Chapter 1 

She was crazy girl, that's what we called her and she didn't mind. "I've been in the hootch...have you?" "I'm a nut-case." She would look at you with these iron blue eyes and willed herself to a kind of homeliness not exceptional in the town of Berkeley. She had danced one night whirling around and around until she found some node, some innocuous guy sitting there in the party among the music and smoke, and stuck her hand down his shirt and started squeezing him. Rumor had it that, as a teen-ager, she had hid aboard a luxury liner from San Francisco to Hawaii until found out mid-cruise. It was a rumor until she brought out a fading yellow clipping showing her and the smiling captain with the caption, "Local Teen Is A Stow-Away," and how she had been given the captains berth and dined in fine style across the Pacific Ocean.

She would go down to the Finnish Hall and help cook meals for homeless people. Everyone knew her by name. At a wedding up in the Hills she nodded and said hi to half the people and threw her cigarettes in the small pool along side the house of the bride's uncle. She had been arrested trying to steal moon rocks up at the Exploritorium and, later, mimeo-graphed what she thought were bomb secrets from the Rad Lab, where she worked and was secretary to the chess club, and drove over the San Francisco offering them to the Russian Consulate on Green Street. The Russians refused and told her not to keep showing up there or they'd call the cops.

David Eide
January 24, 2014