"Come on," she said, in a whining frustrated way.

"Alice, what do you want of him?" John's voice was as strong, as quiet as ever.

"I want to hit him."

Instead of fighting, the two played a game (a fight substitute), in which they stood an arm's length apart and, with no other weapon than that of slapping each other's hands, tried to make the other lose his balance.

Several times in a row, the boy won. He won by teasing her, by getting her to lunge at him so hard that she fell forward. The boy felt very strong and in control.

"What do you want of me?" Alice asked him.

"Very little."

"Alice, he's rejecting you," John said. "What are you going to do about it?"

"I don't know."

"What do you want of him?"

Alice was silent, so the boy said, "I'm a very good bridge player." He smiled wryly, then returned to his place in the circle and sat down. He had frustrated Alice and he felt good about it.

The other event of the morning session was the group's decision to let one of the old women named Jessica fight her way into the circle. It was a traditional game, which they played because Jessica, who had said even less than the boy, suddenly told the group that she felt like an outsider. The group, at June's suggestion, formed a tight circle, standing up, with arms and shoulders and hips locked--and with Jessica on the outside. It was her role to fight her way in.

The boy would find out later that Jessica was a physical education teacher, but he did not know it at the time, so when the old woman began to claw away at the circle, literally to tear people's arms apart, the boy was more than a little amazed. In the process of fighting to keep her out, he injured his big toe; someone kicked the nail, which tore off, and the toe started of bleed. But the boy hung on, until Jessica finally made it in and, finding herself suddenly in the middle, burst out in that same expression of indescribable joy that the boy had seen in Elizabeth and Susie.

"I'm going to go wash my toe," the boy muttered to John.

"Do you want to tell the group where you're going?"