Cut and Color

Seven months before I got on that shuttle, I was standing in my kitchen at eleven at night eating cold noodles straight out of the pot when my pad lit up with Lise's name. That alone was strange, because we always called on Tuesdays and Fridays, and this was a Thursday, and Lise Martinez did not break a schedule for anything except a client emergency. I almost dropped the pot trying to answer before the third ring, which is not cool when you are twenty-nine years old and trying to pretend your life is together.

She looked tired on the screen, in the way she always looked tired after a double shift, pink light behind her from the salon lamps even though she had to be calling from her apartment in the back. She had her hair up in a clip and she was holding a piece of paper, an actual piece of paper, which meant she had printed something out, which meant this was real business.

"Eric. Did I wake you?"

"It's eleven and I'm eating noodles out of a pot, Lise. What's up?"

She held up the paper so I could see it. It was a relocation approval form, and my name was on it, and there was a stamp on it that I assumed meant something official on Kepler-7b. She told me the colony housing board had signed off on a work visa for a second stylist, that the paperwork had taken four months and three appeals, and that Maxwell Abrams in the administrator's office had finally pushed it through the last committee. She had offered me the job months ago, and now it was real. She said all of this very fast, in her business voice, the one she used when a supplier was trying to overcharge her.

I said yes before she finished the sentence. I will be honest about that, because she likes to tell people I thought it over like a reasonable adult, and I did not. She got about halfway through the word "salary" and I just said yes, out loud, standing in my kitchen with a fork in my hand and cold broth running toward my wrist. She stopped talking and looked at me through the screen, and then she laughed, this real laugh, not the salon laugh, and I remember thinking that I would cross six months of empty space for that laugh and here was my chance to prove it.

She got businesslike again after that, because she always does, and we talked numbers and start dates and how many pairs of scissors I could bring through customs, which turned out to be a whole weird argument I was not prepared to have with a shipping manifest. But after she said goodbye and the screen went dark I stood in my kitchen for a long time holding that cooling pot, and the noodles were completely forgotten, and my stomach was doing something I had not felt since I was twenty-two.

Because here is the part I had not admitted to anyone, least of all to her, in nine months of Tuesday and Friday calls. Somewhere in the middle of those calls, the professional part and the personal part had gotten tangled up in my head. I knew her lease terms and her supplier contracts and her opinions on clipper guard lengths. I also knew that she took her coffee with too much sugar, that she hummed old Earth pop songs when she swept up, that she had left our whole planet ten years ago after somebody broke her heart and built an entire business from nothing under a dome on a red rock around another star. I knew I had started dressing better for video calls with my boss. I knew she had started wearing her hair down.

So when I said yes, I was not really saying yes to a job.

The transit took six months and I will spare you most of it. Six months is a long time to be awake in a metal tube with forty other relocating workers, and by month four I could describe every dent in the ceiling of my bunk. I did the math on our arrival maybe two hundred times. The sun out there comes up every six hours, so no matter when you land, morning is never far away, which sounds nice until you have been awake for a hundred hours straight. I watched the approaches on the lounge screen for the last week, that big brownish dome growing out of the red dust, three thousand people living their whole lives inside a circle, and one of them was waiting at the docking bay.

She was. That is the part I still turn over sometimes. I had pictured it so many times during the transit that I had talked myself down from it, told myself she would send an assistant, told myself she would wave from a distance and point me at my apartment and we would be all business until the awkwardness wore off. Instead she was right there past the airlock, arms crossed, in a salon apron of all things, like she had run over from The Snip mid-shift, and when I cleared customs she did not wave or point or do anything sensible. She hugged me.

Now, I had hugged clients, coworkers, friends. I know what a greeting hug is. This one lasted a second longer than a greeting hug, and in that extra second her hands pressed flat against my back like she was checking I was actually solid, and I could feel her breathing change, and when we pulled apart she looked up at me and said, "You're taller than the camera made you look," and her voice cracked on the word taller, just slightly, and then she laughed at herself and smacked my arm and told me to grab my bags because the coffee shop closed in twenty minutes.

The dome was smaller than I expected and warmer than I expected and the dust got into everything, and the main street had exactly three things on it, a coffee shop, the hydroponics depot, and her salon, and I remember thinking that the whole geometry of my new life fit inside one street. The Snip had four chairs under those pink lights she had shipped from Earth at ridiculous expense, and the buzz of the ballasts was the same buzz I had heard in my head for nine months of calls, and standing in it for real felt like walking into a song I already knew. There was a bead curtain at the back wall, and behind it, her apartment, and I looked at it for exactly one second too long and she saw me do it and raised an eyebrow and I turned very fast toward the break room.

My first shift was two days later, because she insisted I sleep for a full day first, and I did, fourteen hours in a colony apartment that still smelled like fresh paint. I came in early that first morning and she walked me through her booking system and her color inventory and introduced me to the two other stylists, and by ten I had my first walk-ins, and I was so nervous I gave a farmer's kid a slightly uneven fade and had to fix it and apologize twice. Kepler is a small place. He has not let me forget it, and it has been months, and honestly I respect him for it.

