“Don’t you dare tell them that!” I snarled in a voice I didn’t recognize. “Don’t you ever tell them a person can go without air for ten days or ten hours or ten minutes!” It sounded like a hell of an asinine thing to have a fistfight about, but as he grabbed the cane from me and tossed it aside, we apparently were going to. He was a better fighter than I was, but to my advantage, I wasn’t minding anything he did to me as long as I could do something—a blow—something—another blow to my stomach. We grappled, neither able to throw a punch. I yelled out to the frightened children, whose parents were wisely moving them away from me, “Kids, listen, he was lying! You can’t live without air. After three minutes, you get dizzy, what they call unconscious, and after that, you’d get very sick—” He kicked my knees out from underneath me and clamped his hand over my mouth, and it felt like the bastard was deliberately trying to stop me from saving the kids, he wouldn’t let me warn them. He was on top of me now and with his other hand he pinched my nose, and I couldn’t breathe. Winded from the fight, I needed air, but then I thought, This was what it was like, let it happen, let me learn what she felt. The noise of the crowd moved them farther and farther away along the shoreline of the big black pool that was forming around me . . . I started counting the seconds, to see if I would reach two hundred . . .

Chapter 22

22

The Sleep

“One, two, three . . .”

Linney looked around, thrilled. No game other than hide-and-go-seek made her heart pound so. The counting, those precious, breathless seconds in which to find somewhere safe! Often, at the last moment, having no recourse, she would simply duck behind a tree or the corner of the building, but that was rarely any good. The seeker needed only to shift his vantage point slightly to spot her skirt, shoulder, or rump. It was humiliating to be called out so early in the game, “I see Linney, one-two-three, behind the telephone pole.” Sometimes the accusation was vaguely worded and she would wait, in case it was a bluff. “I see Linney, one-two-three, over by the building”: anyone could say that. Of course, if she piped up, “Which building? You can’t just say ‘by the building’!” she’d give up her location. There ought to have been demerit points for people who tricked her that way, but that was life.

The ecstatic terror as the seeker would approach her hiding place! They would be within a few steps, breathing heavily. She would try not to move.

Then the unbearable silence.