02 - A Bind of my Own Making
Story index at the bottom
By Mister Mistoffelees [mention]MisterMistoffelees[/mention]
Fictional TUGs Stories
Sun Aug 03, 2008 8:22 pm
My very first story post here at this fine community, and I hope you enjoy it! But first, some details...
The characters in the story are two of my Snowden Snoops characters from my alternate universe at the Girl Detectives in Trouble forumer site. Not to crassly advertise the site here, but I have a series of girl-detective tales there (the addy is on my profile) involving various young-lady detectives getting in various perils while making my fictional town of Snowden safe from various malefactors. This tale is not one of those stories, but a little exercise I did with two of the younger characters. This tale does make mention of events from a couple of the tales, and if you need or want any details on those backstories, feel free to PM or email me. They're one of my favorite subjects!...
First of all, our lead character, one Miss Serenity Mabrey. The tale is a retrospective of a particularly interesting event in her young life (over at GDIT her character just turned 13 this winter), when she was a precociously-bright young fifth-grader. She's quite tall for her age and still is, with a slim build which belies extraordinary athletic talent (particularly basketball and soccer). At the time of the tale you're about to read, she has not-quite-shoulder-length black hair, a light, freckled complexion, and eyes of a striking gray-green color. As well as being a fine athlete, she's also a gifted young scholar in all the top sections of reading, match, and so on. And as the tale opens, recent events are rather weighing on our athletic young scholar Serenity...
Next, Serenity's neighbor and lifelong friend Joey Housely. Shorter than Serenity and stockier, with an unremarkable build, unruly medium-brown hair, and bright hazel eyes, he has a interest in TUGs which he shares with his year-older brother Jimmy, who has a long history of "playing pretend" with Serenity's two-years-older sister Felicity. Joey has a knack for trouble (he's actually one of the "bad guys" in one of the GDIT adventures), and is at best average academically and athletically. But strange things happen when you spend a lifetime next door to each other! So on with my little tale...
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A Bind of My Own Making
By Serenity A. Mabrey
You know what I think? I think that every boy in the world likes to tie up girls! I don’t know why, but they do! Well, at least the boys who live next door to me and my family. Their names are Jimmy and Joey. Jimmy is a class above me, while Joey is in my class, and I’ve known him all my life. And all my life he and his brother have wanted to tie up me and my big sister Felicity! Felicity is two years older than me, which makes her a year older than Jimmy, but believe me, that has never stopped him! And Joey! Even as far back as I can remember, he’s been chasing me around our yards trying to catch me and tie me up! It wasn’t anything mean, you know, just the four of us playing pretend games, like cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians, but they had their own versions of the game! Bounty hunters and girl fugitives, or aliens and humans, or their favorite, bank robbers and tellers! It was always the same kind of game, though, they would be the bad guys and we would be the victims they caught and tied up. Well, at least Jimmy caught Felicity and tied her up! Poor Joey would always try to catch me, but I was always faster than him and he could never catch me! I’d run around and tease my sister after Jimmy caught her and tied her up to a tree or a chair or laid her on the ground and hogtied her. Poor Joey must have thought he’d never catch me, because I was always faster than he was because I have longer legs than him, and could run longer because I play soccer and basketball and he only plays Little League baseball (but I can hit and run bases better than he can too!). But then something happened which changed all that, and a whole lot of other things too.
Well, of course you heard about the time I was kidnapped when I was back in between fourth and fifth grade when I was ten, the crazy old professor who stole me so I could replace a daughter of his who had been killed a few years before. Most of what happened to me ended up in the news, especially after I made my statement to the court when they were sentencing poor Dr. Newland. I still write and talk to his other daughter Luci, even though she knows now that I wasn’t really her little sister Mary back when I was with them. And of course I stopped the guy who really did kill Mary and hurt Luci, and killed all those other girls Dr. Newland had stolen to be Mary for Luci, but since I still get nightmares about that I won’t say anything more about it.
One thing that changed from all that was the way I dress. Before, I didn’t like to be dressy at all! I maybe had two dresses I wore for church things, and a couple skirts and tops Mom made me wear for things like school-picture day, but nearly all the time I just wore comfortable things like jeans and sweatshirts and tees and shorts and sneakers and flip-flops. But Mary Newland was always kind of dressy. I know this because when Dr. Newland was taking me to where he and his family lived, he showed me pictures and videos of the real Mary with Luci, and she was always wearing a nice skirt and top or a sundress or even a nice comfortable jumper, and even a couple really dressy dresses! Well, of course when I was with them as Mary, they made me dress like Mary did, and I guess it sort of stuck to me after I was rescued and brought back home. Anyhow, every once in a while I just had this feeling like I wanted to dress nice, and I ended up having Mom buy all sorts of nice outfits for me. My best friend Abbie Dwight (and you probably have heard of her too, the one that fugitive killed her whole family when she was barely seven years old and Mrs. Dwight in town adopted her) started calling them “Mary days†because I dressed like Mary Newland did, and you know what? I actually kind of like to dress nice a lot of the time now! Not all the time, I still like my jeans and sweats and sneakers, but sometimes I like to feel a little dressy!
