April 23, 1985 — the day Coca-Cola announces it is replacing its ninety-nine-year-old formula with 'New Coke,' one of the most spectacular marketing disasters in history — lands in Benji Cooper's summer as another destabilizing jolt. Whitehead uses the New Coke outrage as one of many cultural coordinates of 1985: the specific texture of being young, Black, and American in a summer full of contradictions.