Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

She was a scrap of a girl really, but her manner unsettled everyone. She said in her elegant voice, “Anyway, you look like a gang to me. If you were a gang, what would one have to do to join?”

All eyes turned in Mitch’s direction. No one else was capable of answering such a hypothetical question. Until now, nobody had thought of the group as a gang. They were just the kids from Class 5, obliged to hang about the rec until they thought of something better to do. At the end of the summer they would go to secondary schools and be dispersed among a number of classes that would be called “forms.” For these few remaining weeks they clung to the familiar.

Mitch pondered the possible entrance requirements of the hypothetical gang. He was sure it wouldn’t be enough to say that girls were excluded. This one was unlikely to accept the logic that she was different.

He had to think of something she wouldn’t contest. At length he said, “If we were a gang, which we aren’t, I’d make a rule that anyone who joined had to show their thing.”

The rest didn’t share his seriousness. There were cackles of amusement. Morgan said, “Girls haven’t got things.”

“Shut up, toerag.”

The laughter stopped, quelled by the force of Mitch’s putdown. Nobody wanted to catch his eye.

The girl Danny said, “If I do, am I in?”

Mitch was finding it difficult to cope with her erratic reasoning. Clinging doggedly to reality, he said, “It isn’t a question of being in or out. We don’t have a gang, okay?”

“Anyway,” added Clive to the girl, “you wouldn’t dare.”

Nobody anticipated that she would take them up on the dare at once, in broad daylight, in the rec, in full view of any grownups who happened to be passing. She unfastened the top button of her jeans and called across to Mitch, “You won’t see from over there.”

She proposed to display herself standing on the swing. For a moment everyone held back in awe. Then Podge Mahoney took a step closer. It was the signal for a general advance. Daley and Morgan disentangled themselves from the other swings. A half-circle formed in front of the girl. Mitch, on his dignity, had to decide how to react. The others had left no doubt of their commitment. If he missed this, he’d be like the kid sent early to bed the night they showed Jaws on TV. He was the last to his feet, but nobody noticed, or cared. The girl Danny had turned an intended humiliation into a show of power.

She gripped the front of her jeans and said, “Ready?”

A couple of heads nodded, but no one spoke.

In a slick movement she slid jeans and knickers down a short way. Most of 5A had been initiated into la difference at some time in their lives; none so publicly, nor with such nonchalance.

“All right,” she said as she drew the jeans up again, “someone else’s turn.” She pointed to Mitch. “Yours.”

The tension broke to howls of laughter, gleeful at Mitch’s discomfiture and relieved that Danny hadn’t pointed to anyone else.

“On the swing, Mitch!”

Mitch glared at Clive, who had made the remark. Of all the lads, Clive was the one he would have counted on to support him. How could loyalty be so brittle? “Shut up! Shut up, the lot of you!”

They didn’t shut up, so he had to continue to shout to be heard. “This ain’t a bloody game. It was to see if she could join some gang, but there ain’t a gang, is there?”

Someone said, “Chicken.”

Someone else said, “Get ’em off.”

It only wanted someone to shout, “Debag him!” and they would be on him like wolves.

Then Danny the girl, still aloft on the swing, spoke up. “Mitch is right. There isn’t a gang, but if there was, I’d be in. Who’s going to give me another swing?”

Shouts of, “Me!” sprang up all round her.

Mitch’s dignity was preserved. His authority was in tatters, and he couldn’t think where he had made his mistake.

In the week that followed, Danny dispelled the summer boredom with marvellous suggestions. She knew a way into the dump where the scrapped cars were heaped high. It was her idea to cross the railway lines and build a camp on the embankment out of old sleepers and slabs of turf someone had left there. She turned the multistorey car park into a Cresta Run, using supermarket trolleys as sledges. When they were told by the attendant to stop, she negotiated a fee of twelve pounds with the fete secretary for pushing leaflets under the wipers of cars. The experience unified the group as never before. They actually were becoming a gang.

Yet Danny’s influence was discreetly managed. She made no overt bid for the leadership; rather, she made a show of deferring to Mitch, seeking his approval. She would let him distribute the cigarettes she brought with her most mornings. Sometimes she let Mitch carry the day with his own suggestions. Unfortunately, when the daily cry of “What shall we do?” went up, Mitch could never think of anything they hadn’t done before, so there were days when they played football or went fishing complaining that it was a drag.