Drop City

and wore size fourteen shoes. Two total strangers were next in line, and then it was Reba and Alfredo and the kids, Reba looking hard and _old__ in the morning light, her hair like dried weeds, her eyes blunted and lifeless. When she smiled--and she wasn't smiling now, because her lips were two dead things pressed one atop the other--a whole deep rutted floodplain of lines and gouges swallowed her eyes, as if she'd already used up her quotient of joy and from now on out every laugh was going to cost her. “Che doesn't like eggs,” she announced, “--I think he's allergic to albumin. Maybe just give me some toast and I'll smear it with honey or something.”
    Che stood there beside her, looking numbed-out, dirty T-shirt, dirty feet, a frizz of wild sun-bleached hair and two eyes that were like blips on a radar screen. “That what you want, baby,” Reba said, bending to him, “--honey and toast?”
    “_I__ want honey,” Sunshine said in a voice that was like the scratching of a scab, rough and low, with no real expectation of relief. She was three years old. She stood just behind her brother, close enough so that the bulge of her bare abdomen brushed the hem of his shirt. Her eyes were soft, brimming, hopeless. Star tried to give her a smile, because that was what you were supposed to do when you came across a kid--_And isn't she cute, or is it a he? Or an it?__--but children made her feel awkward and uneasy, unnatural even. How could she, a woman, tell anybody she didn't want children, didn't relate to them, didn't even really like them? Children were nothing but dead weight as far as she was concerned, red-faced yowling little aliens that sucked the life right out of you, and if you ever had any dreams of living for yourself, you could forget them when you had kids, because from then and forever you were just somebody's mother. And what was wrong with birth control? The Pill? Ball all you want, but just don't forget to take your pill every morning. Star didn't get it. She really didn't.
    At any rate, she tried for a smile, and Reba gave her an exasperated look before swinging round on her daughter and plucking at her arm with two fingers molded into pincers, just like Star's mother, just like everybody's mother, and that brought her back, way back, as if she were trapped in a home movie. “You eat your eggs and don't you dare start in because I'm in no mood this morning,” Reba hissed, “let me tell you--”
    The girl, the kid, Sunshine--there she stood, not in the least moved by the unstated threat. Her brother fell into himself, utterly deranged by the hour, the place, life on this bewildering turned-on planet, and she looked at him as if she didn't recognize him. In her tiny hopeless scratch of a voice, she said: “I want juice.”
    “Milk,” Reba responded automatically. People at the back of the line were drifting along in their own planetary orbits, bells, beards, beads, morning jokes, easy soothing rhythms, but even they began to look up to see what the delay was.
    The tiny voice: “Juice.”
    And now Star intervened, because the juice--well, this was Druid Day, a celebration for the summer solstice, and the juice, fresh-squeezed by Lydia and as pure and sweet and organically salutary as anything you could ever hope to find anywhere in the whole golden sun-struck state of California, was laced with acid, LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, because everybody at Drop City was going to commune with their inner selves today, all of them, in a concerted effort to raise the consciousness of the planet by one tiny fraction of a degree. “But honey, the juice isn't good today, you won't like it--”
    Naked, her legs slightly bowed and her features dwindling in the broad arena of her face, the kid held her ground. “Juice.”
    “Oh, shit,” Reba said. “Shit. Fuck. I don't care. Give her juice.”
    Lydia was there, Merry, Maya, all looking on with washed-out smiles. They were the chicks, and they were serving breakfast. Tomorrow it would be somebody else's turn, another group of chicks. But this morning it was this group--Star's group--and there was a celebration going on, or about to go on. Star hesitated. “But it's, um--you know, the juice is _special__ today, Reba. Did you forget?”
    “Summer solstice.”
    “Right.”
    “Druid Day.”
    She could feel the grass tugging at her body as if she were about to lift off, gravity suddenly nullified as in a dream, the gentlest subtlest most persuasive