One sticky summer night in early July started with Zima and Jolly Ranchers, and from there she somehow graduated to hash dabs on a pin, sitting in the back of one of the old-school vans with luggage rack on tap and a spare wheel on the back, and there was a half-dozen other kids sitting inside with the doors open, several conversations going on at once, and she got out and sat at the periphery of that space and could see where others had gathered around a makeshift fire, trying to make out what each individual cricket might be contributing to the din of chirping on which her attention increasingly fixated. Part of her wanted to get back into the van and back into the rotation, but instead she walked out toward the first and watched as two boys wrap duct tape round and round a large stack of elongated sticks that a girl next to her identified as sparklers. For a sparkler bomb.

The three boys walked about ten yards from the fire and one took at a hand blowtorch and bent down to light the ad hoc firework and then it exploded and everyone started screaming. One of them came running past her, toward the van, holding out a mangled hand, with fingers drooping and askew like pipecleaners she had been given a day earlier in art class, to make something with.

They all went to the parade in the Irish part of town two days later and drank Vodka and Squirt out of straws from convenience store cups as the floats streamed by. About half way through the parade, or something like that - she wasn't sure how long it was supposed to last - a group of five figures dressed all in black walked out front of a stream of gleaming cars representing the Clark County Corvette Club and poured oil out onto the ground from red one-gallon buckets, right there on the street. The group was quickly surrounded and jostled and she could see that the crowd was none too happy at what they were trying to do, and whether it was the sun or the vodka or what she presumed was about to go down, she walked off, away from the scrum, not even bothering to ask anyone for a ride home, which was like at least 2 miles away.

Protest made her think of Vietnam, and she had a hard time thinking of Vietnam except in terms of demonstrations and burning monks and naked screaming girls hurtling into the camera lens, and it struck her as impossible to imagine that the here-and-now would demand something
similar from her, even if she really truly thought and believed what she had thought and believed she thought and believed.