Summer of Love, a Time Travel by Lisa Mason

went down. When she said no, he got all weird. He
said she’d be sleeping in the street if it weren’t for him. She got frightened
and silent. Then he came over to the mattress and climbed on top of her.
    Afterward,
she let him keep the bill. When he was gone, she stuffed the rest of her cash
and her library card in the hidey-hole in her purse where the lining was torn.
Now she keeps the purse with her always. She even sleeps with it tucked beneath
her pillow.
    “I want
you to deliver the dragon’s blood to my connection.” Stan’s eyes are cold.
    “What
connection?”
    “They’ll
be looking for you. Hand it over, that’s all you have to do. You can do that, can’t you, Starbright?”
    Yes,
she can. She’s struck with guilt, giving him a hard time over the
hundred-dollar bill. She’s glad he doesn’t ask her to take money from the
connection. If a narc spots her, she’ll be in big trouble. Apparently Stan’s
got the money thing covered some other way. Cool.
    Sizzling
with his kiss and her paranoia, Susan strides over to the face-painting tent
like he tells her to and waits. She watches and listens for anyone looking for
dragon’s blood. An electric guitar wails over the amps. That’s Rodg the Dodg.
The band is starting their set, and she can’t be there!
    Half
an hour crawls by. Children and their mothers come and go from the
face-painting tent. No one pays her any mind. The Double Barrel finishes their
first set. One of the songs they were rehearsing in the back of the van turns
out better than she feared. She hops from foot to foot, trying to keep warm,
furious with Stan. She’s only getting her hundred dollars back, whereas he will
clear a year’s worth income, tax-free. Maybe she should get a piece of that.
She wonders if she’s got the nerve to ask.
    She’s
about to call it quits when two men wander by.
    A
child with a painted clown face bursts into tears, holding up her packet of crushed
green bean seeds.
    “Didn’t
I tell you?” the child’s mother scolds. “Not everyone with long hair is cool.”
    Susan
looks to see who crushed the child’s seeds. A man brushes past her. That must
be him, a guy in a stovepipe hat that says “L-O-V-E” on the crown jammed over
straggly black hair. Steely black eyes peer out from an unsmiling Buddha face
with a drooping mustache. His partner is a wiry little guy with nut-brown skin
etched by hard times and harder living. A yellow Happy Face button is pinned to
the lapel of his Hawaiian shirt. His psychedelic getup can’t conceal his
reptilian air. She can practically see a lizard’s tongue flick out and snag a
fly.
    Even
on Haight Street, Susan has never encountered men like these. They operate on
some level of existence she knows nothing about. Violent and dangerous and
mean. They drift into the face-painting tent.
    She
wants to turn and flee, but then she hears them murmuring, “Dragon’s blood. Got
dragon’s blood?”
    “Here,”
she whispers. “I’ve g-got dragon’s blood.”
    Stovepipe
is in her face in two seconds. “Got dragon’s blood?”
    “Y-yeah.”
His eyes are so cold!
    “Where’s
the dude?”
    “Around,
I g-guess.”
    “Who
is he?” the Lizard demands. “What’s his name?”
    “Just
a guy,” she says, confused. They don’t know who Stan the Man is?
    “Give
it here,” Stovepipe says.
    Susan
does. Her hands are trembling.
    Stovepipe
and the Lizard stalk out of the tent into a grove of trees at the edge of the campgrounds.
She sighs with relief, but in a moment they’re back. Stovepipe hands her a
smaller package. Then they disappear as quickly as they came.
    The
package could be filled with newspaper for all she knows. It’s not her fault! Why
did Stan make her do this?
    She
runs back to the Double Barrel stage. The band is well into their second set.
It’s the usual circus: fans dancing, bobbing their heads. Beautiful girls posing
in exotic costumes. Stan lounges at the edge of the crowd, pointing at
something