The Slave by Laura Antoniou Read Free Book Online Page A

and villains.
They pulled their stories out of the books that their parents read
them and the ones they got in school. Some of the older kids
brought in ideas, characters and scenes from their favorite
movies.
    And then Robin could relax. Because she was
one of the youngest kids there, they never let her be the evil
Princess, or the Lady Pirate. She couldn’t even be Natasha the Spy.
But she could be the Little Princess, the maid, the youngest
daughter (or the oldest one, when it seemed that she was the one
that was going to get ritually blamed for everything), or the
hostage taken by the evil villain to get the good guys to have to
come and rescue her.
    And as kids do, they used their
overwhelmingly powerful imaginations to come up with scenarios
beyond the pat and G-rated endings they were subjected to. They
used their own experiences with parental discipline to create
fantastic, silly, and sometimes all-too-accurate portrayals of
threatened torments and fear. They were children.
    They feared being abandoned, so they acted
out scenes of banishment. They feared being lost, so they
blindfolded each other. They feared being discovered, so they hid
in dark places and whispered. They feared adults and their
mysterious one-sided world, so they played at being tyrants and
victims.
    Without having to say that she longed for
the times when cousin David would tie her to a chair and pretend to
be her kidnapper, Robin could throw herself into the role so easily
there evolved quiet agreement that these were the kinds of parts
she played. It was just as natural as when her older cousin Pete
also found himself to be always playing the part of the family dog
when they played house, or being the villain whose plots were
foiled and then had to be captured and pummeled ruthlessly with
pillows and plastic swords before he was finally defeated.
    But as the children grew and the generation
was sealed for a while, the older ones drifted away from such
games. With no new young kids to initiate, and more sophisticated
games to tempt the participants, the imaginative scripts of evil
and good gave way. When cousin David got his own Nintendo, they
were destroyed forever.
    And no one ever spoke of them,
except to laugh. How silly we were , they could say, so embarrassed at their past
play. By age 12, they started to forget.
    Or at least most of them did. But Robin
never forgot. Because in many ways, Robin never outgrew those
fantasies.
    I am different than everyone
else , she
once observed, looking at herself in the mirror. I don’t look like
it; at least I don’t think so. But I have thoughts that no one else
does. I think of things that no one talks about. When the other
girls are talking about make-up and hair, and which boy likes them,
I’m thinking about being kidnapped. While everyone watches the same
TV shows, I still like to watch those movies where bad guys tie
their prisoners up in dungeons and people get whipped. Why am I so
weird? Why can’t I just talk about what happened on TV last night?
There must be something wrong with me.
    So she hid her secret perfectly, growing up
to be the perfect middle child. Her older brother was the star of
the family, her younger sister the baby.
    Robin herself had a little of her brother’s
charm and magnetism, and some of her sister’s sweet nature. But she
was also the loner, the bookworm. She read precociously and
voraciously, earning excellent English grades in school. She had to
be prodded towards athletics, and endured girlish sports until
Junior High School, where she discovered track and field. Running,
especially alone, gave her even more time to explore her secret
thoughts.
    To the rest of the world, she was perfectly
normal, smarter than average, good natured, and maybe a little
strong willed from time to time. No one could have guessed that as
she studied Greek and Roman history, she became a barbarian slave,
brought to Rome in chains, to be sold to the highest bidder. No one
knew that she