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 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.”