On the lookout for fire lizards and fauns, I walk toward the campus in the storybook light. I have the twenty bucks my mom left for my school lunch and pizza for dinner. I see her tired face as she heads out the door for another double shift. I cringe but determine to spend it, clearly corrupted by my seditious sneakers and my favorite bookstore’s siren song.

Ahead of me, sitting on the steps of a handsome shingled house, I see the Bubble Lady, an older woman in Renaissance fair garb who’s blowing soap bubbles into the air. Almost every time I visit Berkeley she’s here, blowing bubbles and selling her poetry chapbooks from the embroidered bag slung over her shoulder. Sometimes she’s peaceful, but other times she seems confused.

Today I smile at her and she smiles back, offering me the plastic stick with its hoop on the end. I accept, dipping into the small pink bottle. In the iridescent soap circle stretched across the hoop, I see my own reflection: dark eyes, dark hair, a rainbow across my cheek. I blow, turning my features into a dozen bright orbs that drift into the high blue autumn sky.

At the Other Change of Hobbit, I discover the pleasure of browsing a bookstore alone. How had I never done this before? I wander the shelves, pleasantly dizzy, and wonder if this is what it feels like to be drunk.

My stomach is growling by the time I reach Blondie’s, where the slices of pizza are the size of your head. In front of me is a girl pulling her pockets inside out, rummaging through her bag.

“I know I have a five,” she says. “I’m so sorry!” Her brown skin is a shade darker than mine and splashed with red as she hunts through the pockets of her jean jacket.

“I’ve got it,” I hear myself saying. “Can you add a slice of cheese and a root beer?”

“Are you sure?” The girl is Mexican, probably, with eyes as soft and dark as my mom’s brown velvet coat and the coolest way of putting on eyeliner I’ve ever seen.

Slice in hand, the girl smiles like a movie star and says, “Want to go eat on the steps?” She must mean the steps of Sproul Hall, the scene of so many sixties protests. My mom and dad had met at an anti-war rally—not here but in Sacramento, at the state college. Now, in the eighties, the protests are still about financial morals—students want the university to divest from South Africa because of apartheid. Kelly explained it the last time we were in Berkeley together at the end of our freshman year.

The girl clears her throat. “Or I can just, you know, go . . . somewhere else . . . all by myself.” Her attempt at sad-orphan eyes fades into another grin, showing perfect white teeth and a single band of silver retainer.