“You saw that freak. He was cool.”

“How did you know it was really LSD?”

How does Lucas the Impulsive know that the acid he took an hour ago was acid? Could it have something to do with the hundreds of tiny silverfish currently wriggling around inside Odysseus’s one-eighth-inch-thick windshield?

And yet Robin’s concern, though unlikely, is not without merit. Creative chemists the world over have been known to lace their product with a little something “extra” to boost the rush. Feeling motormouthy and having two thousand thoughts per second? Your acid, mon ami, is mixed with speed. Muscles tight and yearning to stretch? A pinch of strychnine has been added. (Know what’s truly freaky? Strychnine is rat poison. But it’s like the cyanide in apple seeds. In microscopic amounts, it won’t hurt you.)

But Professor Lucas digresses. Back to Robin’s inquiry. “You mean, you think someone would go to all the trouble of making little orange barrels that looked exactly like Orange Sunshine, but weren’t? Why would anyone do that?”

“I don’t know, Lucas. I’m just saying, is this what you’re going to be like next year if you get into Goddard?”

It’s not immediately clear how they went from the authenticity of the Orange Sunshine to his expected enrollment at Goddard College, but El Capitán finds it reassuring that Robin’s thinking about their future. He reaches over and strokes her shoulder. “Listen, everything’s groovy. I promise I’ll be cool with the next toll collector. I’ll get us back to Long Island in one piece. I’ll do whatever I need to do next year.”

Is it his bugging imagination or does the smile Robin returns appear a bit brittle? She gazes out the passenger window. Odysseus sails onward, toward Long I Land.

How could it be

That someone so smart and pretty

Could be into me?

At age thirteen, Lucas is a medium-size, slightly chubby, Dumbo-eared, poorly coordinated, and somewhat befuddled young suburban individual. The father expects progeny who will become prosperous businessmen tennis players. The mother asks merely for academic brilliance. It appears that Lucas is destined to achieve neither. At school, he is adequate at best. The popular kids ignore him while they communicate in their secret indecipherable language. Baffled, he adapts by becoming invisible, creeping around corners, blending into the background.

But then begins the Semi-Miraculous Transformation. In the span of eighteen months, he grows eight inches. His shoulders broaden, voice deepens, waist narrows, cheekbones appear. He passes an afternoon in the hospital having the auris elephantus pinned back. It is now freshman year of high school, and girls who never knew he existed do double takes. Guys who’d never let him play punchball with them at recess suddenly have an open seat at their lunch table.