I don’t get why the other thing changed for me. Well, you can imagine that when I was Dr. Newland’s prisoner, he kept me tied up a lot in his RV so I couldn’t run away from him. And no, he didn’t do anything sick to me even though he could have, mostly because he started thinking of me like I really was Mary. He even called me Mary while he was taking me back there! Well, he always kept my foot chained to a bolt in the floor of the RV so I couldn’t run, and most of the time he kept my hands tied too. At first he kept them tied behind my back all the time, which I hated whenever my nose would itch and I couldn’t scratch it, and of course it scared me to know he could hurt me and I couldn’t fight back. Then too he kept my mouth gagged a lot of the time the first few days so I couldn’t yell for help, which I really hated because he always stuffed a cloth in my mouth and taped it in so I couldn’t get it out, and keeping my hands tied behind my back kept me from taking it out, which I guarantee you I would have if I could have gotten at it! But then he mostly drove at night on like real back roads where there wasn’t much of anybody else, so he didn’t have to gag me so much. Then he would just tie my hands in front of me palms together, which let me write in my secret diary whenever he was driving or asleep or busy doing something else. I actually learned to write pretty well with my hands tied together! Well, then it was all over and the FBI rescued me, and I never really thought much about it for a while. I just figured it was all over and I wouldn’t ever have to deal with being tied up again.
I really can’t tell you what came over me! Well, it was fall, and we were back in school in Mrs. Entwhistle’s fifth-grade class, and everybody except Abbie thought I was weird whenever I came to school in a dress or a nice skirt and top. Well, there was that whole thing about Dr. Newland’s trial, and of course they were charging him with all sorts of things he didn’t really do (nobody listened to me when I said he didn’t do all those things, but I guess they thought since I was only ten and didn’t know any better I didn’t remember it all right, which I did, by the way!), and I was getting more and more nervous all the time about having to testify in the trial (which it turned out, of course, that they never really had because he changed his plea) which maybe was what started it all.
Anyhow, one day I was coming home from school on the bus, and of course Joey was on the bus too because he’s my next-door neighbor like I already told you, and I was having one of those “Mary days†like Abbie still calls them. It was a little gray bibbed sort of skirt, a little above my knees with a few pleats (I still don’t get very much into miniskirts because I still think my legs are too skinny), and I wore a thin white sort of long-sleeve t-neck top with it (it was the beginning of October and it was a sort of chilly day), with white tights and a nice pair of black-patent-leather mules (you should have seen Mom when I told her I liked those shoes!). I even had my hair pinned back over my ears (see, Dr. Newland had cut my hair short when he captured me so I’d look even more like Mary, and I was kind of surprised to find out I liked it short!), and had a necklace Dad bought me for back-to-school. Even I thought I looked pretty good in the outfit (except for my skinny legs of course!), and I must have been right because Joey just kept staring at me the whole way home, not really talking like he always did but just looking at me. Anyhow, when we got off the bus at the end of our road we walked toward our houses, then all of a sudden Joey asked me if I wanted to play pretend with him when we got home! That was what we called our tie-up games, “playing pretend.†Well, he hadn’t even asked me to play pretend ever since I got back from being kidnapped, and I sort of thought he wasn’t interested in it any more. I wouldn’t blame him since he never caught me! I was about to tell him no when all of a sudden I just wanted to so much, I don’t even know now why! So I told him I’d come over as soon as I got out of my school clothes (see, I got home before Mom got finished at the college and had a key to let myself in because I got home before either Felicity or my jerkface little sister Charity), but he stopped and said he didn’t want me to change out of my school clothes and that he wanted me to play in what I was wearing. Well, of course I thought that was kind of weird and I told him that, and he said he wanted to play robber-and-teller with me dressed up real pretty like a real teller might. Well, the way he was looking at me, I felt my heart just literally turn over inside me!
Okay, I guess I better tell you right now that I like Joey. I mean, I like-like him, sort of. Okay, so it’s not really “sort of,†I’ve always sort of like-liked him even when we were real little, and ever since then, well, let’s just say I like-like him even more! But all that time, he never said anything to me that made me think he liked me at all that way, and then all of a sudden there he was saying I was pretty! So I just decided right there that I’d do what he wanted and play pretend in my new outfit. I just figured I’d run him down just like I always did, I guess.
