The fur coat's first march

Turn 12 of 51

Wake up and meet Lizzie for the shopping trip. you put on today baggy blue jeans, a soririty hoodie and put your hair into a ponytail. you do your makeup and put jewlery on. you look like you did on saturday. you leave and met lizzie at the center of campus. her hair is buzz cut dyed yellow. her outfit is a gray sweater, skinny black jeans and converse shoes. she says hello comrade and you say it.

You wake at nine with the feed still open on your phone, and you dress the way you dressed last week — that's the strange part, how automatic it still is. Baggy blue jeans, the sorority hoodie with the Greek letters stitched across the chest, hair pulled back into a ponytail. You do your makeup at the mirror, the familiar small rituals, and fasten the gold hoops and the thin chain, and when you're done the girl in the glass is the one from Saturday morning: polished, moneyed, someone's daughter. The black jacket and the buckled boots hang in the closet behind her like a costume from a play she isn't sure she's still in.

Lizzie is waiting at the center of campus, and you almost walk past her. Her hair is gone — not just shaved, but dyed a hard yellow, buzzed close, glowing under the morning gray like a warning light. Gray sweater, skinny black jeans, scuffed Converse. She looks you up and down once, the hoodie, the hoops, the ponytail, and her face doesn't change.

'Hello, comrade,' she says.

'Hello,' you say, and then, catching it a half-second late: 'Comrade.' The word comes out of your mouth for the first time without anyone handing it to you first, and Lizzie's mouth twitches — not quite a smile, but the door to one.

'Thrift stores,' she says, already walking. 'Real ones, not the ones your people shop at for fun. There's a rack system. You'll learn it.' She doesn't comment on the hoodie. She doesn't have to; the silence around it is a comment, and you walk beside her through campus feeling every Greek letter on your chest like a name tag from a previous job.

'So,' she says, hands in her sweater pockets, eyes forward. 'Cleo wants to know if you're serious. I told her I'd find out.' A yellow-haired glance, sideways, quick. 'Shopping's how I find out. You wear what you buy tomorrow, or you don't, and either way that tells me something true. Ready?'

The town's main street opens ahead of you, and the first thrift store's window is full of other people's discarded lives on wire hangers.