I refused to walk away from him, try to reassign the table— I strode right up, loudly clicked the button on my pen as I approached. "Guess they'll let anyone into this establishment, huh?"

His smile was quick to unfurl as he dropped the newspaper and stared up at me. "That how you talk to all your customers? I don't imagine you get a lot of tips, you don't have nearly enough southern charm."

"Cut the shit, this place is as far from your territory as it is from China." I put my elbows on the table and leaned forward. "You come here to see me?"

"You're a sharp one," he said. "It's cute seein' you all domesticated. You on the prom committee now, too?"

A lightbulb slowly went off over my head— his presence was so strong I'd forgotten he shouldn't be here at all. "Ain't you supposed to be in la patria? What happened to that little field trip?"

"Ain't back for good, I don't know what Timmy'll do there without me to keep an eye on him." He swept some of his hair out of his face; he'd let it grow out in Juárez, his skin glowed with a bright, coppery tan, too. He could've been taking a beach vacation for the past couple months. "Wanted to see how Curly's been holdin' down the fort."

Maybe it was the reference to Curly that made me mean. "They weren't waiting for you down there, were they?"

Twin red splotches emerged along the tops of his cheekbones, and he looked flustered for about the first time since I'd met him. "You got your mama's mouth," he said tightly. "Guess your daddy never managed to smack it out of either one of you."

There were two other customers hanging around at this hour, and yet both were staring at me expectantly. "You are fixin' to get my ass fired," I hissed at him, which was an exaggeration. Margaret was very fond of me, in part because the kind of waitresses Jay's attracted weren't the cream of the crop, mostly because I was as tuff as her and could wrangle this place. "What do you want? What are you doin' here?"

"I wanted some scrambled eggs." He fixed his face into his best approximation of innocence. "Is that too much to ask for now?"

By the way I gestured towards him, I might've given off the impression that I was going to strangle him to death with the gold cross around his neck; he threw his hands up in the air. "Okay, okay, I get it, you're on duty," he said. "I'm serious, we need to talk, though. Come meet me outside next time you got a smoke break... after you bring me my food, I wasn't kidding. I ain't eaten in damn close to three days."


My break came an hour later; Luis was loitering out back, working his way through a pack of cigarettes to pass the time. "You still here?" I asked, wiping my hands off on my apron. "I didn't really expect you to be."

"Okay," he said, unable to keep the amusement from bubbling up into his voice, "you have to tell me what you're doin' at this joint, girl. I mean... fucking Jay's. Darry give you the choice between this or peddlin' your ass outside the Dingo, y'all that hard up for rent money?"

"Dingo got burned down last year, genius." I rolled my eyes as I slumped against the exposed brick wall of the diner, pulled my pack of American Spirits out of my purse. "I'm savin' up for a car."

You'd think that once Soda deployed to Vietnam, and therefore had no more use for his truck, its ownership would naturally transfer over to his siblings— perhaps, even more naturally, the sibling who was of driving age and had her license. I thought wrong. "I don't trust you on your own two legs, Jasmine, much less a set of wheels," Darry had said, and worst of all, I couldn't even dispute the judgement.

"So can I—" Ponyboy had cut in, the little opportunist. I could've strangled him, but hell, if I wouldn't have done the same in his position.

"Judy can use it," he said, with the self-satisfaction of King Solomon offering to split a baby in half. "Damn, Dad said if Soda and I wanted cars, we could get jobs and earn the money for them. Fair's fair, ain't it?"

And here I was, at Jay's for the second summer in a row, saving my paychecks in the hope that I might scrounge up enough for some rustbucket. A few times, I'd let my mind flit towards thoughts of college, then dismissed it as a flight of fancy more suited to Ponyboy; despite what Mr. Anderson told me back in tenth grade, I was well-aware that even with a scholarship I couldn't finance anything of the sort, and that Darry was hardly chomping at the bit to send me. I'd marry, if not Bryon, someone similar, have his children, keep my husband's house the same way my mama had— my fate stretched out in front of me, a long wasteland. She wasn't around anymore for me to question her, ask if she wanted to go back to school or if after years of dealing with my daddy's exploits, washing dishes was a welcome reprieve.

Luis reached out to touch me, swept away some of the hair that had fallen from my ponytail. I didn't cringe away, just let him do it with an impassive face. "You like the kind of wages you're makin' here?"

"I like not havin' every pervert in Tulsa make eyes at me," I said, staring off into the clear blue sky— the sort that promised rain later, just out of sheer spite. I hoped he'd take the hint, but whether it was a lack of self-awareness or just a lack of shame, he didn't.

"You really hurt my feelings," he said with a hint of a pout, "all that shit about me not bein' wanted down in Mexico. My little cousins are always pretty eager for any Mickey Mouse merchandise I can get my hands on."