Well, while he went and fetched his brother’s clothesline and other stuff he kept hidden for when he wanted to play pretend with us, I sort of hid out like I always did when we played. I was a bank teller who ran away when the robbers broke into the bank, and he would have to catch me before I went to the police and reported him, that was the way we played the game that afternoon. There’s this big old shed out behind their house that was his dad’s workshop and we pretended it was the bank, and I hid behind it and waited for him to find me and start chasing me.
I still felt that strange but good kind of funny about him saying I was pretty, and sort of thinking that maybe there was something really real happening between us, and I must have not been paying much attention to our game, because all of a sudden there he was behind me grabbing my shoulder! Well, you can bet I ran as fast as I could when I felt him grab me, and at first I pulled away just like I always do. And that’s when it happened!
I was rounding around the back corner of his house with him still way behind me, and I felt my ankle turn a little. It wasn’t really bad, I turn it worse all the time in gym or playing soccer or basketball and don’t even hardly notice it. But right then something just made me stop! It wasn’t really my ankle, like I said I turn it worse all the time, but something made me just stop and drop down on my rear and grab at my ankle like it really hurt. I sort of think now I actually wanted it to hurt! Well, of course Joey was right there in a second, but instead of just grabbing me he knelt down and asked if I was all right, if I’d hurt myself. Well, what else could I do? I just told him it wasn’t bad and I’d be okay in a minute, and he stood there and kept telling me he could go get his mom and she could wrap it up or something or take me to the hospital to have it looked at, but I said I’d be okay, which of course I really was, and I felt really weird about it because I sort of began to realize that I really wanted him to catch me and that was probably why I fell down! Anyhow, I finally said it felt better and got up, and he said he’d give me ten seconds to run and start the game again, but I told him no, which really seemed to disappoint him. And then, I don’t know why I said it but I did, I told him that he had caught me fair and square and I was his prisoner. Well, of course his face all lit up! I don’t think he expected to catch me, and there I was saying he had caught me when I could have run away again! At first it was like he didn’t know what to do next because he’d never caught me before, so I sort of gave him a hint by putting up my hands and making a real scared face for him and telling him to please not hurt me, I’d do anything he wanted if only he wouldn’t shoot me with his gun. That sort of woke him up. He made his hand into a sort of finger pistol and pointed it at me and told me to march back up to the bank (which was his dad’s shed of course) where he’d keep me with the rest of the bank workers. I made sure to limp a little so he wouldn’t think I was faking my turned ankle, which I sort of was but didn’t want him to know it. After a few seconds, we were at the shed door, which Joey unlocked with his dad’s key (he keeps it in their kitchen by the back door of their house) then pointed his finger pistol at me and told me to go inside. I still had my hands up and my scared face on, so I did. He was so excited he was shaking!
Well, there’s actually a lot of space in the shed, enough that he has one of their old kitchen chairs and an old stool inside with his workshop tools and stuff. I was starting to get a little nervous knowing Joey was going to tie me up, but I’d already told him I was his prisoner and I didn’t want to disappoint him. He stood there for a minute thinking about what he wanted to do, and I figured he’d want to tie me to the chair like Jimmy did to Felicity all the time. I told him in my scared-prisoner voice that he could put me anywhere he wanted as long as he didn’t hurt me, and that seemed to kick-start him. He told me to sit on the stool, which was just tall enough with my long skinny legs, and I did as he said, with my hands still up. I think he was afraid to actually start tying me!
Then I thought of something. Every time Jimmy caught Felicity, she would ask him real disgusted if he wasn’t going to tie her up for once, which of course meant he always tied her up. Well, I thought that maybe he needed sort of prompted, so I asked him in my scared-prisoner voice, “You aren’t going to tie me up, are you?†That seemed to wake him up again, and he put on this real mean bank-robber voice and told me yes, he was going to tie me up like the rest of the bank workers so we couldn’t call the police. I made all scared for him when he said that, and then he told me to put my hands together behind my back. I said something like please don’t tie me up, but I did what he said and held my hands behind my back for him. He was so close behind me I could hear his breath which sounded real ragged like he was so nervous, then he moved my hands so my wrists were crossed behind my back. Then he started looping the rope around my wrists, and I kept up my scared voice, telling him please don’t tie me up too tight, and since he finally understood that I was just play-acting with him he made real mean and said he’d tie me up as tight as he wanted to keep me from calling the cops, and he looped the rope around and around my wrists and finally knotted it off. I was feeling kind of weird, sort of thinking of the times Dr. Newland tied my hands behind my back, but it wasn’t really the same. I was real surprised to feel like it was sort of fun, that it was sort of exciting to play Joey’s prisoner! Well, he finished tying my hands and I said in my prisoner voice that he didn’t have to tie me any more, that I wouldn’t try to run away and set off the alarm. As soon as I said it, I knew I was hinting at him to tie my feet too! Well, he sure got the hint, because he told me to put my feet together, which I did. He put about four loops of rope around my ankles and tied a knot, and he was done. I asked him in my prisoner voice if he was done tying me up, and he said he was, but he wasn’t using his bank-robber voice, and I must have looked at him funny because he got right back into it, and said he was going outside the bank to cut the phone lines. While I sat there he went out and closed the shed door, and I could hear him lock the lock. I was locked inside!
