Running. She was running. There was no thought at all, only her legs pumping. All objects in her field of vision were blurs, obstacles to be avoided only. Intersections were ignored, her own peril unimportant. She had no concern for herself. Every particle of her being hurtled in one direction, towards one purpose: get to help.

She ran, not only to find aid, but to outrun the image of that hand, that big hand, grabbing Rachel's shirt and yanking her inside the Trybek house. If she could just run fast enough, she could beat the Devil of that hand and what it might be doing to Rachel right now. She couldn't let herself think, because if she did she would sink into self-recrimination, for not being right at Rachel's side to fight off that hand before it could take her; for not considering the possibility that Mr. Trybek was home even though he was normally at work at this time; for being across the street and unable to do anything to help even after she'd told Rachel she was looking out for her.

It never occurred to her to knock on the doors of the other houses on Boyne Street, where the Trybeks lived. If she had, she might have gotten help to Rachel faster. That kind of logic was meaningless to a thirteen-year-old girl in a state of panic. Shock had whittled down all options for ending this nightmare to one: go back to Lawrence Street, because Lawrence Street was where her friends were, where the safe grown-ups were, and they would know what to do. She was like a homing pigeon with one destination in its head, a compass pointing to magnetic north. 

She was vaguely aware that a car narrowly avoided hitting her as it made a left turn from Ewen onto the street while she zipped across it. A blaring horn followed her, dopplering the further away she sped. Later she would not even remember this detail, much less tell anybody about it. It mattered not at all to her. All that mattered was that her best friend in the entire world was in the house of a big, abusive man, with nobody to help her, and if she got hurt or worse, Lauren would never forgive herself. She would crumble to dust and fade away, without Rachel to keep her glued together. Rachel was the first kid who'd ever accepted her for who she was; she was her confidant, her vault of Lauren's fantasies about Joe; even, it made her feel weird to admit it, her first partner in something sexual, and it would take thirty more years for that relationship to be reconfirmed.

She knew she was at Mrs. Anderson's house before her vision brought it into focus; her muscle memory knew these streets from all the trips they'd made delivering papers over the past year. They'd been delivering papers, and Rachel had been bringing one to the Trybeks' house, when tragedy had struck. Lauren had left her wagon and remaining papers behind in her rush to get here. She didn't know how long it took her to get here, but that didn't matter either; every second she took was another second too long.

"Mrs. Anderson!" she screamed as she rushed up the front stairs, nearly tripping in her haste. She banged on the screen door so hard she feared she might punch through the screen.

"Over here!" Mrs. Anderson called as she came around the side. "I saw you hurrying up the stairs, Lauren, what's wrong?"

"CallthepoliceRachel'sintrouble!" Lauren shrieked.

"What? Slow down, girl!" Mrs. Anderson commanded, but she was concerned now.

"Mr. Trybek pulled Rachel into his houuuuuuuse!" Lauren wailed, close to tears. No. She couldn't cry now. She needed to keep it together, for Rachel's sake. "She's in there, and who knows what he's doing to her, and we need to call the police!"

Mrs. Anderson's face drained of colour, and she said something far worse than Rachel had ever heard her say.

"Oh, fuck," she breathed. "I'll call them! Then we'll go back there together!" She knew where the Trybeks lived because she'd accompanied Danny back home just a few days ago, a huge mistake in Lauren's opinion. Danny had run away, and they'd taken him back to his abuser. Who did that? And now Rachel was in danger from the same man.

As Lauren watched Mrs. Anderson hurry into her house, she thought, fuck that. The older woman was just too slow for the trip they needed to make back there. She waited until the door closed behind her, then ran back down Lawrence Street to her place. She needed her bike to get back there faster. And... she needed something else, something to help her, an equalizer, just in case she had to face Mr. Trybek herself.

She found Al and Sunny with their wagon full of papers, just about to start on their own route. Wonder of wonders, they were still here. She needed them. She needed all the help she could get.

"Guys, Rachel's in trouble, we have to help her!" she shrieked.

They stared dumbly at her for one second, and then, being children who knew each other so intimately, they intuited exactly what she meant, for just the day before they'd been talking with Danny Trybek through his window; just yesterday, Mrs. Trybek had chased them away with a rolled up newspaper.

Al turned to Sunny and said, "I'll bring the wagon back home and get my bike. You get Joe!"

Lauren didn't even wait to see what they did, she raced up into her own apartment, skidded into the living room, found the equalizer she needed on the rack in the bookshelf, and grabbed it. For something so deadly, it was so light.

"Lauren?" Mom called from the kitchen. "Is that you?"

She didn't even answer until she was back at the door. "Can't talk now, Mom, gotta go, Rachel's in trouble!"

