Drop City

seen her, but she knew her from the inside out, somebody's little sister, skin the color of skim milk, the orthodontically assisted smile and the patched jeans and R. Crumb T-shirt, grubby now from the road and the leers and propositions and big moist hands of all the _cats__ who'd stopped for her out-thrust thumb and she didn't even need to turn and face the traffic because they would stop for her hair and the shape and living breath of her. Her boyfriend was an asshole. Her mother was a clone. There was verbal abuse, physical abuse maybe. She didn't fit in. She wanted something more than diagramming sentences and _Mi casa es su casa,__ and she'd come to them, to the hip people, the people she'd heard about till they were legends of redemption and hope, and found out that in the end she was just another _chick,__ so roll over and make it bald for me, honey.
    Star stretched her hands out before her, red light, green light, moving forward one step at a time. It couldn't have been more than a couple hundred yards between the two houses, but it seemed like miles, their footsteps shuffling through the beaten dust and the clenched brown leaves of the oaks that were like little claws, everybody quiet for the first time since the door had shut behind them. “Man, it's dark,” Jiminy muttered after a moment, just to break the silence, but now there was the low thump of music up ahead, and they moved toward it until two faintly glowing windows floated up out of the shadows. Ronnie tripped over something and kicked it aside in a soft whispering rush of motion. Candlelight took hold of the gutted shades in the windows, let go, took hold, let go.
    This was it, the back house, a place the size of a pair of trailers grafted together at the waist, with a roof of sun-bleached shingles and an add-on porch canted like a ship going down on a hard sea. Migrant workers had been housed here in the days when Norm's father ran the place, or so Alfredo claimed, pickers moving up and down the coast with the crops, apples in Washington, cherries in Oregon, grapes in California. Star could believe it--the place was a crash pad then and it was a crash pad now, the single funkiest building on the property. The windows were nearly opaque with dirt, there was no running water or electricity, and somebody had painted DROP CITY DROPOUTS over the door in a flowing swirl of Gothic lettering. She'd been inside maybe half a dozen times, attached to one movable feast or another--until Lester moved in, that is.
    Marco didn't knock. He pushed the door open and they all just filed in, more like tourists than an invading army, and she tried to put on her smile, but it failed her. It took a minute for her eyes to adjust, a whole flurry of movement over the stale artificial greetings of the tribe, _what's happening, bro,__ candles fluttering, the soft autonomous pulse of Otis Redding, sitting on the dock of the bay. Who was there? Lester, Franklin, three cats, two black and one white, she'd never seen before, even at mealtimes when everybody tended to get together, and--this was a surprise--Sky Dog. It was a surprise because he hadn't shown up for the noon meal or dinner either and everybody assumed he'd gone back to the Haight, or Oregon--wasn't he from Oregon originally, and what _was__ his real name, anyway? She looked at him sitting there cross-legged on the floor, bent over his guitar and playing along with the record as if he didn't have a care in the world, as if nothing had happened, as if forcing yourself on fourteen-year-old runaways was no more sweat than brushing your teeth or taking a crap, and she felt something uncontainable coming up in her.
    “Hey, man,” Verbie was saying, “how's it going? All right? Yeah? Because we just, you know, felt like dropping in and seeing what the scene was over here, you know?” She was five foot nothing, red hair clipped to the ears, with a tiny pinched oval of a face and a black gap where her left incisor should have been. The face paint clung like glitter at her hairline and she was twirling the cape and shuffling her feet as if she were about to tap dance across the room. “I mean, is it cool?”
    No one offered any assurances, and it didn't feel cool, not at all. It felt as if they'd interrupted something. Star edged into the room behind Ronnie.
    There was no furniture other than a plank set atop two cinder blocks, and everyone was sitting on the floor--or not on the floor exactly, but on the cracked