Well, that made me kind of mad. It was one thing to let him tie me up, it was another to lock me in the shed! So I started wiggling my hands to get loose, and I found it was kind of easy to get loose, the way he tied my hands wasn’t very good and I could get out easy. I was just about to when I saw him looking in the window of the shed, and his eyes were real big and excited, and I realized he really liked watching me squirm my hands. That made me a little less mad, and I decided to play along with him, so I squirmed my hands and my feet like I was trying to get loose but couldn’t, and all the time he was just gawking at me so much!
Well, it got a little boring after a while, so I finally pulled my hands out of their ropes, which brought him around inside the shed in a minute. He looked real disappointed that I’d got loose so quick, and he made to pick up the ropes off the floor so he could tie my hands again, and then he grabbed at my hands to pull them back behind my back again. That made me mad again but I wasn’t sure why, so I just told him to stop right there, not in my prisoner voice but my real one, and he just stood there stuttering with his mouth hanging open while I untied my feet. And wouldn’t you know it but the ropes left dirt marks all around the ankles of my tights! They were practically black from the dust and dirt in the rope! Well, I just took the ropes out of his hands, and I told him I didn’t like what he did with locking me in the shed and I wasn’t playing pretend with him anymore. Well, he looked just like he was about to start crying and said he was sorry, so I sort of felt sorry for him and told him I would again, but there were going to be some rules he had to follow or I really wouldn’t ever play pretend with him again. First of all was that he couldn’t ever lock me in anything again, that it made me feel like I felt whenever Dr. Newland locked me in the RV and I didn’t like it at all. Second rule was that if we played pretend, I got to choose what I wore so my nice clothes wouldn’t get messed up like my tights did. And the third rule was that he had to use clean rope and stuff, so I wouldn’t have marks on my clothes that I might have to explain to Mom if she saw them when she did laundry, or worse, whenever Felicity did the laundry. And my fourth rule was that he couldn’t tie me up weird ways or ways that hurt, like hanging me from a tree by my hands or feet or tying me to a bed with my hands and feet all apart. He looked like I’d beat him up or something, and I think I hurt his feelings by being mad at him, so I told him if he followed my rules I’d promise to be any kind of prisoner he wanted me to be, like to act scared if he wanted me to act scared and stuff like that, and to let him tie me up any way that wasn’t weird or hurt me, and not get myself loose, at least very quick, and since I remembered the way he was looking at me when I was squirming around I promised I’d squirm around for him whenever he had me tied up. Actually, that last promise was sort of easy since it felt kind of fun to squirm around but I wasn’t about to tell him that! He seemed to feel better after all that, so I put the ropes back in his hands and went home.
Well, that was just to scare him, so he’d follow my rules for playing pretend. There still wasn’t anyone home when I went in, which was lucky because if Mom or Felicity were there they’d have asked me how I got my tights so dirty and I didn’t have any answer for them! I was going to go back and play again, but I didn’t want to mess up my nice clothes so I ran to my room and changed into my favorite Washington Mystics sweatshirt and some old jeans and a pair of socks and my sneakers. I put my skirt and top on top of the pile in the hamper, but I put my tights all the way at the bottom so maybe Mom or Felicity would miss seeing them next time they did laundry. Then I went back to play again with Joey, just to see if he would follow my rules.
Well, I went in the back door into their kitchen just like I always did, and there was Mrs. Housely of course, and I asked her if Joey could come out and play some more since Mrs. Entwhistle our teacher hadn’t given us any homework like she always did on Friday anyway, see, it was Friday and she never gives us any homework on Friday. Well, she yelled for Joey like always, and you should have seen his face when he saw me standing in the kitchen! Then I asked him if he wanted to play outside, and his mouth practically fell open! So we went outside and he had this look on his face like he was afraid to believe what looked like it was happening! Well, I walked around the corner of the house so Mrs. Housely couldn’t see us (we were always careful to play where no one could see us from the kitchen window), and I turned around and told Joey I had an idea of my own for playing pretend. When he heard that, I thought for a moment his eyes were going to fall out! Which would be sad because actually he has nice eyes, if you know what I mean!
