The fur coat's first march

Turn 16 of 51

you look in the cloest again to only lug sole black boots and a emo pair of boots, black skinny jeans with one pair of patched cargo pants and black tops. your room starts to change as it becomes filled with liberal and marxist stuff. lizzie sees it and approves. you see another bed form in the room and remember that lizzie is your roommate. you two then leave to meet everyone at the dining hall.

You go back to the closet one more time, and it has finished happening. The rod holds only what the new you would wear: the lug-sole boots and a second, emo-heavier pair with buckles and worn toes, two stacks of black skinny jeans, the patched cargo pants, and black tops — turtlenecks, tees, the flannels — hung close together like a uniform rack. Not one bright thing left. The sorority hoodie is simply gone, and you don't go looking for it.

The room follows the closet. It happens while Lizzie scrolls her phone, so gradually you couldn't timestamp any single piece of it: posters rising on the walls where your framed photos were, a red pamphlet folded on the desk beside the boot-printed one, a battered copy of something with a hammer on the spine, a protest badge pinned to the corkboard. Your expensive candle is gone. A kettle sits where it was. When you look for your roommate's side — the half the room split down the middle — there isn't one, because there's another bed now, made up in gray and black, and the memory arrives with it whole and settled: Lizzie has always been your roommate. She's lived here since move-in. You remember being annoyed about the septum ring the first week, and you remember that memory the way you remember all your other memories, which is to say you no longer doubt it.

Lizzie looks up from her phone, takes in the walls, the pamphlet, the second bed, and gives a small nod of pure approval. 'Now it looks like somebody lives here,' she says. 'Thought I'd never get the lavender out.' She says it like a joke you were both in on, and something in you agrees without checking the paperwork.

'Come on,' she says, pocketing the phone. 'Everyone eats at seven. Dining hall, west side, the long table.' She's already at the door in her scuffed Converse, and you follow in your new boots, black flannel sleeves over your hands, out into the hallway that smells like everyone else's Tuesday. The walk across campus is short and cold and you don't shiver in the wool — wait, the wool coat is on the hanger; the flannel is enough, apparently, and apparently you're the kind of person who decides that.

The dining hall doors open onto noise and fluorescent light, and at the far west table the Circle is already gathering — Cleo at the center, orange curls fading to yellow, trays and hoodies and one face turning toward the door to find you. Cleo sees the flannel, the boots, the bare face, and lifts her chin.