“Ow!” Gypsy says, jerking her head away.
“See, that’s how you get cut,” Dee Dee says. “Then you blame me. Now hold still.”
They’re in the living room, Gypsy seated on a plastic stool with a short back, Dee Dee standing behind her, working the hair clippers. The TV is on in the background, tuned to a hospital-themed soap opera Dee Dee calls her “story.”
“Why can’t we just let it grow?” Gypsy asks. “I think I’d look pretty with long hair.”
“You look pretty now.”
“But if I had hair, I wouldn’t have to wear that hat you hate so much.”
“We’ve been over this, Gypsy. It’s the cancer won’t let you grow your hair. I’m guessing you don’t wanna shed like a dog?”
“Maybe I wouldn’t. We could try it. Just the one time.”
“Enough already, Gypsy. Under my roof, we keep things neat and tidy.”
Gypsy thinks: Don’t you mean the church’s roof? Which reminds her…
“About what Pastor Mike said, I was thinking—”
“Don’t start with that now. He shouldn’t have said nothing without asking me first. Now quit squirming. I’m about done here.”
She runs a finger over her daughter’s nearly bare scalp.
“I don’t like this mole you’ve got here one bit,” she says. “Keeps growing on me.”
“But Mama,” Gypsy says, “who turns down a free trip to Disney World?”
“Maybe you should’ve thought things through before you pulled that stunt the last time. Damn near gave me a heart attack.”
“But I learned my lesson, Mama. Nothing like that’ll happen again.”
“You bet it won’t. I should’ve had that man arrested. Who runs off with a child?”
“He didn’t know how young I was on account of the costume. And we didn’t run off, we—”
“Drop it now, Gypsy,” Dee Dee says. “You’re working my last nerve, and it ain’t even noon yet.”
But Gypsy’s mind is already drifting back to last summer, to the time when the man in the orange jumpsuit with the fake bionic leg almost set her free.
* * *
The trip had been a gift from their New Orleans church. Pastor Dan had noticed Dee Dee and Gypsy’s shared love of sci-fi movies, from The Thing (the classic 1951 version) to Close Encounters to E.T. (though that one always made Gypsy cry). The pastor started a fundraiser to send them to Intergalactic Con in Naples, Florida. He chose the conference because it featured a space-themed art show—a contest that all attendees with an artistic bent were encouraged to enter. As he was seeing them off at the airport, Pastor Dan put a hand on Gypsy’s shoulder and said: “Bring the prize home, kiddo.”
She’d had a month to prepare, during which time she was never without a pencil in her hand. The idea came to her early on: a large-scale design of the first human colony on Mars. Instead of houses or apartments, she imagined a futuristic hybrid: ranch-style homes with earth-colored metallic exteriors stacked in structures that looked like ultra-sleek parking garages. High-speed conveyor belts replaced sidewalks, and there were no streets at all since cars would be able to fly. There were no zoos, either, since animals of every stripe would be domesticated, and she did away with hospitals and cemeteries because disease and death would be things of the past.
Advertising, however, would be alive and well in the future. She imagined billboards hovering in midair; spotlights projecting logos for everything from brand-name beverages to three-dimensional video games; jingles playing continuously on a public radio that could never be shut off (though Gypsy wasn’t sure how to convey the latter without using words).
The final drawing filled a poster-sized canvas and looked like an elaborate blueprint with minuscule detail lurking in every crevice.
“I gotta give it to you,” Dee Dee said, “you sure worked on this one. Can’t imagine what you’re gonna do with yourself now.”
“Maybe I’ll be an architect,” Gypsy said.
“Maybe you will at that.”
It was the only time Gypsy could remember her mother sounding proud.
The first two days of the conference were the very best of Gypsy’s life. Their room was on the top floor of an eighteen-story hotel, and all Gypsy could see from the window was pure-blue sky and endless water. The jam-packed lineup of events included an alien-themed comedy show, a staged light saber fight between two stuntmen who worked on The Phantom Menace, an exhibit of alternate designs for the Millennium Falcon, and a screening of deleted scenes from all three Back to the Future movies.
“I don’t want this to ever end,” Gypsy told her mother.
But it wasn’t just the spectacle and setting: for the first time in her life, Gypsy did not feel out of place. True, she was one of very few participants in a wheelchair, and maybe the only one with an oxygen tank, but nobody seemed to notice. It was OK to be strange with so many robots and storm troopers and space creatures roaming the hotel. Here, people talked to her without the slightest trace of pity or revulsion.
That was how Gypsy met Robert: he just walked up to her and started talking.
It was during the costume ball on the last night of the conference. Gypsy was dressed as an alien, and Dee Dee as the Sigourney Weaver character from the movies. The winners of the art contest had just been announced. Gypsy’s drawing placed third out of eighty-seven entries. It wasn’t enough to win her the $1,000 prize, but it did earn her a ribbon, and they even put a photo of Gypsy and the drawing up on a projector screen. Gypsy was ecstatic…until she looked up and saw her mother’s face.
“There weren’t two drawings better than yours,” Dee Dee said. “Not even close. Those judges robbed us, and I ain’t gonna go quietly.”
She walked off, leaving Gypsy alone on the edge of the crowded dance floor. Gypsy sat and sipped from her Shirley Temple, feeling like she might cry for the first time all weekend.
“Excuse me,” a voice said.
She looked up, saw the man in the orange jumpsuit with the fake robot-leg standing over her.
“I couldn’t help but overhear,” he said. “I agree with that woman: you were robbed.”
Gypsy wondered if the man could see her blushing in the room’s dim light. For her part, she could just make out his features. He had a nice face—the kind of thin, angular face she liked to draw.
“That’s nice of you,” she said. “But third place ain’t bad. Not with all those people who entered.”
The man smiled.
“My name’s Robert,” he said. “It’s nice to meet such a gifted artist, Gypsy Rose.”
And then, without knowing she would, Gypsy repeated a line she’d heard in countless movies: “Why don’t we get out of here, Robert?”