Anyway, I told him I had an idea so that we could play way up in the woods on the hill behind our houses, like Jimmy and Felicity did a lot of times (and every time they did Felicity would come back home and complain that her clothes were a mess from it!). I told him that I would be an Olympic track star training for the cross-country run up on the mountain trails and he would be a lonely old hermit who lived on the mountain who wanted to capture a wife from some girl who went up on the mountain and didn’t know any better. I think I remembered that from some movie on Lifetime or something like that! Anyhow, Joey was so amazed that I wanted to play that game that he actually asked me if I really meant it! Actually, I sort of have to admit that I liked the part about him capturing me for a wife, but I didn’t tell him that! I just said that yea, I wanted to play the game. I told him to go find some place on the hill to hide, and in ten minutes I would come jogging up the hill on some of the old pathways we’d made from playing up in the woods all our lives. He was so excited he actually forgot to take the ropes, so I actually had to remind him!
Well, of course he went running up the kill like crazy, he was so excited to have me actually want to play! But I sort of had a trick for him this time! See, the last time I sort of let him catch me, I didn’t put up any kind of a fight. This time I was going to be different! After all, I was going to be an Olympic runner (and someday I really do hope to be able to play women’s basketball or soccer in the Olympics), and Olympic runners wouldn’t just sit down and let somebody capture them, at least I think they wouldn’t. I was going to make him really capture me!
Well, ten minutes went by pretty slow! I stretched like my coaches always told me before playing a game (but they meant soccer or basketball, not the kind of game I was about to play!), but I was (I have to admit) so excited about it that everything went real slow. I had my watch on, and when ten minutes were up I took it off and put it in my pocket so Joey had an easier time tying my hands. I already knew he needed all the help he could get at that! Anyway, after ten minutes I started jogging up the hill wondering where Joey had hidden to try to catch me.
I made sure to run past all the thick trees, you know, the ones he would be able to hide behind the best. I went nice and slow (at least slow according to me) so that he would have a good chance to catch me, and I tried to sort of follow where it looked like he had been walking. I didn’t want to just run up and down and not have him capture me!
Well, I was up pretty far, so that I could look down from the hillside and see the whole roof on both of our houses, and was starting to get pretty warm, and of course I was starting to wonder if he really planned to catch me, when all of a sudden I heard footsteps running behind me, and there he was behind me running to catch me! He had taken one of the ropes and made it into a big lasso or whatever you call it, and he was making like he was trying to throw it over me! Well, that was seriously dumb, because he isn’t exactly a cowboy and can’t throw a lasso very well, and besides I was pulling away from him. After a couple minutes, and him trying to throw that stupid lasso at me, he finally yelled out that I had to slow down if he was going to catch me. Well, I just yelled back that if he really wanted to capture me and tie me up (I put that last in as a sort of a reminder of what he’d get to do if he caught me) he’d have to catch up to me. He stood there and pouted for a moment, but then he really started running after me, so hard that he might have actually caught up to me if I didn’t speed up. And that was something that was bothering me right then, whether I should go ahead and speed up or go slow enough for him to catch me. I wanted for him to have to work hard to capture me, but I didn’t want it to be so hard he gave up! I thought about doing another fake turned ankle, but I thought he might be suspicious if I did it again. Well, you know I was running while I was thinking these things, and I must have not been paying much attention to what was going on around me because all of a sudden, well, let’s just say I had my problem solved for me!
He was still trying to throw that stupid lasso around me, and he just kept missing, I was half running half thinking, then all of a sudden I felt something tug at my ankle and pull me back, and I saw that stupid lasso caught on my ankle just before I went flying flat on my face! He missed most of me, but caught my foot! Well, I reached down to take it off when he tightened it up real tight on my ankle, then tied the other end around a tree beside him. I was stuck! All I could do was try to pull the lasso loose before Joey was on me, and of course I wasn’t close to fast enough!
