The fur coat's first march

Turn 19 of 51

you know the boots are yours as you and lizzie return to the room and sleep. you two wake at the same time like the 14 others and get dressed. you put on the black cardigan, black skinny jeans and the emo boots. lizzie puts on a black faded tee with a union logo, black skinny jeans and her boots. you notice your blonde hair and hate it, lizzie notices and says she can cut it for you. you agree

You know the boots are yours the way you know your own name now, and you and Lizzie walk back through the cold dark and sleep without discussing it, in the two beds that have always been there.

You wake at the same minute. So does she. No alarm sounds, and later you'll learn the other thirteen woke in the same instant across campus, but you don't know that yet — you only know that her eyes open and yours open and the day begins without a decision being made about it. You dress in the gray light: the oversized black cardigan with the safety pins through the collar, the black skinny jeans, and the emo boots with the buckles, heavy on your feet like verdicts. Lizzie pulls on the faded tee with the union logo, black jeans, Converse, and you're both done in four minutes, no mirror-checking, no negotiation with a closet.

Then you catch yourself in the mirror over the sink, and it stops you. The hair. That pale gold falling past your shoulders, soft and expensive-looking, the hair of the girl who owned the fur coat and the trust fund. You hate it — instantly, completely, the way you'd hate a banner from the wrong rally hanging on your wall. Your hand comes up and gathers it back and lets it fall, and it's still wrong either way. Too pretty. Too hers.

Lizzie appears behind you in the mirror, reading you the way she reads racks and faces.

'I can cut it,' she says. 'Scissors are in the drawer. Buzz it or trim it — your call, but the ponytail era's over either way.'

You agree before the sentence finishes leaving her mouth.

She sits you on the desk chair with a towel around your shoulders like a barber's cape, and the first cut is done before you can think better of it — the long length coming away in her fist, dropped on the newspaper she's spread on the floor. The scissors tick and click, quick and sure, and she works around your head with the focus of someone who's done this before, to herself, to other comrades. Pale gold falls and falls, and you watch it go in the mirror and feel lighter with every pass, and when she spins the chair to face her, she studies you for a long second.

'Yeah,' she says. 'Now you look like us.'