He’s just torn a blank page out of the back of the paperback when the wind suddenly swirls, snatching the sheet and sending it across the field behind the junior high. His hair whipping across his face, Barry gets to his feet to control the kite. He and his friend Zach were among the first guys Lucas saw grow their hair long. One night a few weeks after they introduced Lucas to grass, Barry and Zach went to see the Young Rascals at the Westbury Music Fair. Neither of them was old enough to drive, so they took a bus. After the concert, they were waiting for the bus home when a bunch of guys jumped them.

These days, if you fly your freak flag, chances are that sooner or later someone’s going to say something. But it’s nothing like it was in 1965, when hardly anyone had long hair and the few guys who dared to were subject to daily harassment. Barry and Zach were badly beaten. Some of their hair was pulled out and much of the rest chopped off with scissors. (The police speculated that their attackers had come equipped for hippie hunting.) When Lucas saw Barry a few days later, his cousin’s nose was bandaged, eyes blackened and swollen, lip split, a tooth chipped. No arrests were ever made — though Lucas the Cynic has doubts about how hard the cops looked for the guys who beat up a couple of long-haired dirty drug-taking peacenik faggot hippies.

What happened turned Barry into a basket case.

On the blanket behind the junior high, Tinsley inches closer on her elbows, her breasts in plain sight swaying inside the blouse. This is crazy, Lucas the Flustered thinks. He shouldn’t look. She raises the camera, and he stares instead into the rainbow-reflective depths of the glistening lens. Click.

She lowers the camera, then reaches toward his face. Barry is only a few yards away, his back to them as he works the kite string in the gusty breeze. Tinsley’s fingers softly trace Lucas’s cheekbones, nose, and lips. Her fingertips tickle and titillate. Her smile is beatific. Lucas feels off-kilter and weird. He also feels a growing tightness behind the zipper of his jeans.

Robin, O Robin! Wherefore art thou

500 miles away, in the land of Hockey,

maple syrup, and polar bears?

Lucas the Aroused tries to redirect his eyes to his book. Tinsley’s fingers trace the skin down his arm. Goose bumps sprout with abandon. Her hand closes over his wrist.

Now what?

She tugs and his hand follows, crossing a few inches of blanket and sliding into the blouse so that his fingers ever so slightly graze the tip of one breast.