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Rae—was she going to whistle for him? I went buggy.
    I guess I’d watched too many Saturday serials where Hopalong Cassidy drops onto Bullet from the fiery hayloft of the burning livery stable. When Ottie, whistling, passed under the apple tree I uttered a mad gargle—
Keep your mitts off her
—and without exactly thinking about it I dropped on his shoulders, boxed his bubblegum-pink ears with my fists, got his skinny neck in a death grip with my skinny thighs, hung upside down gasping
Keep your mitts off her
and pounding his stomach, and finally I let go with my thighs and plunged to earth, tackling him on the way down. “Whoa, whoa,” he was yelling, “cool it,Bogeywoman, you’re right off your noodle, whaddaya mean, off who?” The funny thing is, I wasn’t mad at him, I swear I wasn’t. It was that dirty rotten Lou Rae I was mad at, who had loved me for twelve and a half minutes and left me, but I wasn’t going to put a hand on her, was I? Lemme die first.
    “You’re oinking nuts, Bogeywoman,” Ottie shouted. I rolled around and was about to sink my teeth into his ankle when I accidentally got a good look, through his legs, at the wood wizardess, Willis Marie Bundgus. For a second my eyeballs froze in their molds. This whole time I had been sorta dreaming that I was saving the wood wizardess. I must have thought, if you can call it a thought, that she would be impressed. Then one look at her face and I knew I was in disgrace. It was over. Now I had lost camp, really lost camp, for good. Now they would have to throw me out, banish me, point me forth, shaking their heads and mouthing
Get help
, yes out of those famous wrought-iron gates with CAMP CHUNKAGUNK YMCA embossed on plates on each granite gate post and
Tough Paradise for Girls
scrolling overhead.
    Ottie by now had thrown away whittle-peg and jackknife and was wrestling me back. After I saw Willis’s stony face my heart wasn’t in it. He flipped me over and plunked himself on top of me. He got hold of my arms (by then I wasn’t punching or even struggling so it was easy, in fact I held them out to him) and after a bit he let go with one hand, looked over his shoulder at Willis and cranked an invisible pencil sharpener next to his ear, with his finger sticking out for the pencil. “Totally buggy,” he said. “What the heck’s eating her? What’s she doing out here? What’s she got against me?” “You’re on the wrong side, Koderer,” Willis said in a scared, sad voice. “You know what that means.”
IT MEANT EXILE:
    (Already in my mind I had fallen back into the world: Upper Meadowbottom Heights Extended, the Jewish suburbs, the girls my age with their panty girdles and orthodontists, sororities and sweet sixteen parties and sanitary belts and beauty salons and college boards—all the girls I knew in Baltimore except the what-went-wrongs, my sister Margaret and me—all those girls rattling their Hutzler’s bags along the white-hot sidewalks of the new shopping centers, moving inside the baffles of their feminine ambitions as their younger selves had traveled in five layers of crinolines or as planets travel in their rings, and no more likely to step out of orbit. Not that I hated those girls. I even saw the possibilities, the tragic possibilities, of some, but they, unlike the Maine girls, shunned me from the outset as no use, in fact a danger, to their own struggles for position. They were Jewish girls, they had programs, they didn’t dare fail. They secreted antibodies for the likes of me, their atomic neutralizers were cut to my shape—if I was stuck among them what would become of me?)
    “Why were you spying on us? What’s wrong with you, Koderer, are you sick?” Willis Bundgus reached in and laid a cool hand on my forehead. “Have you been eating or drinking something queer?”
God gimme an excuse
, Merlin’s Suzette used to say—I almost laughed at the tailor-made excuse my buckskin-fringed goddess was handing me. (Bundgus