out of garages, avoiding boys, hiding from them, and then
enough time would pass, and they would dare to drift back,
lonely perhaps, thinking enough time had gone by that
someone else had been caught or the game was over, and there
would always be the one girl surrounded by boys being pushed
into the cage and the cage being hoisted off the ground, or the
cage would already be tied up there. And the boys would stand
under it, watching it, watching her, and the other girls would
stay far away, around the edges, each alone, afraid to get too
close, afraid perhaps that the boys would grab them and do
something to them, also lonely, also left out. It was our saddest
game. It never ended right.
*
lt would begin in a blaze of excitement. Someone would say
let’s play witch. Everyone’s eyes would look wildly around,
scanning the street for where the adults were. We were
accomplices in this game. We all knew not to tell. No one ever
talked about this game or mentioned it any other time than
when we were going to play. The boys would get together and
count to ten fast because it was a ferocious game: the chase
was fierce and fast and it had to be close and there had to be
the excitement of being almost caught or having a hard time
getting away and they had to be able to see you and get you. It
wasn’t a patient game like hide-and-seek. It was a feverish
game, and it would begin at a fever pitch of the boys chasing
and you running as hard and as fast as you could but you
wanted to keep them after you as much as you didn’t want to
be caught so you would have to slow down to stay in sight,
and they would divide up going in twos and threes after one
15
girl or another and they would hunt someone down but if she
wasn’t the one they wanted they would pretend not to see her
finally hiding or they would suddenly turn and run after
someone else or run in another direction pretending to run
after someone else and in the end they would all have circled
the same girl, whoever they had decided on, and they would
herd her from wherever they had caught her, sometimes far
away from the wooden cage, and push her and shove her until
they got her to the telephone pole with the wooden cage. Once
they caught her it was against the rules for her not to go with
them anyway. The game slowed down after the first few
minutes and each girl was running on her own figuring out,
independent of what the boys had planned, whether she wanted
to be caught or not: and what to do to get caught or not to get
caught: and did the boys want her anyway? It became a game
of slow loneliness, of staggering solitude: breathless, dizzy, she
would stop running in a fever and turn to see no one chasing,
