Not the End of the World by Rebecca Stowe Page A

to the beach to watch us swim, or played bridge withthe other ladies, or even gardened in her own yard. She only ventured out at night, always in her mink, even in the middle of summer.
    “Are you sure you’re OK?” I asked Ginger and she nodded, crawling into our fort, and I didn’t press it. Offering comfort is a delicate business and I knew that there were times when I wanted it and other times when I would have murdered anyone who tried to give it to me, so I let it rest and pulled my surprise from under the branches.
    “What is it?” Ginger asked in wonder, taking the little metal container and examining it.
    I beamed. “I found it behind the Bensons’,” I told her and she gasped—I’d gone into the woods alone! Why not? I wasn’t afraid of the Pervert. If he got me, I’d just turn myself off, I’d just click the switch and escape to my safe place and whatever he did wouldn’t matter because I wouldn’t be there. I’d close my eyes and feel my body getting all hard and rigid, like a mannequin in Peterson’s window, a fake kid. I’d open my eyes and I’d be blind; I’d stare straight ahead and see nothing. I’d put on my mean look, my You-Can’t-Get-to-Me look, and once that was in place I’d flick the switch and fly off. I’d watch. I’d know everything that happened but it wouldn’t be real because I wasn’t real. I was nothing but beautiful blue, blending into the sky, the Lake, and that girl, that hard little rubber girl with the staring eyes and the mean look—she wasn’t real, either. She was just a punching bag, a phoney, a storefront dummy and they never knew they were hurting nothing.
    I never told anyone about my ability to escape. If they knew, they’d find a way to prevent me from doing it, to keep me inside so I’d have to feel things. They’d plug me up, stuff up all the holes and I’d never be able to get out again.
    “Do you think it’s his?” Ginger asked. “What do you think he used it for?”
    I shrugged. “Mother uses them to keep casseroles warm when she has a buffet,” I said. “I guess maybe he was cooking something.”
    “Toes!” Ginger screeched ecstatically. “He was probably boiling some little girl’s toes!”
    “The favored appetizer of Perverts,” I said like a TV announcer, “a rare delicacy!”
    “Marinated toes!” Ginger squealed.
    “Toe à la King!”
    “Toe-na noodle casserole!”
    We shrieked and screeched and Ginger had to put her hand between her legs to keep from wetting her pants. She laughed so hard her face turned pink and when she laughed like that, so that the color came to her face and her eyes sparkled with tears, she was beautiful. Usually she was scrawny and pale, nearly as white as her mother, and when they first moved to the neighborhood, everybody said she was an albino, what with her mass of long stick-straight white hair and her skin whiter than eggshells, white as ice, not a color but a lack of it. “Albino aliens!” Tom Ditwell declared and dared anyone to go into their lair. They didn’t call him Ditbrain for nothing.
    Ginger tossed the container on our pile of Evidence and took two sandwiches from a paper bag. “I bet I know who it is,” she said. “I bet it’s Marvin Peabody.”
    I said I didn’t think so. Marvin Peabody was the biggest creep in the world and a sicko to boot, but all his sickness was on the outside, for all the world to see, and that wasn’t the way it was with Perverts. The thing about a Pervert was, it could be anybody. Somebody you’d never suspect, somebody nice on the outside but ugly and warped inside.
    “It’s like being a werewolf,” I told Ginger. The Pervert probably had a perfectly normal life and was respected and well-liked and a Pillar of the Community and most of thetime he was just a regular person, somebody’s father, and then WHAM! He’d be overwhelmed by moon-rays or something and he’d be turned inside-out and he couldn’t help himself, he’d be in a trance