When they came to the new country they sent her out to steal. She soon found that her strange, bright clothes caused people to stay at a distance from her. Not good in her line of work. She looked at the American girls and she stole some little tank tops and jeans so she could look like them. She pulled her long hair back in a pony tail and looked in a mirror. Dark, narrow face. Restless eyes. No. She cut a thin layer of bangs. Yes. Better. Now people didn't look at her twice.
She moved smoothly through the shopping malls and down town streets and watches fell off wrists and twenty dollar bills disappeared from shoulder purses. Silk scarves slipped from shoulders. Cameras disappeared from park benches. Lattes set down for a moment at a sidewalk table found themselves in different hands.
In the big stores she knew the rules. Never look up. Never look around. Pick up something put it back. Pick up something put it back. Pick up something don't put it back. If they're following you, dump everything. They can't touch you until you leave the store. She was making good money. More than her mother and aunt in the house outside the city limits doing Tarot cards. They didn't speak good English. Her father worked in his uncle's chop shop. The uncle bought the stuff she stole. They were making it in America!
If she hadn't been so pretty the store detective might not have been watching her so closely - might not have seen her hand reach out to look at the earrings, then casually pocket them. He wouldn't have reached out a hand to warn her and she would not have slammed his hand against a thick glass display shelf and broken his wrist.
So there was the store detective clutching his wrist and jumping about in pain and there was the gypsy girl looking hurt and surprised that any one should have thought she was stealing.
They let her go. Told her never to come back to the store.
She was frightened. They could send her back. Deport her. She did not want to go back. She did not want to steal any more. Her magic was gone, her invulnerability broken. She did not want to steal - except maybe once in a while just for herself.
When she told her father he hit her a couple of times and she got in her bed and would not get out. No one spoke to her. She stayed in bed two weeks. At night she would sneak into the kitchen and find something to eat, and she got up to go to the bathroom when no one was home.
Then she got up and went back to the store and sought out the detective. ``I need a job,'' she said.
``What kind of job?''
``Any job.''
``Can you read?''
``No.''
``How well do you understand English?''
``Pretty good.''
``You better go to school. I can't help you.''
He looked at his still bandaged wrist. ``You don't do stuff like that in America''
She knew he was lying. Of course people did such things in America.
She found a job cleaning offices. She enrolled in a GED program and got intensive tutoring.
It was so hard. Reading hurt her eyes. Sometimes she just gave up for a while, but she always returned. She was twenty two when she got her GED.
At the ceremony she met a Cambodian man. They started dating. She explained that if she married him she would be a gypsy no more and he replied that if he married her he would be unwelcome in his family. So they married anyway.
They bought the ring at the store where she had broken the detective's wrist.
They looked around for him but he was long gone.