Now and then Tinsley reveals a tiny glimpse into her world. The way she does it feels more natural than forced. I don’t get the feeling she’s trying to impress anyone. (Though how could you not be impressed? A chance to meet Hendrix? How unbelievable would that be?)

“Your father’s petite copine?” I know it’s French, but I don’t know what it means. I took four years of the language and never got better than a C.

“His girlfriend. Mes parents sont divorcés.”

I used to have a friend whose parents were divorced. There were probably other kids at school with divorced parents that I didn’t know about. And how many had parents like mine, who stay together but with separate bedrooms? Mom and the paterfamilias might as well be divorced.

“What’s that like?” I ask.

“Without him around? Better. All they did was fight. And I never saw that much of him anyway because he was always working.”

“What’s he do?”

“International tax law. For conglomerates that want to expand overseas. It’s all about developing new markets to maximize profit and minimize cyclical risk.” (Does she see my eyes glaze over?) “Suppose you have a company that makes winter coats. Right now you have one selling season, the fall. But if you expand into the Southern Hemisphere, you’ll have two selling seasons.”

Something tells me that she could go into far more depth and detail about what her father does. And this is the same “hippie chick” who sometimes goes around with bare, filthy feet.

“Of course, he was the one who always took my side.” Tinsley sighs. “And pretty much let me do whatever I wanted. Now that it’s just my mother and me, she feels like she has to be even more of a disciplinarian than ever. I mean, this is the first summer I’ve lived at home probably since I was ten. And she is so uptight.”

“She can’t be that uptight,” I point out, “if she’s letting you go with Barry to Canada.”

With the toe of her cowboy boot, Tinsley crushes out her cigarette. “Who said she knows?”

Three boys, maybe eleven or twelve years old, are standing nearby, staring and whispering. They’re wearing matching gray summer-camp T-shirts. When I give them a curious look, two of the boys nudge the third closer.

“Are . . . are you a boy or a girl?” he asks me, then dashes away toward a yellow camp bus. The other two boys remain a safe distance off, waiting to see how I’ll react. When I turn my gaze on them, one tentatively offers a peace sign. I flash one back, and they excitedly congratulate each other, as if I’m a seal at the zoo and they’ve gotten me to clap my flippers.

“Your mother doesn’t know you’re on your way to Canada?” I ask, returning to the conversation.