I finished the Gatorade and vodka in the canteen and lit a Marlboro.

Robin said, “My self-pity getting a little thick for you?”

“I prefer you ironic.”

“You should talk.” Robin reached into her backpack for a box of Entenmann’s chocolate-chip cookies. “All you’ve been doing is moping around trying to figure out why I’m here and Glenna’s not.”

Robin opened the box, then put it between us, and we attacked the cookies.

“Meyers, you don’t get Glenna, do you?”

“She said something like that to me not long ago.”

“Well, she’s sick in love with you. That’s why she’s such a pain in the ass.”

I felt vaguely unfaithful talking to Robin about Glenna, and yet it was comforting. “Explain.”

“Say you have everything. You’re smart, gorgeous, guys chase you. Then you fall in love—not the puppified variety. Now you have a lot to lose that you’re not in charge of, and so it stops feeling like you have everything.”

I flicked my cigarette into the fire, my feelings about Glenna pinwheeling from anger to an unbearable longing for her.

Robin said, “And the reason Glenna’s not here is because we were eating lunch at the hospital with Palm, and when Glenna mentioned going to Woodstock with you, Palm told her he needed her at his clinic. I knew Glenna wouldn’t come.”

“Which is when you bought your ticket?”

“That’s my secret. And here’s a secret for you. Our first year of med school, Palm tried to put the moves on her.”

“And?”

“Don’t get jealous, Meyers. Glenna shut him down, but he doesn’t want anyone else to have her, and he still tags after her. See, it’s not like she ditched you. She does have a bug up her ass about abortion, but it’s also that Palm’s her souvenir from the days when she had nothing to lose. And everyone keeps souvenirs.”

We finished the cookies, and after I tossed the box in the fire, Robin said, “Chicago was shitty.”

“Last summer? What made you think of that?”

“Camping. Remembering how angry I was having to go to chubby camp. You.”

“Me?”

“You love secrets,” she said. “And you keep them.”

“Because I don’t have too many of my own.”

“That’s what Glenna said.”

“I was kidding, Robin.”

“Glenna wasn’t. She meant that you go your own way with your life, and you’re not ashamed of much. She’s my best friend, but I don’t tell Miss Universe my secrets. Secrets are things you’re ashamed of.”

“Like what?”

Robin laughed. “Like when I was thirteen I read the Communist Manifesto and masturbated to the portraits of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the cover.”

I laughed. “You’ll have to do better than that.” God, I liked Robin.

“I was ashamed last summer.”

“Didn’t you threaten one of Mayor Daley’s cops with a hypo of LSD?”

“Not that. I was ashamed afterward.” The warm blue air had been washed away by the chillier purple of twilight. Robin draped a Barnard sweatshirt over her shoulders and spoke to the fire. “Afterward, after the Democratic Convention, everybody went camping at this state park outside Chicago. At night, we toasted marshmallows, if you can dig that—forty radicals toasting marshmallows. Then some jerk-off launches into a speech about monogamy letting men exploit women, and there’s been a shitload of exploitation in SDS, and what were we gonna do?”