Free Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood

hundred, he would come after two hundred – for so long that I was half an hour late for dinner and my mother was furious.
    “What have you been doing?” she said.
    “Playing,” I said, and she told me I was selfish and inconsiderate.
    The snow finally changed to slush and then to water, which trickled down the hill of the bridge in two rivulets, one on either side of the path; the path itself turned to mud. The bridge was damp, it smelled rotten, the willow branches turned yellow, the skipping ropes came out. It was light again in the afternoons, and on one of them, when for a change Elizabeth hadn’t run off but was merely discussing the possibilities with the others, a real man actually appeared.
    He was standing at the far side of the bridge, a little off the path, holding a bunch of daffodils in front of him. He was a nice-looking man, neither old nor young, wearing a good tweed coat, not at all shabby or disreputable. He didn’t have a hat on, his taffy-colored hair was receding and the sunlight gleamed on his high forehead. I was walking ahead, as ordered (they liked to keep an eye on me from behind), and the others were deep in their plans, so I saw him first. He smiled at me, I smiled back, and he lifted his daffodils up to reveal his open fly and the strange, ordinary piece of flesh that was nudging flaccidly out of it.
    “Look,” I said to the others, as if I had just discovered something of interest. They did look, and immediately began to scream and run up the hill. I was so startled – by them, not by him – that I didn’t move.
    The man looked slightly dismayed. His pleasant smile faded and he turned away, pulling his coat together, and began to walk in the other direction, across the bridge. Then he turned back, made a little bow to me, and handed me the daffodils.
    The others were waiting above, clustered a safe way along the street. “What did he say? What did he do?” they asked. “Don’t you know that was a bad man? You sure had the nerve,” Elizabeth said grudgingly. For once I had impressed them, though I wasn’t sure why; there hadn’t been anything frightening about the man, he had smiled. I liked the daffodils too, though I threw them into a ditch before I reached our house. I was astute enough to know that I wouldn’t be able to explain where I’d got them in a way my mother would approve of.
    On the walk home from the next Brownie meeting the girls were especially nice to me, and I thought that now, after my long probation, I was going to become their friend. That seemed to be true, because Elizabeth said, “Would you like to be in our club? We have a club, you know.” This was the first I’d heard of it, though clubs were popular at school, but yes, of course I wanted to be in it. “You have to go through the ceremony first,” Marlene said. “It isn’t hard.”
    We knew all about ceremonies, Brownies was full of them, and I think they got some of the details of what followed from the joining-up ritual, in which you were led across cardboard stepping stones that read CHEERFULNESS, OBEDIENCE, GOOD TURNS and SMILES . You then had to close your eyes and be turned around three times, while the pack chanted,
    Twist me and turn me and show me the elf,
I looked in the water and there saw …
    Here you were supposed to open your eyes, look into the enchanted pool, which was a hand-mirror surrounded by plastic flowers and ceramic bunnies, and say, “Myself.” The magic word.
    So when Elizabeth said, “Close your eyes,” I closed them. Marlene and Lynne each took one of my hands, and I felt something soft being tied across my eyes. Then they took me downhill, warningBrownies. It was too bad, because I really did like it. Brown Owl was one of the most pleasant women I had encountered so far, besides Aunt Lou, and I missed her.
    My mother used this incident as an example of my own fecklessness and general lack of wisdom. “You were stupid to let the other girls fool you like