The Girl Next Door Read Online Free PDF Page A

something manic in it. Like she really wasn’t having much fun at all despite what she wanted you to think.
    It also disappeared too fast. It was unnerving.
    It did that now and she said so only I could hear, “I was thinking about The Game before.”
    She looked straight at me very wide-eyed and serious like there was something more to come, something important. I waited. I thought maybe she expected me to answer. I didn’t. Instead, I looked away toward the truck.
    The Game, I thought. Great.
    I didn’t like to think about The Game. But as long as Denise and some of the others were around I supposed I’d have to.
     
    It started early last summer. A bunch of us—me, Donny, Willie, Woofer, Eddie, Tony and Lou Morino, and finally, later, Denise—used to meet back by the apple orchard to play what we called Commando. We played it so often that soon it was just “The Game.”
    I have no idea who came up with it. Maybe Eddie or the Morinos. It just seemed to happen to us one day and from then on it was just there.
    In The Game one guy was “it.” He was the Commando. His “safe” territory was the orchard. The rest of us were a platoon of soldiers bivouacked a few yards away up on a hill near the brook where, as smaller kids, we’d once played King of the Mountain.
    We were an odd bunch of soldiers in that we had no weapons. We’d lost them, I guess, during some battle. Instead, it was the Commando who had the weapons—apples from the orchard, as many as he could carry.
    In theory, he also had the advantage of surprise. Once he was ready he’d sneak from the orchard through the brush and raid our camp. With luck he could bop at least one of us with an apple before being seen. The apples were bombs. If you got hit with an apple you were dead, you were out of the game. So the object was to hit as many guys as you could before getting caught.
    You always got caught.
    That was the point.
    The Commando never won.
    You got caught because, for one thing, everybody else was sitting on a fairly good-sized hill watching and waiting for you, and unless the grass was very high and you were very lucky, you had to get seen. So much for the element of surprise. Second, it was seven against one, and you had just the single “safe” base back at the orchard yards away. So here you were firing wildly over your shoulder running like crazy back to your base with a bunch of kids like a pack of dogs at your heels, and maybe you’d get one or two or three of them but eventually they’d get you.
    And as I say, that was the point.
    Because the captured Commando got tied to a tree in the grove, arms tied behind his back, legs hitched together.
    He was gagged. He was blindfolded.
    And the survivors could do anything they wanted to him while the others—even the “dead” guys—looked on.
    Sometimes we all went easy and sometimes not.
    The raid took maybe half an hour.
    The capture could take all day.
    At the very least, it was scary.
    Eddie, of course, got away with murder. Half the time you were afraid to capture him. He could turn on you, break the rules, and The Game would become a bloody, violent free-for-all. Or if you did catch him there was always the problem of how to let him go. If you’d done anything to him he didn’t like it was like setting free a swarm of bees.
    Yet it was Eddie who introduced his sister.
    And once Denise was part of it the complexion of The Game changed completely.
    Not at first. At first it was the same as always. Everybody took turns and you got yours and I got mine except there was this girl there.
    But then we started pretending we had to be nice to her. Instead of taking turns we’d let her be whatever she wanted to be. Troops or Commando. Because she was new to The Game, because she was a girl.
    And she started pretending to have this obsession with getting all of us before we got her. Like it was a challenge to her. Every day was finally going to be the day she won at Commando.
    We knew it