I was pulling at the loop of the lasso when Joey grabbed me and threw me face-first down on the ground, a real tackle! All of a sudden I wasn’t feeling so bright about wanting him to really have to capture me! I was faster, at least if I didn’t have my ankle lassoed to the tree, and I was smarter (at least until stupid me let my ankle get lassoed in the first place!), but if Joey had one advantage over me it was that he was stronger. It was a sort of wrestling match, with him sitting on top of me trying to grab my arms while I tried to throw him off and get my ankle loose while at the same time trying to keep him from getting my arms. I might have been able to crawl away if my foot hadn’t been lassoed, and Joey sat on me with all his weight and I couldn’t get him off me, and didn’t you know but sooner or later he was going to get hold of my arms, which he did. He got hold of my left hand by my wrist, and held it behind my back with one hand while he tried to get the other one. I did my best to keep my other hand away from him, but I was getting tired trying to get him off me and after a few minutes he managed to get hold of my right arm and pull it behind me. He said I had to stop fighting him because he had my hands, but I told him back that I wasn’t really caught until I was tied up. Well, as soon as he let go of one of my arms to get at his rope I pulled my arm away, so he had to work all over again to get hold of it while he had the rope in his teeth. I figured I could keep this going all day because he’d always need to use a hand to use the rope so I could always keep one hand free.
Then he actually did something smart! Instead of trying to grab both my hands at the same time, he wrapped some rope around the left wrist he still had. Now my sweatshirt had ridden up while we were wrestling around on the ground, and he must have seen the belt loops on my jeans, because he took the other end of that rope and tied it through a belt loop on my right hip. I would never have given him credit for having the smarts! Well, it wasn’t real tight, and I was able to get at the knot on my belt loop, but it gave him time to grab my right wrist while I was trying to undo the other knot. He grabbed my right wrist and pulled it behind me, crossing it over my left wrist and using another rope to tie them together. He really had caught me this time! Well, of course he stood there for a while gawking at me while I rolled around on the ground trying to get my hands loose and pulling at the lasso on my ankle. I didn’t play a scared prisoner this time, this time I was a mad prisoner, mad that the old hermit had caught me and tied me up. I yelled at him to untie me, told him stuff like my friends would find me and he’d end up in jail, and he’d better let me go if he knew what was good for him, that kind of stuff. I don’t remember it all, mostly I remember him gawking down at me with the biggest eyes I’d ever seen on him! And I remember that seeing him like that gave me a really weird but nice feeling, sort of excited in a way.
After a few minutes of all that, he pulled me up to my feet. He said that if I was a good prisoner and didn’t try to kick him, he’d loosen my ankle from the lasso. He said too that if I wasn’t a good prisoner, he’d just leave me fastened to the tree and let the bears eat me and look for another wife in the woods. Well, I still played the mad prisoner, but I just stood there and made my best mad pout at him and told him real angry that he better not hurt me. That gave him time to loosen the rope from the tree, and I stood still enough to let him take the other end off my ankle. Then he told me he was taking me up to his cave up on top of the mountain and he was making sure I couldn’t run away from him. He hadn’t unlooped his lasso, he just loosened the loop enough to slip it off my foot, so it was still looped like a lasso. Well, he got behind me holding my one arm, and all of a sudden he was putting that stupid lasso around my neck!
Well, that just scared me to death! See, when Dr. Newland first kidnapped me he had done the same kind of thing, put a rope around my neck like a leash to lead me to the RV. He didn’t actually use it, though, I was so scared stiff he could just pick me up and carry me to the RV without it. But I can still remember that rope around my neck, how it felt like it was cutting off my air and I couldn’t breathe, how I was terrified that he could hang me up by my neck and kill me and I couldn’t stop him, and boy did I just totally lose it on Joey! I screamed at him to take it off, and at first he must have thought I was still play-acting because he just looked at me. But he still didn’t tie my hands very well, I just ripped them right out of the ropes and ripped that leash off my neck in a second! Well, I was so mad at him, I just started yelling at him that I wasn’t ever playing pretend with him again, that if he was my real friend he wouldn’t have done that to me like Dr. Newland did, that he was totally awful and mean for doing that to me and I totally hated him. I threw all his ropes on the ground, and looked down at him so mad before I started to run away.
But then I saw his face, and he was literally crying! His face was already all wet, and his lips were blubbering and shaking like they do when you cry real hard, and he said he was sorry. Not the kind of sorry like you say when you have to so you don’t get in trouble, but real pathetic, his voice all shaky and choking. He said he didn’t mean to hurt my feelings, that he didn’t know it would upset me so bad, and said he never ever wanted to hurt my feelings or make me mad at him, and he said he couldn’t stand for me to not be his friend anymore, and all the time he was just crying like a baby! And all of a sudden it felt like my heart was just melting inside me, seeing him there crying to me sort of made me want to cry too (and anyone who knows me knows I don’t cry all that much!), and all of a sudden I wasn’t mad at him at all, all of a sudden I just wanted to reach out and hug him and tell him I wasn’t really mad, and that I could never really hate him (and I can’t, but don’t tell him that!).
