Drop City

and set two pots of chamomile tea and a tray of thick ceramic mugs on the big table at the front of the room. That was the signal, or so Star thought, and she settled in on the floor beside Marco, Ronnie, Merry and Lydia, but it was another half hour before Norm Sender showed up and Alfredo lifted an old circus-prop megaphone to his lips and began saying, “All right, people, all right--can I have your attention up here for just a minute, and we're going to make this as painless as possible, I promise you--”
    Star was feeling good, very good--blissful, even--as she sank into the pillows and Marco put his arm around her and one of the yellow dogs threaded its way across the room to settle at her side and prop a big yellow head on her knee. Everything seemed to converge in that moment, all the filaments of her life, the tugging from one pole to another, Ronnie, Marco, the teepee cat, her parents and the job and the car and the room she'd left behind, because this was her family now, this was where she belonged. She stretched her legs, gazed up at the drift of cobwebs stretched out across the ceiling like miniature cloudbanks and the craneflies straining against them. Until Drop City, she'd never belonged anywhere.
    Who had she been in high school? Little Miss Nobody. She could have embroidered it on her sweaters, tattooed it across her forehead. And in smaller letters: I AM SHIT, I AM ANONYMOUS, STEP ON ME. PLEASE. She wasn't voted Most Humorous in her high school yearbook or Best Dancer or Most Likely to Succeed, and she wasn't in the band or the Spanish Club and when her ten-year reunion rolled around nobody would recognize her or have a single memory to share. The guys noticed her, though. In college they did, anyway. They noticed her big time, noticed her in the hallway and the cafeteria and downtown in the claustrophobic aisles of the record store, their eyes glazed with lust and a kind of animal ferocity they weren't even aware of. She dated a few of them, but she'd never had a serious boyfriend, and though she was pretty--she knew she was pretty--she couldn't figure out why that was, except that something was out of sync, as if she'd been born in the wrong era and the wrong place, especially the wrong place, where nothing ever happened and nobody ever got anywhere. That's what it was, she decided, that had to be it, and the notion comforted her through all her disappointments and the cardboard array of days and months and years, each as stiff and unyielding as the one that preceded it. She sat through the banal Education classes, Psych 101, faced down the six primary causes of World War I, algorithms and the internal anatomy of the earthworm, thinking there had to be something more.
    She graduated, put on a face and started teaching third grade in the very elementary school she'd attended ten years earlier, living in her girlhood room in her parents' house like a case of arrested development, and she was just like her mother everybody said, because her mother taught kindergarten and wore cute petite-size pantsuits and mauve blouses with Peter Pan collars and so did she. But she didn't want to be just like her mother. When she got home at night she balled up her pantyhose in her own petite-size pantsuits, flung them on the floor in her room and lay stretched out on the floor with a speaker pressed to each ear, staring at the flecks and whorls of the thrice-painted ceiling while Janis Joplin flapped and soared over the thunderous changes of “Ball and Chain.” Her mother chattered through dinner, the lace curtains from Connemara hung rigid at the windows, her father guarded his plate as if someone were about to take it from him. She could barely lift the fork to her lips, peas, meat loaf, cod in cream sauce, Brussels sprouts. _And what about Tommy Nardone, is he behaving in class, because I had his brother Randy, and believe you me,__ her mother would say, and she'd nod and agree and go back up to her room and study the sneers of the Rolling Stones on the jacket of the _Out of Our Heads__ LP. And then she went to buy makeup at Caldor one rinsed-out dead bleak soul-destroying October afternoon and ran into Ronnie in the record section--Oh, yeah, he'd dropped out, all right, and he was hustling records just until he could save the _bread__ to get out to California, because that's where it was happening, there and no place else. Oh, yeah. _Miniskirt. Head shop. The Haight. Lucy in the Sky with