Free Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer Page A

discussed them all with doctors of every stripe. What she should do now was to search out the appropriate files to bring, the appropriate numbers to consult for comparison.
    Instead Sunny said, “You know what? No more tests.”
    She found herself thinking, This will not be tolerated. Then she put the phone down, stood up, and stretched a long, long catlike stretch ending in a neck roll. On a normal day, she would now replace the wig, comb it down, inhabit it. Instead she got dressed, got into Maxon’s car, and drove over to the very special preschool to take Bubber home. She felt kind of strong in her bald head. In the moment, she was only thinking about how Bubber was being tested again, and pissed off that he would again be found wanting.
    Sunny was the mom with the multicolored activism ribbon in magnet on the back of her van. Sunny, heretofore, had been a very good friend of tests.
    When she arrived at the school, the other parents were waiting to pick up their children, too. It was like a minivan convention in the parking lot. Silver ones, mostly. Some burgundy. Some teal. When they had purchased their minivan, Maxon had yearned for the black one, but Sunny said no.
    “I’ve never seen a black minivan,” she said. “We have to blend in with our environment.”
    “Well, if you’ve never seen a black minivan, might that not mean that the black minivans are blending in very well?” Maxon pointed out.
    But they bought the silver one. On the highways, it was virtually invisible. The wig and the minivan together made an invisibility cloak. Walking past the rows of other cars, the different-colored ribbons on the bumpers, the soccer balls, the black-and-white ovals from vacation spots, Sunny remembered the first of three terrible things she had said to Maxon on the day before he went into space: It is all your fault, that we don’t fit in here. I’m doing my goddamned best. What’s left, Maxon? It’s all you. You won’t even try. You won’t even give it a decent effort. Of all the children at Bubber’s school, Bubber was the one that was autistic. Bubber was pushing the limits of what the school could handle. They kept telling her this.
    On the sidewalk, a little stream of children bumped past her, the few girls with their little sparkling backpacks, their hair accessories glittering, their leather shoes squeaking comfortably, each holding a larger, duller, flatter parent by the hand, pulling them along. The children did not look up at Sunny as they passed her. They were dispassionate. She could have been a talking hawk, or a rhinoceros. They were like little hairy animatronic children, marching down the sidewalk, already thinking about lunch. The parents, in contrast, had no time to hide their surprise at Sunny’s bald state. These were women she had chatted with, day after day, waiting for pickup time in the rain, or at the Christmas show, or at the grocery store, over the grapefruit bin. She didn’t know all their names, but they were Taylor’s Mom, and Connor’s Mom, and Chelsea’s Mom, and yet they walked right past, carefully averting their eyes and also smiling with lips drawn together in a line. Some crazy bald lady came to the school today.
    Inside, the director was distributing art projects to take home, making sure sweaters were matched with the right children, and giving out lollipops that had no artificial colors. He was actually a man with no hair. He did have eyebrows, chin hairs, the rest of it, but his head was shining and bare. Sunny had never truly forgotten that fact, but in the days since the wig went on her head, she noticed bald people with less interest than before.
    Back in the old days, it might have been like, Hey, high five, my brother. Then with the wig it was just another hairstyle, of the many that we regular humans can choose from. Now it was as if she were an animal, identifying another of her species.
    The other parents began to clear out. The other children were all