The next morning, when I got up to brush my teeth, there—in the medicine cabinet—sat the Mega-Soldier Syrup kit: a hypodermic needle with three doses of the formula that had temporarily turned Trent Phloog back into Megaton Man. It sat quietly behind the vapor rub, ear-wax syringe, cotton swabs, calamine lotion, and dozens of other mostly useless items that accumulated spontaneously since I began sharing a house with three other adults. Significantly, the kit hadn’t been thrown out—yet.

Coming down the stairs, I heard the Q-Wagon backing out of the garage alongside our house. When I reached the foot of the stairs, out of the front screen door I could see Stella and baby Simon, his bassinet strapped into the passenger seat, as the station wagon backed out of the driveway. The vehicle that once belonged to Stella’s old Megahero team—its peeling Megatropolis Quartet logo still legible on the side—lurched forward and soon rumbled off down Ann Street.

I knew Stella had meant to visit her parents ever since she’d been back in Michigan, but something always seemed to come up. They had sent presents after Simon’s birth, but had been unable to visit given Stella’s father’s mobility issues. Now Stella was packing Simon off for the day—just mother and child—to visit them at their home in the western Detroit suburbs.

Pammy was gone for the day, too, but Trent was relaxing on the sofa, his feet on the coffee table, reading one of the used books he’d picked up at work. He was dressed in his usual black polo shirt and Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Bookstore lanyard with nametag around his neck; he would soon be running off to work—literally running, because once he got distracted he would lose track of time.

“You’re not going with Stella and Simon?” I asked. The question was moot at this point, since the Q-Wagon was already gone. But I felt awful on Trent’s behalf—Stella wanted to show off Simon to his grandparents, but was too ashamed of Simon’s father to take him along.

“It’s okay; I’ve needed some time to relax anyway,” said Trent. “I’ve been going at it fairly relentlessly, what with the two jobs and all. And Stella needs her space.” This was entirely unconvincing; I could tell Trent was deeply hurt.

“It was so nice seeing the two of you being so affectionate in the restaurant last night,” I said. “I was kind of hoping you two crazy kids would get back together.”

Trent sighed. “That was just the wine talking,” he said. He struggled valiantly to look at things philosophically. “I accept the situation for what it is. I respect what Stella’s doing—getting an education and all—so much. It’s been clear from the start that she doesn’t want a physical relationship, and I don’t want to pressure her. From here on out, everything between us is all about Simon.”

I told him I found this remarkably selfless. Still, I wondered what he did to compensate.

“You can’t just live like a monk,” I said. Listen to me, a girl whose only sexual experience to date had been with a life-size rag doll.

“Oh, I have, uh, friends,” said Trent euphemistically. “There’s an, uh, friend I’ve made at work…. I don’t live like a complete monk, at any rate—as you might suppose.” He declined to elaborate.

I wondered what he could mean—late-night groping in the stock room of the used bookstore? Amid the Shakespeare and Bible backstock? Back-seat trysts with a waitress between pizza deliveries? Whatever shabby, down-low satisfactions Trent was alluding to, it still didn’t seem right to me the way Stella froze him out.

“Oh, crap,” he said, looking at his watch. “I have to get going.” He dropped the book down on the coffee table and brushed past me where I stood in the foyer to grab his jacket from the front closet. “Goodbye, Clarissa,” he said. The screen door slammed shut as Trent leapt off the porch and jogged down Ann Street.

Which was a shame. Because, as I realized later, I was in the mood to fool around.

I got some practice in—at fooling around, that is—the following month up at Camp Michi-Fo-La-Ca. The name stood for Michigan-Forest-Lake-Camp, and a lot of Arbor State students went up north to spend four weeks in the woods as camp counselors to middle-school-age kids from churches and so on. This was my second summer; last summer I learned all about the canoes, campfires, crafts, hiking, and singing ridiculously corny songs and telling ghost stories by flashlight, not to mention all the requisite safety procedures. I had a tent full of kids who got poison oak in the third week, for example. But this year, as a veteran, and I was more looking forward to the after-hours extracurricular kind of stuff we adult counselors would be up to.

Mind you, it wasn’t Woodstock or the Summer of Love at Camp Michi-Fo-La-Ca—I don’t want any parents out there getting worked up. It was all low-key—on a few occasions after our kids were safely asleep in their sleeping bags and hogans, us college-age counselors would sneak off and huddle around the campfire for a little bit of relaxation. Some of us got a little chummy—Ryan, who had a crush on me the year before but I was too virginal to pick up the signals, was surprised when I was ready for him this year. Being high class and everything, we went behind a tree—but then we thought we heard a bear, and that kind of blew the mood. It turned out to be a deer, but that particular night was already lost.

