkness.
Barbara was both frightened and puzzled. Then the child had taken off in a scuffle of sandals
on concrete, her yells ringing up the cellar steps ahead of her.
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8
It was late when Freedom Five assembled the next morning; it was also hot, the hottest day
of the drought of late summer. When John and Dianne and Paul came out of the tree line
along Oak Creek, their faces were shiny with sweat. The dust-it lay on every leaf and pine
needle-stuck to their skin. Breaking clear beneath the broiling forenoon sky, they crossed
the field, came past the vegetable garden and up to the Adams' kitchen steps in silence.