She thought she heard Mom say, "What?!" But she was already rushing down the stairs. She grabbed her bike from the side of the building, right beside Rachel's. She gripped the sword and one handle bar in her right hand, stabilized the bike with her left, and got going.

To her surprise and relief, Al, Sunny and Joe were already waiting for her on their bikes. They said nothing about what she had in her hand. They said nothing at all. They all knew where they were going, and they all started riding.

As they turned left on to Ewen, Lauren saw Mrs. Anderson descending her front stairs. "Wait for me!" she called, but there was no chance of that. Lauren just hoped the woman had called the police, because even though the four of them were now riding to Rachel's rescue, she wasn't sure they would be able to do it without help.

"Was Mrs. Anderson supposed to come?" Al asked as they sped along the sidewalk.

"She said she'd call the police for me, but there's no way I was going to wait for her," Lauren said. "Rachel needs us now!"

It occurred to Lauren that they might be riding into danger themselves. They would have to get into that house somehow, and the occupants would not be giving them a warm welcome when they did. What warmed her heart was the knowledge that the boys had asked no questions, had shown themselves willing and ready to throw themselves into a potentially dangerous situation to save their friend. With that same lack of caution and foolhardy courage children needed to master riding a bike for the first time, to wipe out repeatedly on a skateboard, or to jump into the deep end of a pool knowing they couldn't touch the bottom, that same quality soldiers needed to leap out of their foxholes and meet a hail of gunfire, the four of them rode back to Boyne Street, to meet the master of the house, the villain that beat his son and caused him to seek refuge with the Lawrence Street Detective Club.

They ditched their bikes on the lawn in front of the house and stood looking at it.

"Not the front door," Sunny said. "They won't let us in if we knock, and it's too hard to break down."

"Danny's window," she said, and they scurried to the back of the house.

Joe peered through Danny's window and said, "No one's in Danny's room, we should be able to sneak through."

He tugged at the window, but it must have been locked from the inside because it wouldn't open. Frantic, Lauren joined him in tugging, not thinking about how fruitless this was. "Come ooooon!" she wailed. "Open! Please!"

"Stand back!" Al shouted as loudly as if he were using a megaphone. Startled, she turned and saw he had a massive rock in his hand. Confused for a second, she looked and saw the patch of brown in the rock border from which he'd taken it. Why hadn't she thought of that?

They backed away, and Al threw the rock with more strength than Lauren thought the small boy possessed. The window smashed so completely that it left an almost perfect square hole where it had just been a second ago.

"Holy shit! Good job, Al!" Sunny said, examining the window casement. "Wait!" he warned as they made to climb through. He pulled off his shirt, revealing a surprisingly bony brown body, and laid it over the rim. "So we don't get cut on the bits of glass still on it."

Al went through first, and the others followed one by one. The shirt did its job; Lauren heard no exclamations of pain from punctures from any of them. Sunny dusted his shirt off and put it back on when they were all in. It was a little worse for wear; the remaining glass must have sliced through the fabric and left a few holes. Still, Lauren was pretty sure Sunny didn't even notice, and that he'd probably toss the shirt into the trash without a thought as soon as he got home. If they got home. That wasn't a sure thing right now.

"Rachel! Where are you!" Al shouted before they could even discuss whether to reveal themselves. It seemed Al was just as frantic as she was to know Rachel was in here somewhere and okay.

Then, miracle of miracles, they heard Rachel's voice. "Be careful! He's dangerous! Call the police!"

Rachel, and probably Mr. Trybek, were on the other side of the closed door, judging by the sound. Lauren gestured to the others to stay against the wall on either side of the door. Then she slowly drew the sword so as not to alert anyone on the other side of that door. 

The metal gleamed as it emerged from the scuffed leather scabbard. Near the hilt, the Japanese characters signifying the name Hasegawa were engraved in the blade: 

はせがわ 

It was a trophy brought home from the war by her grandfather, who'd engraved the name into it himself. It remained sharp, and she quietly hoped she would have the courage to use it if she needed to. Dad had trained her in how to use one by practicing with a wooden version, but the weight and heft were roughly the same.

"We did already!" Al shouted, even though that wasn't entirely accurate. "They're on their way!"

Lauren looked at the door hinges and determined it would open out, not in. She stood on the opposite side of the door knob and slowly raised the sword, gripping the hilt with two hands like Dad trained her, ready to push with the left and pull with the right as she brought it down, to allow it to chop as she swiped, increasing the cutting potential. The boys looked at her, and she didn't know if the fear on their faces was for the possibility of Mr. Trybek coming through that door, or for what Lauren might do with the sword.

She thought she heard a man's voice yell, "Fucking... meddling little shits!" And then something hit the floor hard. She prayed that wasn't Rachel hitting the floor. That sounded painful.

"He's coming!" Rachel shouted. "Be careful!"