On the second try, a few nights later, Ryan was so nervous I had to offer him some extra stimulation to make him forget he was in the woods with carnivorous beasts. The only problem was, he was so satisfied with what I did to get him in the mood that had nothing left for a second try. That stuff’s kinda like toothpaste—once it’s out, you can’t put it back—and then it’s either spit or swallow. The third time was the charm—Ryan came ready and I didn’t have to pick twigs out of my knees this time—although he didn’t exactly rock my world. But at least I got to use one of the rubbers Avie had bought me.

Then there was auburn-haired Celie, who wasn’t into the late-night campfire scene at all; she was more of a morning person. She liked to make out in the shower before anyone else in camp was up; she might be the only counselor in the history of Camp Michi-La-Fo-Ca to get athlete’s foot on knees. But I have to say, the combination of hot water and wet auburn hair between my fingers, and the cool morning air in the woods—it was heady. No pun intended.

I should probably mention that I’ve had about a million crushes on guys, but almost never a crush on a girl. And I didn’t have a crush on either of my counselor-colleagues that summer, either; I was motivated more by a desire to pad my resumé, as it were, and make up for lost time in some small way. It took four weeks of camp to almost equal half of what I had done in a single night with Bing Gloom back on Ann Street. What made it unusual was that my partners were both Civilians, which at least gave me something to compare with Yarn Man.

I felt like I grew another quarter-inch by the time I got back to Ann Arbor. I certainly felt more fit after all that canoeing and volleyball and fresh air and shit. I walked the three-quarters of a mile from the Stagecoach Bus Line Depot back to Ann Street with my huge duffle bag, and I wasn’t even tired when I reached the front porch. My daddy’s pickup was in the driveway, and I wondered what he could be working on now. I went in the front door and threw my duffel on the sofa; Trent was in the dining room and baby Simon was in his bassinet on a chair. Trent was cleaning off an old chrome-and-enamel high chair from the fifties or something that my daddy must have picked up at some flea market. I heard a pan boiling in the kitchen, which meant Trent was warming up Simon’s baby food.

“Hey, can I feed him?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Trent. “Just make sure it’s not too hot; I forgot about it.…By the way, your dad’s in the back yard.”

I took the pan off the stove with a pair of oven mitts, extracted the jar of baby food from the water, and set it on a towel on the counter to cool—the lid was loose and the contents inside were boiling; Trent had gotten distracted and left it on way too long. I took the lid off completely. While I waited for it to cool, I looked out the window over the kitchen sink. My daddy was on a ladder propped up against the front of the garage. “What’s he doing?” I asked.“I don’t know,” said Trent. “He’s been working on a lot of projects around here while you were at camp, that’s for sure.”

As soon as I stepped out the back door, I saw what Trent meant. There was a new patio of alternating-colored paving stones under my feet, right next to the house. To my right was one of those A-frame pine picnic tables—you know the kind: made of a combination of planks and raw logs covered in yellow shellac, they’re sold along roadsides all over the state. There was also a small charcoal barbecue on wheels at the far end of the patio.

On top of the ladder, Daddy was installing a backboard on the roof of the garage. I walked across the driveway and called up to him.

“Hello, Sissy,” he replied. After a few more turns of a bolt with a socket wrench, he was finished. “Here, hand me the net.”

I looked around at my feet among the cardboard and wrappings, and located a net wrapped in rubber bands. “Is this it?” I handed it up to him.

He attached the thick, white cord loops to the rim, forming the basket. “Now you can play ‘Around the World’ whenever you want,” he said proudly. He climbed down and kissed me on the forehead.

“Daddy, you don’t have to be doing all this stuff around here,” I said. “We only rent this place, you know.”

“It isn’t entirely personal generosity,” he confessed. “At this point, it’s become more of a side job for me. You remember that Preston Percy we met after your dinner?” Of course, I did. “You didn’t tell me he works for the Inter-Collegiate Housing and Habitat League.” Daddy pulled out a card from his work-shirt pocket, with the distinctive ICHHL logo—for Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning—unbeknownst to Daddy, Preston’s cover espionage agency. “Later, Mr. Percy got in touch with me back in Detroit; he informed me that this is a specially-zoned neighborhood; because of the address, and because there are two full-time college students living here, this house qualifies for a special federal subsidy. He slipped me a few bucks right there on the spot, and told me I was to just send my receipts—and any invoice I deem fair—to him from now on.”

Daddy also told me that when he got his two weeks’ vacation from the auto plant later that July, he and some of his buddies were going to paint the whole exterior of the house. “It will pay for a new car for Alice,” he said proudly, meaning Mama. “We’ll give the Pacer to your sister.”

I had grave misgivings about Daddy working by ICHHL, and I wondered what Preston’s ulterior motive could be; but I didn’t know what to say to Daddy without giving away the whole Secret Agent-Megahero thing.

Daddy wasn’t around for the rest of the week, but I noticed some strange behavior every time I walked to and from downtown Ann Arbor along Ann Street. I could swear people in sunglasses sat in parked cars and talked into their cuff links.

