Uncertainty ripples through me. What’s she doing here? Where’s Barry? “Hi.” I try to sound nonchalant while recollecting the awkward sensation of her naked breast squashed against my palm behind the junior high last week.

Tinsley doesn’t respond. She’s concentrating on three bronze coins that she’s just tossed onto the asphalt. The coins have square holes at their centers. With her fountain pen, she draws two dashes in a notebook and scribbles the number five.

“Whatcha doing?” I ask.

“Throwing the I Ching. An ancient form of divination.”

“Uh, come again?”

“A way to figure things out and gain insight.” She pats the asphalt beside her.

I sit with my back against Odysseus’s door and light a cigarette. What’s Tinsley trying to gain insight about here in the parking lot? Whether or not she should do something insane and sexual again? Hopefully not here where my fellow workers can observe. I could play it cool and simply wait and see, but it annoys me that she has the ability to make me uneasy. “So, uh, what’s up?”

Once again the coins clink on the pavement. “Barry told me where you work.”

Right. And it’s not like the factory parking lot is overflowing with psychedelically painted VW microbuses. But she still hasn’t explained what she’s doing here.

My fellow workers stare as they pass on the way to their cars, no doubt thinking that only a couple of weirdo hippies like us would choose to sit in a parking lot amid smatterings of broken bottles, cigarette butts, and spots of ground-in chewing gum. Do they still think I’m a spy for my father? I wonder. This is my third year at the junk-mail factory. I show up on time, do my job and anything else that’s asked of me, and never leave early. If they knew anything about the counterculture, they’d understand that I’m probably the last person who’d turn on them.

Tinsley scribbles in the notebook. Snap! Snap! Snap! In the parking lot of the warehouse next door a couple of kids set off firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July. Four nights ago, I took Alan up to Bayville to Adventure Park, a rinky-dink amusement center with half a dozen kiddie rides. From there we went to the crescent-shaped beach where every fifty yards bonfires burned and people were shooting off rockets and firecrackers. Alan likes to watch fireworks almost as much as he likes going on rides, but the loud bangs scare him if we get too close, so we sat on a low white concrete wall some distance away. When a cherry bomb went off nearby, he took my hand in his.

On the radio on the way home, we heard the DJ talking about Brian Jones, who’d been discovered dead in his swimming pool the day before.

“That sucks,” I muttered to myself.

“Who’s that?” Alan asked.