Lauren took a deep breath. The sword quivered at the top of its arc.

The door opened.

Just as she saw something or someone entering the room, Lauren brought the sword down.

It met something near the end of its journey, there was a tiny bit of resistance, and then that something dropped to the floor with a burst of red. Lauren felt a drop of something hit her cheek and run down it like a tear.

A man's voice screamed in agony, like a wounded animal, and Lauren brought the sword up again in case what she did failed to stop him entering the room.

No one entered the room. There was only the scream. It was a terrible, awful sound.

Lauren quickly looked at the thing that had fallen to the floor. It was pinkish and tube-like, with a rounded purple head, and the other end was red and bleeding from where it had been cut.

Holy shit, she thought. I think I just cut off his...

Joe was the first to act. He went through the door with more courage than even Lauren could have summoned, and ran into something, because he bounced back a little, and then continued into the rest of the house. Lauren heard him say, "You okay?"

From that, Lauren assumed it was all clear to go in. She held her sword in front of her, saw Joe had run over to a woman, Mrs. Trybek, she thought, lying on the floor further in, and then she saw Mr. Trybek on the floor in front of her, gripping his groin, blood seeping through his fingers.

Lauren put the sword to Mr. Trybek's neck and said, "Don't move, motherfucker, or I'll cut your throat!"

But Mr. Trybek was down for the count, just screaming his head off. Lauren took the opportunity to look for Rachel, and there she was, sitting on the floor, fiddling with her shorts for some reason. Thank goodness, she looked okay, a little bruised and scared but okay.

Suddenly she could hear police sirens in the distance, and she realized they'd done it. They'd saved her.

Al quietly stepped over Mr. Trybek, Sunny behind him. When his wide, frantic eyes found Rachel, he sagged in relief. "Oh, thank God!"

Rachel began to cry and held out her arms. He ran over and drew her up and, even though he was smaller than her, she clung to him and he didn't fall forward.

"Oh, God, we were so worried!" he said. "Lauren ran all the way back to our street and got Mrs. Anderson to call the police! Luckily me and Sunny hadn't gone out to make our delivery yet, so we were there. Lauren got her dad's sword, can you believe it?! We thought it would be best to go through the window around the back, since we knew he wouldn't answer the door, but we couldn't open it from our side, so I grabbed one of the rocks bordering the garden and smashed it."

Rachel looked at him in amazement. "You broke the window? You never do anything wrong!"

"I had to, Rachel! I didn't know what he was doing to you in there! I know it was wrong but I had to get to you!"       

Rachel kissed him, on the lips! Lauren was happy for them, especially Al, who, all of them knew, had a gigantic crush on Rachel. She was also a bit jealous, though, and that surprised her. She hadn't kissed Joe yet, and she wanted to be the first. She also felt a little proprietary over Rachel, and she suspected it had something to do with what they'd done to each other last Saturday night. She wondered what it would feel like if Rachel kissed her like that...

Al unlocked and blinked at Rachel, mouth hanging stupidly open. He said, "Huh," and patted her arms.

Sunny opened the door just as police cars pulled up. Then, to Lauren's surprise, Mrs. Anderson appeared in the door, huffing and puffing and red in the face, and she realized she'd forgotten they'd left her behind. "Kids, you didn't wait for me!" she admonished them. "I had to run here, and I'm no spring chicken anymore!"

Then she surveyed the impossible scene before her, and her face fell. "What in the world happened here?!"

"Mrs. Trybek's nose is broken," Joe said, helping the groaning woman to her feet. "She needs to go to the hospital."

"Mr. Trybek needs to go to the hospital too," Lauren said, grinning. "I sliced his pecker off."

That was what had everyone worried for a while. Maybe she shouldn't have grinned when she'd said it. There wasn't really anything to be pleased with herself about. It had been an instinctual flick of her wrists. She hadn't even known what she was swinging at. For all she knew she could have hit Danny, his mom or, heaven forbid, Rachel herself, although Rachel's warning that Mr. Trybek was coming had made her pretty confident he'd been her target.

"This is how I stood," she said to Al's dad, who worked as a child psychologist and had volunteered his counselling services to the kids. She positioned herself on the side of the door with her arms raised as if holding the sword again; the sword was still in police custody as evidence. "I didn't know when or how he was going to come into the room, but Rachel warned us he was dangerous, and I knew I had to be ready to take a swipe at him."

Al's dad examined her shrewdly. "So, when you held the sword, it wasn't the first time?"

He kept coming back to that. "My dad trained me in how to defend myself," she said. "I had problems with bullies where we used to live, and he thought it would be a good idea. Being small, he taught me ways to defend myself that took my height into consideration. He taught me aikido..."

"Tell me about aikido," he said, leaning forward. He looked genuinely curious.

