The fur coat's first march

Turn 13 of 51

Say 'ready' and follow Lizzie into the thrift store. she finds clothes that a liberal like she would wear. you search and start to find the same liberal style clothes. you grab a bunch stuff that is colored black like pants and boots. you two finish after an hour and you pay because dad said that no matter if you turned to a communist and liberal, he would still pay for stuff.

“Ready,” you say, and mean it more than you expected to.

The store smells like dust and old fabric softener, racks crammed tight under flickering fluorescents, a radio behind the counter playing something tinny. Lizzie moves through it like she was born here — two fingers walking hangers, flicking past the ordinary, pulling out a military-style jacket with pins already on the lapels, a faded tee with a union logo cracked half to nothing, black jeans with the knees worn soft. She holds each one against herself for half a second and keeps what passes.

“It's not about the look,” she says, not turning around. “The look is downstream. It's about not buying new when there's a warehouse of dead people's clothes nobody claimed. Fast fashion is a graveyard, comrade.”

You start down your own rack. And somewhere between the third and the tenth hanger your hands change their mind about what they're looking for. Nothing bright. Nothing with a brand. You pull black jeans, heavier than yours, a black turtleneck with a tiny moth hole, a black flannel, a secondhand pair of black leather boots with actual lug soles, scuffed like they've already lived. Then a black wool coat, long, military buttons, and your fingers stop on it the way they stopped on nothing else on the rack. You hold it up and it looks like the kind of thing the girls on your feed wear. The kind of thing Lizzie wears. You put it over your arm with the rest.

Lizzie glances over at your stack and doesn't say anything, but her mouth does the door-to-a-smile thing again.

“Boots are the right call,” is all she says. “You can't run in flats.”

At the register you get your wallet out before she can move, and she watches you do it with her jaw set, saying nothing, like she's decided today that the test isn't about the money, only the clothes. Your father's card goes through without a sound — he told you once, half laughing at some holiday dinner, that he'd keep paying no matter what you turned into, communist, liberal, anything, and it turns out he was right, and it turns out standing here in a thrift store with ninety dollars of other people's clothes, that lands on you differently than it did when he said it.

You carry the brown paper bags out into the gray morning. Lizzie walks beside you, hands in her sweater pockets, and says, “Tomorrow. You wear it all. Every piece.”