The free-and-easy California lifestyle of her hippy classmate made author Vendela Vida look at her own family in a new, unflattering light. But those candlelit fondues and sleepovers were tinged with regret…

My parents met at a dance in San Francisco in 1967, married there in 1969, and had me in 1971. But while I was, in a sense, a product of the Summer of Love, my parents were not hippies. My father was a second-generation San Franciscan with Hungarian roots and my mother was a recent immigrant from Sweden. Their favourite musical artists were Tony Bennett and Doris Day, and they kept their hair clean and tidy. All this, for me, was a problem. When I was growing up, I'd bike the long mile from my sleepy San Francisco neighbourhood to Haight-Ashbury. The Haight was so bright, so crowded, so… fragrant by comparison to where I lived that I knew, even as a kid, I had missed out on an entire era – that I was still missing out.

The year I was 10, a girl I'll call Nina joined my tap-dancing class. She had blonde hair and wore the same tap shoes and dance clothes the rest of us did. I didn't pay her much attention. My eyes were focused on a beautiful hippy-looking woman watching us practise. She was at least 15 years younger than the mothers around her. Her wild butterscotch hair extended down to the back pockets of her bell-bottom jeans. Who was this woman, I wondered. She was surely a hippy, I thought. At the end of the lesson, Nina called out: "Mom, I'm cold" and the beautiful woman handed Nina a poncho. I knew then that I'd do everything in my power to make Nina my best friend.

The first step was inviting Nina over to my house. The day she was due to come, I sat in the window waiting for her mother to drop her off. I waited for a long time, easily an hour. Just as I was about to give up, a yellow taxi came circling our block, looking lost. Taxis to me were a novelty. I watched as Nina's mother pointed in my direction, at my house, and I felt like she was pointing right at me, singling me out.

That day, in my room, Nina and I discovered we'd both just had several cavities filled, and Nina told me that meant we could hear songs on the radio without turning it on. I hummed "Walking on the Moon" by the Police and when we turned on our favourite station that very song was playing! We tried to channel songs on the radio for three more hours, until a different taxi pulled up and it was time for Nina to go.

A few weeks later, I was invited to Nina's for a sleepover. My mother was at "Stitch and Bitch," her sewing club, so my father said he'd drive me there. "Can't we take a taxi?" I asked. He was confused, and I was, too. He drove me in our car, and I slid down in the front seat so Nina's mother wouldn't see me if she happened to be looking out of the window, waiting for me (which she wasn't).

Nina's mother answered the door wearing a long colourful skirt and a tank top. She led us through the living room and, suddenly inspired by the music playing, stopped walking and twirled slowly by herself, her arms out in the air like wings. There was a man at the house, who I assumed was Nina's dad. But then Nina called him by his first name – Basil – and I realised he wasn't her father, that her parents were divorced or possibly had never been married. Basil was thin, with long hair, and at dinnertime we all sat cross-legged on pillows around a low table.

We had fondue, which I'd never eaten before. Nina's mom showed me how to dip the bread and not drip the cheese. For dessert we had chocolate fondue, and Basil made a joke about how many cookies I'd lost to the pot. Nina's mom laughed and tossed her hair behind her shoulders, revealing a bruise on her neck. It was a big bruise that was conspicuous even in the candlelight, and Nina suddenly got upset. She crawled into the yurt set up in the living room and wouldn't come out. I followed her.

"It's a hickey," she said.

"What's that?" I asked.

"It means he's her boyfriend."

"That's nice, right? He's nice, right?"

"It's not nice."

Next thing I knew Nina's mom and Basil were in the yurt with us.

"I know you're upset about the hickies, honey," Nina's mom said.

"You mean there's more than one?" Nina said.

Basil interjected. "Hickies don't mean anything," he said. "Look, you can give yourselves hickies."

Nina was sceptical; I was intrigued.

"Look," he said, and sucked on his own arm to show me how I could give a hickey to myself. I sucked on my forearm for a minute. Then I waited. I didn't see anything so Basil suggested I stand by the window. There it was: a big purplish bruise!

"Nina!" I called out. She emerged from the yurt and inspected my self-inflicted hickey. She seemed impressed. We spent the next three hours giving ourselves hickies. At tap-dance class on Monday we refused to wear sweatshirts. Our classmates didn't take notice of our hickies, but our instructors did.

Early that summer Nina's dad, younger than the other dads, with a full head of shaggy blond hair, drove us to Clear Lake, where his parents had a holiday home. His parents were at the house, too, and would blend alcoholic drinks each morning while we ate our Cheerios. One night they took care of us while Nina's dad went to a bar with a friend. Nina's grandmother put us to bed in a guest room with a double bed and told us that, whatever happened, not to let Nina's father take over the room. He had been put in a room with bunkbeds.

At four in the morning Nina and I were awoken by her father. He pleaded with us to move to the other room. "No way," Nina said. Then he went to the other room and he and his new friend made noises that Nina and I knew had to do with sex even though we'd never heard them before. We squashed pillows over our ears and held hands as we fell asleep.

On the way home that Sunday, Nina's father almost got into an accident with someone driving a VW campervan. "Fucking hippy!" he shouted. I gasped. It wasn't the first word, but the second. That's when it occurred to me that Nina's father was not a hippy. I don't know how this had been lost on me before. He was, after all, driving a red convertible. But I had wanted to believe that Nina's parents, with their single lives and unconventional ways, were something that my parents were not: true representatives of their decade, of their city, of youth.

On the drive back, Nina was still embarrassed about her father's behaviour the night before. When he dropped me off, Nina and I said goodbye as though it was any other goodbye, though we both knew it was more than that. Come summer, her mother would be taking a job in another city and Nina would be leaving San Francisco, leaving me. I ran into the house, where my mother was mending my socks, and my father was reading the paper.

"You're back!" my mother said. "Did you have a good time?"

I sunk into the couch instead of answering. My parents looked at me and then at each other, and must have tacitly agreed not to badger me for details. My father stood and extended his hand toward my mother. She rose to join him, and they gracefully danced the same waltz they'd been dancing since the night they met. Normally I would have been mortified, but for the first time, on this particular evening, at the end of this particular school year, I watched them, uncool as they were.

The Lovers by Vendela Vida is published by Atlantic Books at £14.99