they needed everybody present to make a good game of it.
The game goes like this: Everybody has three numbers to remember. At a signal, everybody claps their hands on their knees, claps their hands, then the person starting the game calls a number. Knees, hands, then the person whose number was called calls someone else’s number. Knees, hands, number. Knees, hands, number. It goes on, the speed of the beat picking up, until somebody claps wrong or misses when one of her numbers is called. When that happens, everybody gets licks with stiffened fingers on her wrist.
The game is simple enough. It’s just that when the pace picks up, it’s easy to make a mistake. We girls stood in a group in the aisle, one or two lucky ones sitting down, near the front of the shuttle car.
We started out—clap, clap, “Twelve,” said the girl starting.
Clap on knees, clap together, “Seven.”
Clap, clap, “Seventeen.”
Clap, clap, “Six.” Six was one of my numbers.
I clapped hands on knees, hands together, and “Twenty,” I said.
Clap, clap. “Two.”
Clap, clap, “—.”
Somebody missed.
It was a plump eleven-year-old named Zena Andrus. She kept missing and kept suffering for it. There were seven of us girls playing and she had missed five or six times. When you’ve had licks taken on your wrist thirty or thirty-five times, you’re likely to have a pretty sore wrist. Zena had both a sore wrist and the idea that she was being persecuted.
“You call me too often,” she said as we lined up to rap. “It’s not fair!”
She was so whiney about it that we stopped calling her number almost entirely—just often enough that she didn’t get the idea that she was being excluded. I went along with this, though I didn’t agree. I may be wrong but I don’t see any point in playing a game with anybody who isn’t just as ready to face losing as to face winning. It’s not a game if there’s no risk.
A moment later when somebody else lost I noticed that Zena was right up there in line and happy to have the chance to do a little damage of her own.
We seven weren’t the whole class, of course. Some were talking, some were reading. Jimmy Dentremont and another boy were playing chess, some were just sitting, and three or four boys were chasing each other up and down the aisles. Mr. Marberry, who was in charge of us for the afternoon said, “Sit down until we get to Geo Quad,” to them in a resigned voice every time they started to get too loud or to make too much of a nuisance of themselves. Mr. Marberry is one of those people who talk and talk and talk, and never follow through, so they weren’t paying too much attention to him.
As we reached the last station before Geo Quad, somebody noticed and we decided to play just one last round. Since we were so close to home, the boys were out of their seats and starting up the aisle past us to be first out of the shuttle. They were bouncing around, swatting one another, and when they got up by us and saw what we were playing they began to try to distract us so that we would make mistakes and suffer for it. We did our best to ignore them.
One of the boys, Thorin Luomela, was paying close attention to our numbers so he could distract the right person when that number was called again. By chance, the first number he heard repeated was one of mine.
“Fourteen.”
Thorin waited until the right moment and smacked me across the behind. He put plenty of sting into it, too. I said, “Fifteen,” and clouted him back. I brought my hand back hard and set him back on his heels. In those days I was small and hard and I could hit. For a moment I thought he might do something about it, but then his resolve wilted.
“What did you do that for?” he asked. “I was only fooling.”
I turned back to the game. “Fifteen” happened to be Zena Andrus and she had missed as usual, so we started to take licks.
When I stepped up for my turn, Zena glared at me as though I had deliberately caused her to miss and was personally to blame for her sore wrist. I hadn’t intended to hit her hard at all because she was so completely hapless, but that look of hers just made me mad, it was so chock-full