I wasn't wrong; Luis might've been hot shit around here, controlled nearly all of the dope in the city, but he was still a small town, Okie drug dealer compared to the scene in Ciudad Juárez, which had more than a million people. I feel like fuckin' Alexander the Great, he'd told me outside the courthouse last year, smug like a cat who'd gotten the cream. No wonder he'd rapidly grown restless, wanted to expand his horizons even further, he was in endless motion. "Can you ever get to the point? What revelations did you come to over there, exactly, that you couldn't even wait until I was off my shift?"

"Ain't you heard, doll? It's 1967, Summer of Love, they're callin' it over in Haight-Ashbury." I didn't like the way he looked at me when he said that. "Horse is real passé now, that's not what the hippie kids are into, and their parents' pockets are deep. New drug on the street is acid."

"And what would I know about hippie kids?" They were around even back when I was slinging, but those had never been my kind of kicks; my mind conjured up visions of rich white kids in badly tie-dyed shirts, joints between their fingers, protesting a war they were at no risk for being drafted into. "I look like I want to link arms and sing This Land is Your Land in someone's VW Beetle?"

"I've roamed and rambled, and I've followed my footsteps, to the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts—" I was starting to wonder if Luis hadn't mixed some pot into those cigarettes. "You support our actions in Vietnam, then?"

"If I say yes, are you gonna start singin' bars from Eve of Destruction next?" Luis, a peacenik. It would've been a more convincing charade if he didn't have a pistol strapped to his hip.

"Your daddy wouldn't have." He spat on the ground, real casual, like he didn't know the impact those words would have on me. Like he wasn't echoing what Darry had thrown at Soda when he came home a few days after his birthday, puffed up and proud as hell, saying Dad had fought in the south Pacific. You think our union rabble-rousing, IWW card-carrying, Indian nationalist daddy would cheer you on while you're shooting gooks in the jungle? It was the first political opinion I'd ever heard him express that didn't make him sound like he was canvassing for Barry Goldwater. "I remember that much about him."

"My brother's in Nam," I said, "I feel like it'd be a little hypocritical for me to start rootin' against him." I hated the war, because it had taken Soda away from us, but he hadn't gotten drafted— he enlisted all on his own. If I thought too hard about it, the only person I would have left to hate was Soda himself. "Walter Cronkite talks about this stuff every night on CBS, if you're interested in politics now."

"I just need you to do me a favor." How nice, he'd finally managed to start approaching the point. "Hit up one of those hippie joints and sniff around there. See what they're droppin' or smokin' or snortin', where they're gettin' it from, how these outfits operate— they're gonna be a lot more willing to share trade secrets with some cute-lookin' teenage girl than with me. But get some new clothes first, before they think you're an undercover cop."

"And what's in it for me?"

"I'll take you out on a date."

My response was immediate. "Fuck you."

"If you insist, but damn, I usually pay for a meal first." He shrugged; I, for the second time, considered whether or not strangling him with that chain would be justifiable homicide, and settled for flipping him off. "I'll make it worth your while, okay? Give you a bigger cut of profits than Dallas did, at the very least."

I pressed the back of my skull against the brick wall and lit another cigarette, let the smoke curl around my head without saying anything. Partly because even after all this time, the mention of Dallas still made my stomach twist into complicated knots, a storm of unfocused thoughts raging through my mind. Partly because if Luis kept pressing, or maybe even if he didn't, I would say yes now that I'd saved face and given him a hard time first. I hated when he said it, but he just knew me too well.


When I went over to Sylvia's after my shift ended, unwilling to hurry home to Judy cooing over baby name books, she wasn't the one who answered the door. "Hi, Jasmine," her mama said distractedly, her hair half in rollers as she was getting ready to go to work; she and Mrs. Mathews served at the same bar. She dressed a lot like her daughter— a couple years ago, Sylvia used to take half her skimpy clothes out of her closet— and looked a lot like her too, though with darker hair that showed at the roots. She was fond of me because back in second grade, I was a good influence; I detested her, though I had enough home training not to show it. "Ain't seen you around much lately."

"Can't imagine why," Sylvia bawled as she stalked into the hallway, grabbed me by the arm without so much as a greeting— we didn't need them. "Don't talk to me," she added before Ida got a word in at her, holding a hand up. "Don't even fucking look at me."

"Ain't my fault you can't keep a man longer than twenty minutes," Ida shot back, her fist already clenched and ready to go. I'd seen them literally roll around on the carpet together before, like two sisters fighting over the same boy, which made a sad amount of sense— Ida had popped out both of her kids before her eighteenth birthday. "Don't fuckin' sass me in front of your lil' friend, Sylvia Mae. He was too old for you, anyway, I did you a favor."

"And just right for you, I guess," Sylvia said with disgust dripping from her tone, "if you pretend you ain't on the wrong side of thirty. S'ppose you think your slutty makeup's got the guys fooled—"

Ida tried to slap her and narrowly missed the tip of my nose, which was when Sylvia pulled me into her room and slammed the door hard enough to knock her John Lennon poster off the wall. (Gun to my head, my favorite was George, he had the best haircut. In later years, once they all had solo careers, I'd be vindicated.) "Will Taggert and I are history," she said unnecessarily. "What happened to you, huh? You look like you've seen a ghost."

