1. Hot pink, pale pink.
2. Bright blue, light blue.
3. Blood red, watery red.
4. Dark yellow, mellow yellow.
5. Blazing orange, faded orange.
6. Deep purple, soft purple.
7. Neon green, dull green.

Terrifying creatures. Giant behemoths, snarling and grinning wildly; bending down to peek through our third floor windows. That summer, my tenth of (now) sixty-three, remains the worst summer of my life.

It was the week school let out; five neighborhood kids in the 1970's. We had to play the game. He trapped us that day and before he would let us go he made us play and promise to come play again. He was nice enough and we were pretty sure, then, he was just joking. At first we thought it was fun; exciting. The danger was introduced in degrees like a stovetop heating water on low heat. The rules were simple. I was the youngest and the order went from youngest to oldest. The first person picked a color, the second person picked an adjective and so on until all 28 words were gone. The trick was, you not only had to remember your words, you also had to try to remember the words others had taken because if you didn't and picked a color for a third time or picked an adjective again, you missed that turn. Those first few times, if the other players who already had your word didn't call out and claim it, the referee (that's what we took to calling him), stopped play and (with a stern look) reminded the errant player and made them claim their word; and even though he never wrote anything down, he was always right. At the end, each player had to recite their words in the order adjective-color, adjective-color, etc. but not necessarily in the order they had been chosen and we were encouraged to jumble the pairings from the originals as written. Each successful pairing was worth points, but any unpaired, leftover words were minus points; and, depending on both the successful pairings and the leftovers, each one was worth a different number of plus or minus points. The rules were simple, but the scoring was not. It took some of us a good part of the summer to sort of figure out the scoring and work it in our favor, but Seth and Teresa, they never did get it. Even though I was the youngest, (we all were only a couple of years apart), me and Emily stayed pretty steady in the top two, and Bruce pretty much stayed in the middle all the time. If you haven't figured it out, the scoring was cumulative all summer long, but the order of finishes per game held pretty true to the running totals, (with a handful of significant exceptions). The other thing me and Emily and Bruce couldn't figure out is how the referee knew when we were bluffing. See, after playing a couple of times, me and Emily, (and Bruce after a couple of weeks), figured out that it might be advantageous (especially towards the end of a game) to miss a turn. The first time I tried this, the referee called my bluff, (literally said, “I call your bluff”), and assigned me exactly the word I was most not wanting. The three of us compared notes on this all summer and I don't think he was wrong once, even though we kept trying to be more and more clever about it. So Bruce gave up trying about halfway through the summer and Emily was far more judicious than I was. I just didn't think it was possible for him to be right every time, so I had to keep testing him; I refused to learn, and it cost me more and more as the summer progressed. I kinda think maybe Emily did figure out how to successfully bluff a time or two, but she would never admit that to me. One thing never changed: until that very last time, the week before school started again, he made us promise each and every time to come back and play again. And each and every time, we did. A couple of times after he let us go for the day, we swore to each other that we wouldn't go back, but those times, come that third day of not going back, we would start seeing him hanging around our houses, or talking to our moms at the market, or to our little brothers or sisters at the playground. And so each and every time, we went back. Most times he just made us promise and no time limit was set, and he was always there when we went like he knew when we were coming. But three or four times he said the day after tomorrow and that one time in early July, he made us promise tomorrow. That was a bad time.

The first escalation came as we went through June. Instead of a stern look for not remembering to claim our own word when someone else called it out, he began to be verbally abusive by (at first) making snide remarks about our inability to remember and (then) more and more personal remarks about our lack of intelligence and questioning the integrity of our lineage and (finally) yelling and threatening possible physical abuse if we were unable to keep up with this (in his mind) minimal requirement. It was the 70's; we had teachers like this. Still, it was at this point that we decided a couple of times to not go back and first saw him hanging around our neighborhood and approaching and talking to not only family members but other neighbors and even once to the beat cop that patrolled the neighborhood. So we kept going back to the game and by towards the end of June we were all nearly perfect on remembering our own words, though it pushed Seth and Teresa nearly to their limit to do just that.

Next came the physical abuse; though he never touched us. Sometime in June, the referee started reciting the definitions of leftover adjectives. For example, early on, once when I had neon leftover he said, “a chemically inert gaseous element occurring in small amounts in the earth's atmosphere, used chiefly in a type of electrical lamp.” As he was speaking I felt a tiny build-up of tingling throughout my arms and legs, strangely, (though I know you're thinking power-of-suggestion to a ten-year-old), strangely like an electrical charge. Other times Hot resulted in a sunburn for Teresa and Blazing Hot, a fever for Seth. That's not power-of-suggestion. Coincidence? Maybe. But there were a lot of coincidences that summer. And as the summer progressed, these coincidental afflictions got incrementally worse.

In the end, Seth was gone, Teresa was wrecked, (the way it turned out, for Life), Bruce managed to escape and forget, I did okay, though still dealing with the anger, and Emily appeared to grow stronger from the experience and in the intervening decades has done quite well for herself. There are a lot of stories to tell, all going back to and including that summer.