To this point, Lori’s face had been about as expressive as a stone, but now she did smile, on cue, and it was as if she were doing one of those toothpaste commercials you saw on TV, her lips pulled back to show off her healthy pink gums and flawless teeth. The smile invested her eyes, brought out a display of dimples, lit her up till she was beautiful and no doubt about it.

“Right,” she heard herself say, but she said it perfunctorily because she was trying to get at something here. She turned back to the girl. “And maybe it’s just me, but aren’t you afraid of getting bad grades and didn’t I hear something about your college president declaring the Hitchcock estate—us, that is—out-of-bounds for all you girls? Which isn’t right, I’m not saying that, but—”

The smile vanished. “He’s a jerk,” she said.

“Well, that may be, but he’s the jerk in charge.” Something in the girl’s face told her to stop, that it was none of her business, but of course it was, if she was living here now. Living here and influencing the other kids. And Fitz. And Ken. And Tim. “Maybe it’s not for me to say—”

Lori’s mouth hardened.

“I mean, I’m not your mother.”

“No,” Lori said, “you’re not.”

Tim was gone intermittently during that week and the next, traveling back and forth to New York to lecture on the psychedelic experience, sit for interviews and drum up financial support for the Castalia Foundation while managing both to play down and capitalize on the press hysteria over LSD, which seemed to be everywhere now, not just in the tabloids. The New York Times had done an article on Tim’s and Dick’s move to Millbrook (and, of course, their unceremonious departure from Harvard) and The Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek and Esquire ran sedately sensational stories about psychedelic drugs and the revolution they were fomenting not simply among psychologists but the general public as well. The big news? That the drug had escaped the lab and people were beginning to use it indiscriminately—not under a psychiatrist’s direction or in controlled studies or for any purpose any reasonable observer could deem legitimate. And that they were courting trouble, like the group of college students who had stared so long and hard at the sun while under the influence of LSD as to scorch their retinas and become permanently blinded (a story that turned out to be untrue, ridiculous really, but stood in vivid testimony nonetheless).