“Look at this.” Milton gestures to a story in the newspaper about five guys on trial for burning their draft cards. “They’re facing five years for burning pieces of paper.” He points at a name: New York State Supreme Court justice Leopold R. Wagner. “And the SOB who’s presiding over the trial? Lives a couple of blocks from here. Bastard plays chess with my father.”

Something is different about Milton this summer. Last fall, only a few weeks past his sixteenth birthday, he went off to MIT an innocent genius. He’s never been one to talk openly about his feelings, but I sensed he was uptight — not about how he’d do academically but about living on his own away from his family. He’s come back more confident. He made it through freshman year. He’s more apt to reveal his emotions now.

And yet, when he heaves the rolled-up newspaper against Arno’s closet door, it catches me by surprise.

“What was that?” Arno’s muffled voice asks from under the bed.

“I’ve had it with this civil disobedience crap,” Milton seethes. “All this Gandhian drivel about winning the government over with love and patient suffering. There’s still half a million American soldiers over there. They’re still bombing the crap out of Cambodia and North Vietnam.”

I drop the pinner outside and close the window. In one of Chris’s first letters to me, he wrote about how in areas where there’d been intense bombing, he noticed that the scattered bodies left behind were sometimes naked. He was puzzled by this until his squad leader explained that a bomb’s shock waves often tear the clothes off a body. In another letter, he wrote about walking through a bombed village and finding a child’s foot lying on the ground. Nothing else. Just the foot. Chris has been over there for about six months. Six months to go.

If he makes it.

Arno backs out from under the bed dragging a bulging teardrop-shaped black sock. Narrow at the top, wide and round below, with a thousand little bumps like the skin of an avocado. It’s show-and-tell time.

“I heard on the radio today that there may be as many as twenty-five thousand people at that festival. If that’s true, in a little less than a month, Arno the Magnificent is going to perform the greatest magic trick of his life. He will turn the contents of this sock into six . . . thousand . . . dollars.”

He waits for us to figure it out.

“Acid,” Milton guesses.

“Is right, my fine freckled friend,” says Arno. “Five hundred bucks bought half a gram, which made two thousand hits, which —”

“If you sell for three dollars apiece equals six thousand dollars minus the cost of ingredients, which results in a net gain of five thousand five hundred dollars,” Milton swiftly finishes the sentence.

“Is correct.”