"It's a martial art that allows the practitioner to use their opponent's momentum against them; most of the movements involve grabbing, throwing and pinning. But a lot of what Dad taught me was the mental discipline that accompanies it; most western people look at Asian martial arts the wrong way, thinking they're fighting systems, but the disciplines they teach have more to do with mastery of yourself than of your opponent. In fact, aikido, when practiced properly, does as little harm to the opponent as possible while incapacitating them."

Al's dad nodded as if he understood. "And did he teach you how to swing a sword?"

Back to that again! "Look, my dad had a family heirloom in our apartment that happened to be a dangerous weapon, and, being a kid, I was curious about it and wanted to touch it. Instead of locking it away, my dad taught me how to be safe with it and use it properly, like he would a hammer or a saw. He didn't teach me with the sword, that would have been dumb; I could have killed myself. No, he taught me using a bokken, a blunt wooden replica, so I'd get all the practice of swinging and parrying without the danger of cutting myself."

Al's dad nodded and made notes on a notepad.

"I don't know what all the fuss is about," Lauren said. "If I didn't have that sword with me, I wouldn't have been able to stop Mr. Trybek. He might have hurt all of us, maybe even killed us. I saved Rachel! Isn't that a good thing?"

"Of course, of course," he said. "Nobody's saying you did anything bad, Lauren. All I'm doing is talking with you about it, letting you have the opportunity to talk it out and examine any... feelings you might have about what you did."

"What do you mean, feelings?"

"Well, Lauren, you seriously injured someone. Even though you might feel good about saving your friend, there might be a part of you that still has to process that fact."

Lauren shrugged. "It's not like I meant to slice his pecker off. And that's another thing! Why was his pecker the first thing through the door? Why was it hanging out in the first place?"

Al's dad cleared his throat in embarrassment and said, "That... uh... is something the police are still figuring out."

"You know," Lauren said, "If that wasn't hanging out, I might have just chopped at empty air and he might have been fine."

He cleared his throat again. "Um, yes, that's very true..."

"So, in a way, it was Mr. Trybek's fault his pecker got cut off."

"Lauren, no one is blaming you for anything. You're not in trouble at all. Everyone agrees that Mr. Trybek is the guilty party here. What we're concerned about is the fact that you did what no child should ever have to do, and that the aftereffects of that action might cause you some mental trauma we're hoping these counselling sessions can address."

"What trauma? I'm okay."

"You witnessed your friend, your best friend, as you said, being forcibly kidnapped. You hurried back to Lawrence Street, a few blocks away, to find help, all the time not knowing if she was okay. You went back into that house knowing your own life might be in danger. It must have been scary."

Lauren shrugged. "Yeah. I guess."

"And then you were forced to make the decision to hurt someone. You know, soldiers in war have to go through the same things you did, and a lot of them come home with mental trauma too, unable to get the images out of their head of the hurt they caused or witnessed. Some people call it shell shock, and it causes nightmares, panic attacks, bouts of rage, alcoholism..."

"I don't drink, I hate the taste of alcohol."

Al's dad laughed. "No, of course you don't, you're a minor. All I'm saying is, it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for you to experience some of those other things."

Lauren nodded slowly. It made a kind of sense. "Well, I have to admit, I didn't like seeing it there on the floor, all bloody. It was pretty gross."

"So, you can't get the image of Mr. Trybek's dismembered penis out of your mind."

"Well, yeah, I guess."

"I can help you with that."

Lauren blinked in surprise. "How?"

"Psychologists can use techniques like hypnosis to help patients who've undergone trauma. We can work on locking away that image, so that you remember only the heroic things you did that day and not the ugliness of the aftermath."

"Huh. That sounds pretty good."

"Of course, we'll have to get your parents' consent before we do any hypnotherapy, and one or both of them will need to be in the room when it happens..."

"My dad," she said. "I want my dad in the room. I don't want my mom knowing about the pecker."

"I'm sure by now she does. But tell me why you want your father in particular."

Lauren smiled. "Because he's the only one who knows what it means to swing that sword, what it means to be a warrior. And he's the only one who's proud of me for what I did."

"That's not true, Lauren. We're all proud of you."

"No you're not. You're scared of me."

They did the hypnosis, and for thirty years Lauren forgot about the image of the pecker lying on the floor. Then she saw one lying on a bloodstained bedsheet next to a man who'd had a heart attack and died, and it all came flooding back.

Thanks for reading this far! Every one of the kids had to deal with their own fallout from the events at the Trybek house, but Rachel and Lauren most of all, and both in opposite ways. If you liked what you read, be sure to click "Vote" and send this story up the rankings. If anything didn't ring true about the counselling of children back in the Seventies, or the use of hypnosis as therapy, please leave a comment. I strive for authenticity. Now, let's return to Al and Lauren in the present day by clicking "Continue reading."