I gave her the abridged version, but even that was enough that once I finished telling her, she reached inside her pillowcase for the grass and rolling papers she kept there. "Listen, you're not gonna do what Luis asked?"

"... No?"

Fear flitted across her face like a shadow. She picked a piece of peeling dry skin from her wrist, the remnant of a sunburn, then she elbowed me in the gut, hard. If she wasn't my best friend, I would've socked her right back. "He's a fucking creep."

"Yeah, I'm well-aware—"

"Are you, though?" I didn't like the way she looked at me, as incisive as a surgeon's scalpel. "He don't care about you," she went on, the THC making her bold as brass, "if he did, he sure as hell wouldn't want you to be doin' his dirty work. He's playin' some kind of angle, so he won't be the one knee-deep in shit if this blows up—"

"Why," I started boredly, already wishing I was more high once she'd passed me the joint, "are you givin' me this lecture like I'm in love with him?"

"Are you?"

My mouth hung open like a cartoon character's, and my stupor was the only thing keeping me from giving her that return punch; I might've broken out of it, if we hadn't been interrupted. "Hey, Syl." Nate gave the doorframe a perfunctory knock— he was still shirtless and dressed in plaid pajama pants, though it was creeping on two o'clock already. He was handsome, I had to admit it, he and his sister had gotten their good looks from their shared mama, but his heavy-lidded eyes and sluggish body language took away from whatever sex appeal he'd once held for me. "You got any shrooms?"

"Thought you were rehearsing today," Sylvia said, flexing her toes; they shone in the sunlight coming in from the window, wet crimson ribbons. Nate and a couple of other guys from Tim's crew, in their off-time from selling drugs, had decided that forming a Doors cover band was going to be their way out of the hood. I couldn't say it was a raging success yet, or even a moderate one. "Didn't hear Mom complainin' about the noise level yet, though, so—"

"Mom likes my music," he said defensively, and she rolled her eyes high enough that all I could see were the whites. "And I told you, they help me focus." He'd need to straight-up snort cocaine for that; he pointed at the other posters dotting Sylvia's walls. "You know how much acid them Beatles are droppin' between sets?"

"If I had any shrooms or acid, you think I'd hand them over to you for free?" She blew a mouthful of smoke at his face; he tossed a pillow from her bed in her direction and cussed her pretty good before stalking out. Brothers were the same everywhere. "Christ hell he's a pain."

"You do that stuff now?" I asked, more out of surprise than anything. It just didn't seem like her speed, Sylvia was no hippie chick. "Magic mushrooms?"

"Not on the regular." She played with the ends of her hair, blunted from a recent cut. "Nate and a couple of his 'bandmates' gave me some, a few times, Evie and I did it with them. It's pretty groovy— I've never picked them up myself, though, I don't even know where they got it from."

Hell, was I apparently now behind on the times, and for a second, I felt a little hurt, that she was doing that with Evie and not me. I channeled that feeling into something more productive, before I could dwell on it— taking advantage of the opportunity that had fallen into my lap.


"Hey, Nate," I said as I wandered into the kitchen, stoned as hell and starving; he was swirling his spoon around in a bowl of soggy cereal, absently, like his body was there but his mind was gone. My mouth was cottony like I'd been chewing on a handful of wool. I wondered if Ida would toss me out on my ass if I took a bite out of that fried chicken leg in the fridge, then remembered what her two children and last boyfriend were like, and abandoned the thought.

He yawned and stretched like a cat, scratched the thatch of wiry hair on his chest. "Yeah?"

"You doin' shrooms?"

"Yeah," he said again with the faintest tinge of condescension, "who ain't, these days?" He walked over to the open fridge, pulled out a carton of orange juice with frayed edges, and took a long gulp before putting it back. "Why else would I be askin' Sylvia if she's got 'em, then?"

"What's it like?" I was asking out of genuine curiosity, I'd never actually done them myself. No one was really interested, back when I was active in the business, I didn't understand why their popularity had exploded all of a sudden.

"Real nice," he said, looking slightly dreamy, "you get all warm and happy, and you see things— I stared at a wall for two hours straight once, just watched all sorts of neat patterns and shit. And after..." He trailed off. "I dunno. Everything just seems real clear and bright, after you come down. I can't describe it. Like walkin' around downtown when the first snow starts fallin', and the streetlights are on..."

I felt the need to cut him off, before he started waxing even more poetic. "Sounds real tuff." I perched my ass on the table and swung my legs off the edge, smiled at him. "Where d'you get it from? Tim branchin' out into psychedelics now?"

Another guy would've looked at me with some suspicion after I dropped the last bit— I sounded a little too interested for a casual observer, a little too invested in men's business. Nate, fortunately, was not the most perceptive guy on earth. "Oh, nah, I don't even know if this stuff's on Tim's radar," he said guilelessly, and started sifting through the pantry for pre-packaged snacks. "We've been gettin' it from this negro hippie over on the North side, he's got a real racket goin'. His name's Cliff or somethin'? He's always got a flower crown in his hair, you can't miss him."