Drop City

full-body tug in the world, and then it let go. “Yeah,” she said finally, “and so we, Lydia, I mean, already--”
    “--laced the OJ with acid, as if Alfredo and I didn't like _invent__ Druid Day year before last, and where were you then, back home with Mommy and Daddy? You really think I'm that far out that I don't know what I'm doing? You think my kids haven't been turned on?” Reba shot a withering look round the kitchen, then dropped her face to confront her daughter. “See the trouble you're causing? You want juice? Okay, have your juice--but don't you come crying to me if you get onto some kind of kid trip like you did last time--remember last time, when you curled up in that cabinet under the sink and wouldn't come out all day?”
    Sunshine didn't nod, didn't say yes or no, didn't even blink.
    “Okay,” Reba breathed, straightening up and smiling now, her face a cauldron of tics and wrinkles and wildly constellating moles, “give her the eggs, and _milk__, and if it'll keep her out of my hair because I need a day off sometimes too, believe it or not, just half a glass of the juice, okay?”
    Alfredo was deep in conversation with Mendocino Bill--“Hobbits are three feet tall, just the size of kids, because it's a kids' book, so get over it, already”--and he had nothing to say. He turned a blank face to Star and the line shuffled forward. Sunshine took her plate of eggs and her juice over to the table, set them down, and came back for the milk. When Star looked up again, all the seats at the table were taken, and Jiminy was holding forth about something, waving his fork and jerking at the loose strands of his hair as if they'd come to life and started attacking him. Sunshine was nowhere to be seen. Her plate, barely touched, had been pushed to one side. The glass of milk was there beside it, a yellow stripe of cream painted round the rim, but the juice was gone.
    Star registered that fact, made a little snapshot of it in her head--crowded table, a surge of tie-dye, saffron eggs on a dull tin plate, forks gleaming, teeth flashing, and no kid present in any way, shape or form, and no juice--but the snapshot never got printed because Verbie was there in line with a girl who could have been her twin except she wore her hair long, and Verbie was introducing her as her sister Angela from Pasadena, and the plates moved, the biscuits retreated, the orange juice dwindled in the stoneware pitcher. Verbie helped herself to a double scoop of eggs, accepted biscuits and a full glass of juice. Star had already had _her__ juice, and she could feel the first crackling charge of it leaping synapses up and down the length of her, and she momentarily tuned out Verbie, who was in the middle of a complicated story about her sister, something about the Whiskey, too many Harvey Wallbangers and a go-go dancer. The sister seethed with joy. This was a story about her, and Verbie was telling it, at breakfast, on Druid Day in Drop City.
    “You know, I guess I'll take a full glass too,” the sister said. “It isn't that strong, is it?”
    “Two hundred mics,” Verbie said. “Three, at most.”
    And who was next? Ronnie, looking chewed-over and cranky. He had his head down and his eyes dodged and darted behind the oversized discs of his sunglasses, _fish,__ but not in a net, little fish, _minnows,__ trapped in a murky aquarium. He took a glass and held it out. “Eggs?” she said, and it was a peace offering. She'd cooked the eggs, and here she was to scoop them up and serve them, the hard-working, self-effacing and dutiful little _chick,__ and what more could anybody ask for?
    “Skip the eggs.”
    “Toast? Biscuits?” She tried for a smile. “Fresh-baked. By Maya.”
    “Just the juice.” He watched her fill the glass. The breakfast roar surged round the room, spilled out the door and into the courtyard. “So where you been the last couple of days?” he said. “I've been looking all over for you.”
    She shrugged to show how casual everything was, no big deal, but it wasn't easy to shrug and pour at the same time. Juice dripped down the sides of the glass, puddled on the table. “We were down backpacking round Mount Tam,” she said, “in the redwoods there? It was a trip. It really was.”
    “You and Marco, right?”
    She nodded.
    “Like the night I got my deer--I looked all over for you that night too.” He took the glass from her hand and held it out away from him, the juice foaming like a witches' brew,