“Just go! Come back and get me later.” Heart galloping, I turn to face the approaching horde, my body feeling like a thousand volts of electric current are flooding through it. I don’t know what’s impelled me to make a stand, but I’m thinking of Robin and how I’ve failed her. How I’ve failed myself. How pissed off I am at me. How tired I am of living in a world where the powerful impose their wills on the meek.

Arno goes about twenty feet more, then stops. I mouth the words Keep going! at him. Tinsley and Milton continue toward the car.

The hoods stop a dozen feet away from me. The leader is the smallest, but muscles bulge under his tight T-shirt. “Where you runnin’ off to, hippie?”

“We aren’t running anywhere,” I tell him, gripping the stick tightly but keeping it at my side.

“Looked like running to me,” the leader says. “You afraid of something?”

“Whoa, check out the hot chick.” One of them nods at Tinsley, standing beside the GTO in her short dress and white go-go boots. Milton’s with her. Arno’s still about halfway between me and the car.

“That is some choice hippie piece of ass,” says another.

“I get it.” The lead hood leers. “You don’t want to share.”

Shit! Why didn’t Arno and the others go when they had the chance?

The gang steps closer. Even with this stick, six-to-one odds really stink. Then again, if I get the crap kicked out of me, I might not have to go all the way to San Francisco for my deferment. Surely the army doctors in Brooklyn will be compelled to flunk me if I show up in a body cast. But then I think of what happened to Barry. Nothing about this is funny.

“We don’t want any trouble,” I tell them.

“Too late, hippie boy,” the leader says. “You ain’t from here. You come to our beach, leave your fire burning. Leave your bottles and cups. What do you think we are, garbagemen?”

Arno takes a few steps closer. “We’ll clean it up.”

“Oh, yeah? Maybe I don’t want hippie garbage like you pickin’ up hippie garbage like that.” The leader turns to his pals, grins proudly at his clever turn of phrase. A regular lowbrow Oscar Wilde. Then he steps nearer. “What are you, hippie boy, six two?”

“About that.” My heart drums. I squeeze the stick hard.

“Go one eighty? One ninety?”

“About that.” I’m trembling. If they come any closer, I’ll get into batting stance. Hopefully, when they see I’m serious, they’ll have second thoughts.

Lamebrain cracks his knuckles. “So you got five inches and twenty or thirty pounds on me. What do you say you drop the stick and we settle this mano a mano?”

“Lucas!” Arno calls anxiously from behind.