Maxwell Abrams came in at noon. I knew his name already, obviously, from the paperwork, the administrator who pushed my visa through, the landlord who owned the building the salon sat in, fifty-two years old, arrived on the same transport as Lise back when the colony was barely a year old. What I did not know was that he came in for a trim. I want to stress that word, because it became a word with weight for me later. A trim.

He sat in her chair, not mine, and she took him, and I worked two chairs over pretending to sanitize things that were already sanitized. He was a plain, pleasant man, the kind who talks with his hands, and he told some story about the hydroponics depot and a delivery drone, and Lise laughed. Not the salon laugh. The other one. The real one, the one from my kitchen screen, the one I had crossed six months of space to hear in person, and she was laughing at it for him, at his story, in her chair, while I stood there holding a bottle of disinfectant like an idiot.

It was a trim. Four minutes of work, maybe five. She took twenty.

I kept my mouth shut and my face pleasant and I did a good job on the rest of my day, because I am a professional, whatever else I am. But walking home that evening past the coffee shop, I did the arithmetic I had been avoiding. Nine months of calls, and in all that time she had never once mentioned that Maxwell Abrams got his hair cut at The Snip. And the question that walked home with me down that red dust street was simple and ugly and it would not go away. How long had he been coming in?

Maxwell came back three days later. I had been keeping a quiet little mental ledger of appointments since that first shift, and the ledger told me that the man had sat in Lise's chair on my first shift and was now back three days later, which meant two visits in one week, which meant, if you ran the numbers forward, a trim roughly every four days. Nobody needs a trim every four days. On Earth I had clients who came every six weeks and I still had to talk a couple of them into it. Hair does not grow at the speed of a colony administrator's schedule.

He arrived at noon again, and I started to suspect that was not a coincidence either. Noon was the hour when the other two stylists took their lunch in the break room and the floor was half empty, and the coffee shop across the street was doing its own rush, and the whole main street had this settled hush in it that the six-hour day cycle produced twice a day, a kind of dimming of the pink lights that Lise said she had never gotten around to fixing because honestly it saved her power credits. So noon was quiet, and Maxwell Abrams had learned to like quiet.

I did my work. I had two walk-ins, a woman from the coffee shop with a root touch-up and a young man, twenty-five or so, who worked at the depot and wanted the sides taken in. I was good with him. I was extra good with him, in fact, because the whole time I could hear the low rumble of Maxwell's voice two chairs over and the real laugh, the kitchen-screen laugh, coming out of Lise every couple of minutes, and I needed something to do with my hands and my brain that was not listening. I talked to the depot guy about filtration systems. I know nothing about filtration systems. He talked for twenty minutes and left happy, and that is a service I did not put on the books.

They took longer than the trim required. That was becoming a pattern with its own arithmetic. Twenty minutes the first time, and this time I watched the clock over the register and it was thirty-five, and at some point the sound of scissors had stopped entirely, which meant there was no work left to hide the talking, and still they stayed, and still she laughed, and I sanitized my shears for the fourth time that hour.

And then I heard it. I was at the product shelf, back turned, doing the thing where you square up bottles that are already square, and Maxwell's voice carried across the quiet floor in that way voices do when a room is empty enough, and he said something about tomatoes. I want to be fair to the man, he said it normally, pleasantly, the way he said everything. But the word that hooked me was private. A private tour. There was a new cultivar coming in, some beefsteak variant engineered for low-light cycles, and the depot was getting the first seedlings on the planet, and he would love to show Lise before anyone else saw them, a private tour, just the two of them, sometime next week when the shipment cleared.

I stood there with a bottle of conditioner in my hand and did not turn around. I heard Lise's pause. It was a pause, I want to stress that, it was not a yes. She made a sound that could have been a laugh and could have been something smaller, and then she said that tomatoes were interesting, and Maxwell laughed too, and said that was the spirit, and then his chair scraped and he was up and paying and gone, and the little bell over the door did its job, and the salon was just the salon again, two customers' worth of quiet and the buzz of the ballasts.

Tomatoes. I thought about tomatoes for the rest of the day. I thought about the fact that a fifty-two-year-old administrator who had come in for a trim every four days was now dangling private tours of vegetables, and I thought about what my own face would have looked like if I had turned around, and I decided my face was not ready, so I kept it aimed at the shelf. The root touch-up woman asked me if the pink lights ever got to me and I said no, I loved them, and that was true, I did love them, they had buzzed in my head for nine months and I was not going to let a man with a tomato ruin them.

I stayed late. I did not plan to stay late, or rather I planned it the way you plan things you already know you are going to do, meaning I pretended not to plan it. The other two stylists packed up at the end of the cycle shift and said their goodnights, and Lise started on the register, and I said I would stay and organize the color inventory because the shelves had been driving me crazy all week. That was a lie. The shelves were fine. I had already squared every bottle twice. But she shrugged and said sure, take your time, and went behind the bead curtain to change out of her work smock, and I heard water running, and I stood in the pink light with four hundred bottles of product and tried to