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his kindness was part of the cruel joke being played on me, some part of me believed him, or desperately wanted to. His pretend kindness, his urgent hope that I would admit I’d been wrong about him and his friends, were at some bizarre level almost convincing, as if just beneath the game he was playing lurked another boy who wished he
was
the boy he was pretending to be. Maybe that good boy was real. Maybe he wouldn’t let the others harm me. I also wanted to believe he was telling the truth about Bobby, that when we got wherever we were going Bobby would be there, and then they’d find out who his best friend really was.
    Eventually we came to a blighted place where the bank on both sides was very steep, spanned overhead by a rickety railroad trestle and a dark, tilting structure that opened onto a rock quarry. This, it turned out, functioned as their clubhouse. At the far end several sheets of plywood had been arranged across the beams, and in the center of one of these sat an old steamer trunk. There we paused, the other boys forming a circle, with Jerzy Quinn and me in the center. Jerzy regarded the trunk, then me for a long beat, as if expecting me to draw from its mere existence some weighty inference. When he grinned, I saw in his yellow teeth that I’d been wrong, that there was no good boy.
    “So, you want to join our club?” he said, putting his hand on the back of my neck and squeezing hard.
    Balanced as I was on my railroad tie, even a gentle nudge would have sent me over the edge of the plywood and down onto the dark, jagged rocks below. Fearing that either a yes or a no might have equally disastrous consequences, I said maybe. I’d ask my parents. See if it was okay.
    Well, you see, that’s the thing, I was told. Theirs was a secret society whose first rule was that no parents must ever learn about all the good deeds they performed. So I’d have to decide myself and if I joined I’d be made to swear a solemn oath never to tell anyone. It may have been then, seeing that in reality I had no choice, that nothing I said or did would change what was about to happen, that my eyes began to leak. Yes, I told them. Yes, I’d join.
    “Look,” one of the boys said, pointing. “He’s so happy he’s crying.”
    All that remained, they said, was the initiation. Did I know what an initiation was? When I said I didn’t, they pulled up the lid of the trunk.
    Inside, it was dark except for a thin crease of light at a seam, and the air reeked of urine. “Hey, look who’s here,” I heard a voice say after the trunk’s lid was fastened. Had somebody new just arrived? Was I about to be rescued?
    “I just thought of something, Lucy.” Jerzy’s voice was confidential, mere inches away. “You
can’t
join our club. Take a guess why.”
    I tried to stop blubbering but couldn’t, because now that the possibility of membership had been withdrawn, I knew I should’ve agreed to join right at the start.
    “Tell him.”
    Came the chorus, “
No girls allowed,
” followed by much laughter.
    Then Jerzy’s voice again. “Guess what happens next.”
    That was when the sawing began.

    W HEN I AWOKE, it was pitch black and the silence outside the trunk so profound that for a moment I wondered if I was home in bed, having dreamed my imprisonment. But my room was never this dark, the tree branches outside my window always reflecting the ghostly glow of the streetlamp in front of the building. Still, it was only when I tried to stretch out my legs that I knew I hadn’t dreamed the trunk.
    How long had I lain there in the dark? Probably not so very long, though upon awakening I remember feeling for the first time the dreamlike peace with which, over a lifetime, I would become so familiar. Exhausted from my earlier screaming and pleading, as well as from the panic of seeing sawdust filtering down through that thin crease of light, I’d waited in abject despair for the saw to finally come through the trunk’s lid and rip