And Both Were Young by Madeleine L'Engle

But be careful,” and handed her the needle and the match.
    Flip bared her arm. Gloria struck the match, but it flickered and went out.
    “Oh, Glory, you sap!” Sally cried.
    “I told you to be careful,” Erna said, rubbing toothpaste on Flip’s outstretched arm.
    Jackie’s face puckered into a frown. “There isn’t another match. Now what should we do?”
    Esmée Bodet shrugged and ran her fingers through the reddish hair she wore in a glamorous long bob. “Do it without sterilizing the needle, that’s all.”
    Jackie hesitated. “Maybe it isn’t safe. Maybe we’d better do Pill another time.”
    “I sterilized it good and thorough for the others,” Erna said. “It ought to be all right.”
    “Oh, sure, it’s all right,” Sally cried. “Go on, Gloria.”
    Flip turned her head away as Gloria took her arm and jabbed at it gingerly with the needle, exclaiming with chagrined surprise, “It didn’t go in.”
    “Try it again,” Esmée urged.
    Gloria jabbed again. “Oh, blow.”
    Erna took the needle from her. “Here, stupid. Let me do it.”
    “Wait a minute, Erna. She’s had enough,” Solvei said.
    “No, she has to be properly inoculated,” Erna insisted. She took the needle and punched. This time she didn’t have to squeeze to draw blood. “I did it kind of hard, but it’s very
good
blood, Pill,” she said.
    “The worst is over,” Jackie promised. “You only have one more ordeal to go through.”
    “So, peoples,” Erna said to the other new girls. “You’re all through now. All we have to do is finish Pill up and then we’d better get back to the common room or someone’ll be out to look for us.”
    “What do we do to Pill now?” they cried.
    “We blindfold her and tie her to the tree,” Jackie said.
    “And gag her, too, don’t forget,” Gloria added.
    “Come on, Pill, over by the tree.” Erna gave her a boisterous shove.
    Flip looked at the tree and it seemed more like a gibbet than ever, sticking up starkly out of the tall grasses. She remembered reading in a book once about the way you used to see gibbets along the desolate highways in England long ago;and as you drove along you would sometimes see a dead highwayman, black and awful, strung up on one of the gibbets, as a warning to thieves and murderers. She felt that this tree against which she was being forced to stand was like one of those old gallows, and for a shuddering moment her imagination told her it might have been used for that very purpose.
    But no, she reassured herself. It’s only a dead tree and there aren’t any lonely highways nearby, only a big school that once used to be a hotel.
    “Anything you’d like to say before we gag you?” Erna asked.
    Flip shook her head and Sally cried, “Oh, Pill never has anything to say.”
    Erna tied one handkerchief over Flip’s mouth, another over her eyes, and with a rope made of a number of brown woolen stockings knotted together secured her to the tree. Gloria and most of the English and American girls danced around the tree singing what to Flip was an appalling and fearful song:
Did you ever think when a hearse goes by
    That one of these days you are going to die?
    The French girls were singing a dreadful song about a corpse being dissected:
“Dans un amphithéâtre il y avait un macabre . . .”
while Erna and the rest of the girls were for some unexplained reason singing the school song.
    When Gloria stopped singing she shouted, “I say, I’m tired of this. Let’s go back to school and play Ping-Pong.”
    “How long should we leave Pill?” Jackie asked.
    Erna considered. “Well, let’s see.”
    “Not too long,” Solvei put in on Flip’s behalf. “She did awfully well during the initiation.”
    Behind her blindfold and gag Flip felt a glow of pride because she could hear from Solvei’s voice that this time she really meant what she was saying.
    “Well, fifteen minutes then,” Erna said.
    “Fifteen minutes! What are you talking about!”