the house again, and she was not alone. Suddenly there was at least softness against her
body. Suddenly there was privacy and a shred of human dignity beneath the sleeping bag
top. Suddenly kindness hurt her.
Barbara's legs, allowed to extend, did so with electric-seeming shocks, and pain long
blocked by numbness flashed through to her. She tried to stretch, to move her toes and
fingers, and could feel nothing but prickles and hotness. She throbbed both in relief and in
pain and thankfulness. They were good children, or at least this one was. Thank you,
Bobby, Barbara said.
He had removed the unnecessary ropes from around her upper arms and body; he had
eased her ankles away from her wrists, so that she could straighten herself; and he had
made his support for her head. At the sound of her sob, moreover, he looked at her with
alarm and sadness and offered the ultimate gift-he removed her gag.
From the beginning, gagging Barbara had been one of Freedom Five's problems. If they
hurt her too much, and she began crying and her nose filled up (how well they knew it as
coughy kids), she would not
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be able to breathe and would suffocate behind that adhesive tape and rag. That-this being
the situation she would die of imposed anguish, self-pity, and so on, was irony lost on
Freedom Five. They simply knew that she could die if they did not take care. In their
watches they had listened to her breathing, and in their torments of her they had listened
with even greater care.
So it was that Bobby now ungagged her quickly and nimbly. The tape came off with an
audible, tearing sound, and the rag came out to lie at her side. Barbara sniffed and licked
her dry lips with a dry tongue. Outside, it had grown quite dark and still. Older girl, younger
boy, they were astonishingly-each felt it alone, and he had let her talk, and she couldn't
say a word.
Can words and eyes and tone of voice alone persuade? Can anyone convince anyone else
of anything at all? Is it ever possible to change the direction of things that are about to
happen?
What Barbara wanted to say was the everything of everything, the me of me, the absolute
necessity of necessity. Words, sentences, paragraphs, speeches, books, entire libraries of
appeal, should have filled her mind, but they would have boiled down to the one thing. I
must live. And would he understand even that? She looked at Bobby and knew that she
could not make him know. Not now. Not really. One day he might create life, and-tomorrow-
he might help end it, but be couldn't understand what it meant to lose it. He was too
young, too rich in life-yet-to-come. It wasn't that valuable, yet. What she actually said was,
"Can I have a drink or something, please? I don't need much. Just something?"
What he said was, "All I've got is a soft drink."
Still, be got it for her, opened it, lifted her grown head in the bend of his arm, and let her
drink. When it dribbled down the side of her cheek, be wiped it with his hand and then
wiped his hand on the sleeping bag. She coughed.
"I'm sorry," be said. "Is everything OK?"
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The absolute monstrousness of the question, she ignored. They were going to kill her-
Bobby, too-and he was being nice. Unbelievable. Nonetheless that was the situation that
they were in. Reality has its force; God helps those who help themselves.
"Bobby," she said, "are they really going to kill me? Are you going to kill me?"
Bobby pulled the sleeping bag top around her shoulders and sat back on his heels. She
looked up, and be seemed very far above her: he was a boy-god. "I dunno," he said
seriously. "I really don't know. I guess so." He seemed thoughtful enough, even unsure.
Barbara stared at him with an intensity that she had never put forth in her life. There was
goodness in Bobby. It seemed strange under the circumstances to recognize it, but she had
been right. He could be appealed to. He had breeding, nobility, courage to work hard, and
give up things, and he was sweet. Among his peers he would shine out-had shone out-
among children he was the one a prospective parent might pick for her own. Some day he
would be a credit to the human race, and yet he was ready to kill. That was the one thing
he could not be made to know. When she died, everything stopped: it didn't, of course, but to
her, it did. She considered infinity while he balanced units and percentile figures.
"Why?" she said. "Why, Bobby?"
He shrugged. He encompassed the entire history of oratory in his shrug. "I dunno," he said
again. "I really don't know. Honest."
"Bobby ... " Her ropes held her, her nakedness held her, her helplessness held her. "Bobby,
think a minute."
"Yeah. OK."
The thunder came closer and the first advance drops of rain hit the tin roof. This is insane.
I'm dying, Barbara said. "Bobby, think about it carefully."
"I said OK."
All of the time that he sat there-back on heels, fair, young face alight, consideration at the
forefront- 245
he still seemed remote. Bobby's compassion and humanity were under a strange
control. It seemed charity against getting caught, kindness against duty. She was only
relative on his scale of things, and she had never realized that such a thing was
possible between people. He was on the other side, a side she had never considered to
exist at all-another race of human beings entirely separate from herself-and yet the
separation was blade clean.
The hopeless, alien strangeness of another complete, isolated human being, another
person-the other person-engulfed her. She did not think it in words, but the feeling
chilled her nonetheless: we are not alike. The way I think is not the way he thinks. What
works for me doesn't work for him at all. He's other. I'm other to him.
At the thought Barbara's friendly and trusting life did finally come to an end. The rather
sweet, milky, vague possibilities of general love diminished and vanished. The cruelties
of captivity endured were real, not play. They were planned and intended. The fact that
they were administered by children did not count at all. Long ignored, a certain
coldness and uncaringness, running through all life, appeared to her. She understood;
she wished to tell Terry.
We're alone, Terry, she said. There's nobody here but people, and the closer we get, the
more we're alone.
Terry was silent.
"Bobby," Barbara said, "you're hurting me. I can't move. It hurts so much I can't even
think straight." She let her head sink onto his windbreaker and closed her eyes. "Bobby-
one last try-why did you do this to begin with? Really? In the beginning?"
"I dunno," he said for the third time. He shifted himself around and sat down cross-
legged. "Because we could, I guess. It seemed like fun."
She opened her eyes and looked up. He seemed so innocent and pretty that Barbara
almost understood what be meant. "It's not true."