I didn’t have the energy to go anywhere last night, so I asked Milton and Arno to come over. We sat on the back patio and I laid it out for them: if I can’t keep starving myself, or if it gets close to the physical and I haven’t lost enough weight, I’m going to need their help. I’m not going to prison or Canada.

Milton said he’d had a feeling I might call upon him; Rudy had told him about what we’d discussed.

“I’ll do whatever you need me to,” he said.

Arno squirmed and scratched his chin nervously. “Man, you can’t just help people cut off parts of their bodies, can you? It’s got to be illegal.”

“Arno, you were planning on selling two thousand hits of acid at the festival.”

“That’s different.”

“How?” I ask.

“I don’t know. It just is.”

“Chicken?” Milton taunted.

“Shove it, idiot-stick.”

“Great story to tell your new friends at Bucknell,” I suggested.

Arno lifted his eyebrows. He appeared to mull it over, then leaned forward. “What’re you going to do with it?”

“My finger?”

“Yeah.” Suddenly his eyes were bright.

“You cannot be serious,” Milton muttered.

“What would you do?” I asked Arno. “Dry it out and wear it on a cord around your neck?”

“No, flea-brain. I’d put it in a jar with alcohol. Keep it on my desk. I mean, tell me that wouldn’t be the coolest thing ever.”

Was he serious? I didn’t know what to say. I looked at them both, and it was the craziest thing, but inside me so much emotion suddenly welled up that I had to blink back tears. Milton with his gun and Molotov cocktail, his head practically shaved for court. Arno with his GTO and two thousand hits of acid, his Good & Plenty aftershave still stinking up the place. Maybe we didn’t get to have our last hurrah at Woodstock, but what a summer it had been regardless. Only in a week or so, Arno was going to Bucknell, and Milton was going back to MIT, and I was going . . . Well, I was going to miss them so damn bad that I was almost tempted to cut off a finger right then and there and give them each a piece of it to remember me by.

In the den, Alan’s back in his old spot in front of the boob tube. Any moment now, Mom and the paterfamilias will return. The paterfamilias will probably have to hang around the house. It would be unseemly to go off and play tennis on the day his nephew is put in the ground. Maybe he’ll go up to his gym in the attic and work out. The amount of stress around here will once again rise to palpable levels. But at least now I’ve gotten a glimpse of why.