One day, there was a weird, white van parked along the side street a block east from our house with an ICHHL logo—accompanied by the words Interior Carpeting, Hardwood, Heating & Laminates on the side; I couldn’t see inside its opaque windows, but I could have sworn I saw it shift around, like a person’s weight was moving inside. On another day, one of those aerial bucket trucks with Inter-Coastal Headwaters & Hydroelectric Light painted on its doors was parked about a block away in the other direction; some guy in a hardhat was working on some power lines connected to a telephone pole. He wore sunglasses, too, and looked around furtively while muttering into a walkie talkie.

Call me paranoid, but I was getting the distinct impression our entire Ann Street neighborhood was under constant surveillance by our friend Preston Percy.

Finally, one day, I spotted the white van again. It was parked along State Street, around the corner from Ann Street. As I passed by it, I could have sworn it rocked, like somebody was moving around inside it. I imagined someone with a camera or binoculars or something watching me as I passed. I turned around and walked up to the van and knocked on the windows. “Hey you, in there! Open up!” I tried all the doors; locked. “Agent Percy! Come out!” I demanded. I kicked the tires and shouted a few choice obscenities. There was no response, but the van stopped moving.

I felt a little silly when I noticed a few pedestrians across the street looking at me. I must have appeared crazy, yelling at a parked, locked van. I turned and continued down the sidewalk as if I had only stopped to tie my show. I went about my business, which was an errand downtown.

On State Street, I ducked into Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Books. As I’ve said, I frequented the store quite often; it was one of the places Trent worked, although he wasn’t working that day—he was back on Ann Street with Simon. The inside of the store was big—it was one of the bigger bookstores I knew of at the time. There were a lot of popular books on the first floor—paperback mysteries, romance, and best sellers—along with several racks of magazines, academic journals, and newspapers. Its back wall was of unadorned red brick, and there were stairs leading up to a mezzanine with lots of scholarly books from academic presses, then the second floor, where coffee table art books, history, local interest and other stuff were located.

I was in the market for a copy of the I Ching; up at camp, when us counselors weren’t exploring a number of sexual or at least intensely emotional and sensual experiences, we were constantly consulting the oracle to determine our futures—what to declare our majors in, whether we should get back together with old partners—that sort of thing. The Religion and Spirituality sections of the store were between the Film Studies and Philosophy sections.

“Need any help finding anything?”

The voice belonged to a woman who had long, wavy, greying brown hair, big round eyeglasses, a Stevie Nicks skirt, an Annie Hall vest, a button shirt, full necktie, and sandals. She was the quintessential Ann Arbor hippie chick refugee from the late sixties-early seventies, and she hadn’t aged gracefully. I had often seen her in the store but had never been quite sure whether she worked there or not. She wore so much stuff—all kinds of beads, jewelry, and crystals around her neck—I could never make out a name tag. But now, I caught a glimpse of it. It read: Imelda. It was disconcerting to picture square, clean-cut Trent working alongside this kind of person every day.

I told Imelda I was looking for a copy of the I Ching. “You want the Richard Wilhelm translation, translated again by Cary Baynes?” she asked, as if she already presumed the answer. She located a thick, yellow book in a grey dustjacket. “It’s a bit dense, but it’s the most thorough.”

I recognized it as the same edition we had used at camp. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

“I’m more of a Tarot person myself,” Imelda confided in me. She fingered a small dreamcatcher she kept on her lanyard next to her nametag. “Wait a minute,” she said, suddenly recognizing me. “I know who you are—you’re Clarissa James, Trent Phloog’s roommate.”

“Housemate,” I said, but sure, I told her; I was in the store all the time and knew her by sight at least as well. “Trent talks about you all the time,” she said. “I’m working with Trent—not just as a co-worker, I mean, but on his chakras—unblocking his pent-up energies, you know.” I didn’t know at all, but I took her word for it. She slipped me her business card; she explained that her apartment was around the corner above a storefront on East William Street. “I give private spiritual readings, offer poetry workshops, convene personal encounter groups, and hold tea ceremonies—both English and Japanese varieties. I also do pet-sitting; I’m a canary person.”

And handjobs, I’ll bet—by candlelight, with the incense burning. The thought of Megaton Man and this—she was probably only in her late twenties but to me she was a crone—sorry, sometimes I can’t control when these images when they pop into my head.

Imelda and I exchanged a few more pleasantries and said goodbye; she went back to whatever she was doing—restocking the shelves in the local section or whatever—and I went downstairs to the checkout counter. As I was being rung up, I kept thinking about Imelda working on Trent’s chakras—“unblocking his energies”—but where? In the local section? In the stockroom? In her canary-filled apartment around the corner late at night? And what was wrong with Stella unblocking the poor guy’s chakras every once in a while?

I must have been deep into these fruitless speculations as I walked out of the store and onto the State Street sidewalk—and straight into Preston Percy.

“We have to talk,” he said.