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like all suburbs, the idealized Northeast had really only lasted through the first generation of its postwar inhabitants. Those first striving settlers were the ones who had seen the Northeast as the best of both worlds. Their vast numbers—and the predictable difference between parents who worked hard to earn what they had and children who just
had
—slowly turned the Northeast into what some perceived as the
worst
of both worlds. It had neither architectural nor natural beauty. Its citizens had neither the true street smarts of the city nor the true safety of the pristine suburbs; they seemed informed neither by time-honored wisdom nor by up-to-the-minute thinking. To cynical outsiders—who assumed the “mall culture” was a small but controllable cancer on the America body politic—the Northeast came to embody how quickly the newly manufactured middle-class dream could turn nightmarish.
    An incident at Abraham Lincoln High School—Kathleen’s alma mater, where both Joey and Michael Carangi were students—typified the vast differences between the generation that had built the Northeast and the one about to inherit it. The drugs of choice in the early seventies were still marijuana and LSD, but suddenly Lincoln High was being flooded with phenobarbital pills. It wasn’t just an unusually large supply of sedatives working its way through normal drug distributionChannels. There were suddenly just phenobarbs
everywhere.
Kids had pocketfuls of them; they were toting around bottles that contained not ten or twenty pills but a thousand. Students were throwing them across the 107 Lunchroom like confetti, swallowing them like candy.
    There were scares, overdoses, investigations. Eventually, there was police action; over a dozen Lincoln students were arrested, many at a teen dance at the Jardel community center at Cottman and Penway. The story made the evening news and was covered by all the newspapers—especially when the source of the phenobarbital pills was discovered. They hadn’t been clandestinely manufactured in some shack in rural Bucks County. Nobody had robbed a drugstore or broken into nearby Byberry State Hospital and stolen all the inmates’ sedatives. The pills had been discovered by students in medical kits in a forgotten Civil Defense bomb shelter, located in the
basement of Lincoln High itself.
    It was anyone’s guess what authorities in the 1950s had imagined that high school students might do with thirty-four thousand downers if the bomb got dropped.

2
The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys
    K aren Karuza was a sight to behold, especially in the setting of a drab high school classroom. If the fourteen-year-old had antennae protruding from her high forehead, instead of just the space where her eyebrows had been, she couldn’t have stood out more among the flannel-shirted boys and peasantbloused girls. In her glittering stretch pants and platform shoes, her brightly dyed hair nearly glowing and her multicolored fingernails sweeping rainbows when she talked, Karen decked the halls of Lincoln. The fact that she was one of the brightest students in the ninth grade only added to the mystery of her physical mutation from yet another Polish-Catholic Northeast girl into one of
them.
Lincoln had large ramps between floors instead of stairs, and each major clique in the school claimed a ramp as its exclusive territory. But there was no incline for the kids who looked “outrageous” like Karen Karuza. They found each other in different ways.
    One day Karen was walking out of a classroom when she encountered a vision as startling as herself. It was a girl her age but taller, wearing a quilted red satin jumpsuit and shiny red boots with black platforms. She wore her thick hair cropped short and shaggy in the back. It looked like a coon-skin cap had been glued to her scalp.
    The girl made eye contact and awkwardly approached her.At first, Karen flinched: not long before, she had been sucker-punched and knocked off her