6:45 a.m., five days before Christmas

The first whiff of what they were all there for, the first hint of hope, appeared when one of the dozen shiny Smart-mart doors clicked and slowly opened. A pimply-faced head wearing a Santa hat poked out.

Dozens of pairs of eyeballs, including Lucy Perlmutter’s, swung and riveted the store worker. He froze, and not because of the 22-degree air outside.

Lucy followed his gaze. The line of bundled-up, vapor-puffing shoppers snaked from the bank of doors, past the shopping cart corral, out from beneath the covered entryway, down the sidewalk to her. Last-in-line Lucy. She guessed the thirty minutes of intensive temporary-holiday-employee training the teenager probably received hadn’t prepared him for this.

Lucy didn’t see anyone who looked like a suicide door-crasher, or a checkout-stand terrorist among them. But-too late-the shoppers bombarded the store worker with technical questions.

“Hey, did you guys get in any GyPSies last night?”

“How many do ya have?”

“Is there gonna be a lottery?” Lucy screeched. She didn’t know why, but she was jumping up and down in her violet-and-white, horizontally striped tights and UGG shearling boots. Streaked blonde hair flared from beneath her brimmed, pink knit cap.

Startled, the door boy jerked back inside so quickly that his Santa hat fell outside. At the same time, he slammed the door on the ankle of the employee he had come to let in. Panic-stricken, he re-opened the door and bent to reach for the Santa hat, when his outstretched arm and head became entangled with the churning legs of his co-worker now frantic to get inside. Together they writhed in a heap of Smart-mart crimson Polo shirts and tan khaki pants before sorting out their feet. The door banged shut, followed by the disheartening slap of deadbolts falling into place.

The crowd, though noisy and anxious and armed with credit cards, hadn’t budged an inch.

A young African-American man, wearing a baggy gray hoody sweatshirt, his hands plunged into the front pouch, strolled up and took the place behind Lucy. She turned, only to be greeted with a frosty, vacant stare. He looked to be in his twenties. Printed in ornate, gothic lettering from nipple to navel across the sweatshirt were the letters “Aka”.

“I’m not last any more. Cool,” she said, with a smile.

“Trust me,” the black man said, “we definitely ain’t gonna be last in this line today. Five days ‘til Christmas and the whole world is lookin’ to score a GyPSy. See.”

Streaming from the parking lot, a score or more shoppers, packed into winter coats, picked their way across the icy asphalt toward them. More vehicles were pulling into the lot.

“Oh, I want a GyPSy so bad,” Lucy squealed to no one in particular, clapping her hands with excitement. “Do you think we’ll get one? Do you think they’ll have enough? I’m getting it as a Christmas gift for my boyfriend, Jeremy.”

The decibel level of her voice caused the person in front of her to pull his head even deeper into a thick face scarf. Then, like a turtle, a Latino face reemerged from the scarf, exposing a gray-white mustache so precisely trimmed it looked like it had been applied with eye-liner.

“I know they got them. I helped unload them last night.”