So that’s exactly what I did, well, almost. Okay, so it was something actually totally different, but that’s what it sort of felt like. I just reached out and grabbed his hand (even though it was all wet from him wiping his face with it), and I made him sit down on the ground beside me so I could talk with him, not playing or anything like that, but friend to friend. Well, I told him I didn’t really hate him, I was just mad at him putting that leash on me, and I said I was sorry that I hadn’t told him that before (I really only told Mrs. Derry my counselor and Abbie of course about everything that went on) so it wasn’t really his fault. So I sat and told him about what happened with me and Dr. Newland (not everything, but the stuff that sort of scared me about playing pretend with Joey), and sort of tried to make him understand why I had to have all those rules about our game. I told him I really liked playing, that it was actually real fun but there were some things that still scared me, and I promised I wouldn’t get mad when that happened but just tell him when I was scared and why. He was still upset, but then I told him we were always friends and we’d always be friends, and that got him to stop crying. I asked if he was okay and he said he was, and then I asked if he wanted to keep playing the game. And that really got him to smile again!
He asked if I wanted him to give me time to run away again so he could catch me, but all of a sudden I didn’t have the heart to go through all that again, so I just said he’d already caught me. He was still apologizing about that stupid leash, and he said he only did it because he would have had to have a way to lead me up to his cave on top of the mountain. He said that if he was real close to me I could beat him up because I was an Olympic athlete and he was just an old hermit, so he needed some way to lead me away. Well, I thought about it for a minute and then I had an idea. I held my hands out in front of me, pressed together, and I told him he could tie my hands together in front of me with the long rope and use the rest for his leash, only the leash would be fastened to my hands instead of my neck. He smiled at that (which made me feel like melting inside again, but don’t tell him that!), and in a few moments my hands were tied in front of me and he was walking me away with the leash on my hands. Actually, it was kind of funny since even with my hands in front of me he didn’t tie me very well, and I had to be careful to not let him pull too hard on the leash because if he did the ropes would come all the way off my hands! So I just left a little pull on the leash, walking along behind him keeping up my mad-prisoner thing, yelling at him that he’d never be able to keep me and I’d get away and boy would he be sorry when I did, and kind of twisting my wrists in the ropes so they wouldn’t fall off.
Well, after a while walking up the hill through the trees got him tired (I was too, but that was from squirming around on the ground before and blowing up at him because of the leash), so he said we were going to stop while he rested. He found a tree that looked right to him, and he made me stand with my back to it, then wrapped the long leash around my chest and tummy to fasten me to it. Then he took another rope and tied my feet together, and another one and tied it around my body and the tree like he did the leash, and this time he was pretty good, there was no way I could get loose from the tree with all that rope wrapped around me. He said he had some supplies up ahead and he would have to keep me quiet so I couldn’t yell for help, and right then he pulled out this big hanky (actually it looked more like a bandanna like I use sometimes to tie back my hair) and lifted it up like he was going to put it in my mouth like a gag.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen! I really hated it when Dr. Newland gagged me (okay, he did it with tape which was really awful because it always hurt when he pulled it off my mouth), so I just told him right there that there was no way I was letting him gag me. His eyes got big and wet again when I told him that, and I remembered I’d promised to not just yell at him when that happened, so I calmed down and explained about how I hated it when Dr. Newland gagged me. But he wasn’t giving up, he told me he just wanted to tie it over my mouth so I would only look gagged. But I still told him no, I didn’t like the idea of anything over my mouth. Well, this time he was the one who looked mad, he just pouted and sulked. And then he walked away! He went right down the hill and left me tied to that stupid tree! Well, I yelled at him to get right back here, and he yelled back that he would be back in just a little bit. Okay, I decided, he was going away to watch me squirm against the tree just like he did when I was in the shed and when I was on the ground a little bit before. So I squirmed a little, but I figured out real fast that this time I couldn’t get myself loose, and I couldn’t hear him anywhere close, so I just stood there and waited for him to get over his little mad and come back to untie me. Well, it was really irritating after a while because my bangs (I wore bangs back then) were getting in my eyes and I couldn’t get them out very well. I was starting to wonder if he really had left me alone up there!
