This transformation is as mystifying to the transformed as it is to everyone else. Inside Lucas, nothing has changed. He is still muddled and befuddled. Still lacking the athletic and intellectual makeup the progenitors had hoped for. But they have bestowed upon him a genetic blessing, a letter of transit through the tempestuous ninth-grade social scene — a chassis that gives Lucas a facade of poise.

Robin, on the other hand, is hatched of the choicest Grade A, 100 percent excellent hereditary material. As far back as kindergarten, she has been universally liked and admired, and not in that unapproachable, cliquey, I’m-not-sharing-my-blocks-with-you kind of way. Someday people will say she has an aura — strong and determined while soft and caring.

In elementary and junior high schools, she and her friends are the serious, studious ones. Together they are tracked into smart-kid classes. They dominate such extracurricular activities as yearbook, literary magazine, student government, and model railroad club.

Robin will scrape elbow and knee in field hockey and volleyball. She will also become very pretty. (Who ever said life was fair?)

Spring ahead to a warm and sunny 1968 senior-year October day. Robin sits under a tree studded with red and gold leaves in the courtyard, reading The Stranger. Lucas passes on his way to chemistry class. On impulse, he abruptly doubles back. After all, they are seniors now. Grown up, mature, risen above (or so they pretend) childish concerns about popularity — equals soon to be dispersed to institutions of higher learning hither and yon. It has been not quite a year and a half since the hippies flocked to Haight-Ashbury for the Summer of Love, sixteen months since Jimi doused his guitar with lighter fluid and set it ablaze and Janis’s plaintive wails first gave people shivers at Monterey. Freaks in bell-bottoms and hippie beads have begun to sprout like weeds among the well-trimmed populace. Lucas is a weed with a chassis.

Until this moment, he has never said more than three words to Robin. His heart thumps nervously, the imprinted low social expectations from his awkward Dumbo-eared formative years leading him to prepare to be shooed away (but because she is Robin, he can at least hope for a gentle shooing). He nods at the book in her hands. “What do you think?”

(If nothing else, he has now succeeded in saying a total of seven words to her.)

The sun shines down from over his shoulder. Robin squints up in the brightness and says that she prefers to see meaning and purpose in life. “And you?” she asks.

Him? Having spoken on impulse and thus failed to arm himself with a reply to her reply, he mumbles something about meandering through meaninglessness and leaning toward existentialism.

Then hastily adds that he is open to other interpretations.