Well, just as I started to think that, I heard someone coming up the hill, and I yelled out if that was Joey because I really didn’t want to have to explain this to anyone else like Felicity or Mom or Joey’s brother Jimmy (who would probably have liked seeing me like that anyway, but I didn’t want him to see me). Nobody answered, so I began to worry a little that maybe it was even someone else besides them, like maybe someone who really wanted to steal me again, and I got scared real quick until I saw it was Joey with a big water bottle in his hand. I yelled at him a little about not telling me it was him and not someone coming to really steal me, and he said he was sorry, and I decided it was okay this once, I just asked him as nice as I could to not do that to me again because it scared me, and he said he promised. Well, then he opened the water bottle, and that’s when I realized I was getting real thirsty, and there he was with a big drink.
But before I could ask him to please give me a drink, he put the bottle up to my lips and told me he got the drink for me. Of course I thanked him, and when I tasted it the water was real cold, with little slivers of ice it was so cold, just the way I like it (warm tepid water—YUK!). He told me he’d put the bottle in the freezer when I went back home to change clothes just in case I wanted to play again later, because he knew I liked my water real cold. Well, that just made me want to melt all over again! I never thought he’d do something like that for me! So I told him thank you and it was real thoughtful of him and I really appreciated that, and you just should have seen him smile when I said that to him! I think it was then that I really knew I like-liked him, because he would think to do something like that for me. So I asked if he was going to take me up to his cave now, just to let him know I still wanted to play the game with him, so he put on his hermit act and told me he was going to do just that, and he untied me from the tree and untied my feet, but kept my hands tied with the leash on them. They were still real loose, so I had to keep my wrists twisted like before to keep the rope from falling off them if he pulled too hard. I tried to keep up my mad-prisoner thing, but my heart was just so full of Joey being nice to me with the water that it was hard to be mad at him!
Well anyway, soon we were up at an old dirt road way up on the hill which made it easier to walk along, and soon we were at a big old wooden set of doors which were part of the old mine tunnels that were dug into the mountainside. The doors were set inside a big huge wooden frame, and the frame had lots of old nail heads sticking out of it. Joey looked around a little to decide what to do next, then he made me sit down inside the frame and stick my legs out in front of me. He took some of the rope and tied my feet together and then my knees, but before he tied my knees together he asked if it was okay. I was glad he asked, so I told him okay and he tied my knees together too. When that was done he took my hands and put them up over my head and tied them to one of the nails in the old frame so I was sitting with my legs tied and my hands over my head. He said (in his hermit voice) that he was going to keep me there until I agreed to marry him, but first he wanted me well fed so I could be a good wife to him. He pulled a couple granola bars (the chewy ones with chocolate chips that he knows I like) out of his pocket, and he fed them to me while he was telling me how I was going to keep his cave and give him a bunch of kids and all that kind of stuff, and I could have got loose any time but I just sat there and let him feed me. And it seemed to me that he was having a hard time keeping up his hermit thing, just like I was having a hard time keeping up my mad-prisoner thing, and finally he asked if I wanted to quit playing the game. I noticed that the sun was real low and everybody was probably home by now, and I’d forgotten to leave a note for Mom that I was playing with Joey, but to be honest I didn’t want to go home yet! So I told him that I was still his prisoner and he wasn’t letting me go until I agreed to marry him, and I squirmed a little to pretend I couldn’t get loose from the ropes even though I could. I think he was getting nervous that somebody like Jimmy was going to come up and find us, and I guess suppertime was coming, so I decided to end the game the only way I wanted to end it.
I put my head down and pouted, then sniffled a little like I was crying (but I wasn’t, I was just play-acting), and I said since I couldn’t get loose that I would go ahead and marry him. I can’t wait for him to really propose to me someday so I can remind him of that! He actually smiled at me, and I said that he better untie me now because I agreed to marry him. He untied my legs first, then let my hands down from the nail. I could have gotten my hands loose myself, but I let him untie them instead like I couldn’t get loose, and we walked down the hill to our houses together. He asked me if I liked playing, and I said I really did, especially after we figured out how to play it right. Then he got all shy and asked if I wanted to play again sometime, and I smiled and told him we didn’t have any homework that weekend, so maybe we could tomorrow! He was real happy at that, and I almost felt like holding his hand, I was so happy, but I didn’t because I didn’t want him to get any wrong ideas (well, actually, I guess they would have been right ideas!). And when I got home Mom and everybody was there, and she told me to leave a note next time I went next door to play, and there was Felicity looking at me like she knew what we were really doing! I don’t think she knew, and I wanted it to be just mine and Joey’s special secret. I should have known better!
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Mister Mistoffelees's stories
- 01 - A Bind of My Own Making: All Grown Up in Archives for Adults
- 02 - A Bind of my Own Making (m/f)
- 03 - The Family Feud (m/f, m+f+/m+f+)
Index of all stories in the "Archive for Everyone" section