The fur coat's first march

Turn 21 of 51

leave the room at 7 to meet everyone at hall. you arrive and sit down with everyone at the same time. everyone inlcuding you says hello comrade. you remeber thats your name now, comrade. everyone here is comrade. they notice your hair and say its good. you all then start talking about problems and the thursday flyering. you notice the black converse or boots with black skinny jeans on everybody.

You leave at seven, boots on the stairs, and Lizzie matches your stride without either of you deciding to. The dining hall is already breathing its morning noise when you come in, and at the west long table the Circle is arriving too — not gathered, arriving, from three directions, and you all sit down within the same half-minute like parts of one mechanism closing.

'Hello, comrade,' you say to the table, and 'comrade' comes back in a ragged unison that has clearly been said every morning for months. You remember, sitting down, that this is your name now. Not Marissa from the fur coat — comrade. Everyone here is comrade. The word fits your mouth better each day.

The hair lands before the food does. The girl with the beads leans over the table to look at the bangs; Lizzie's neighbor whistles low through his teeth; and Cleo, who was reaching for her fork, stops and looks at you for a long, unblinking second — the buzzed skull, the blue Bettie fringe, the blue tail at your nape.

'It's good,' she says finally, and the table echoes it — good, comrade, good — and that's the whole ceremony. Then she leans in. 'Okafor Hall, dawn tomorrow. We go in pairs. Two hundred flyers, corners of the parking lot and every door on the east entrance, done before facilities is on shift. Lizzie, you're with me. Comrade Marissa — you're with the beads girl.' The girl with the beads, whose name you still don't know, holds up two fingers like a salute.

You look down the table and you see it for the first time as a fact and not a coincidence: black Converse or black boots on every pair of feet, black skinny jeans on every pair of legs, the whole table in one silhouette. Your buckled emo boots are the same species as Lizzie's scuffed pair and Cleo's steel toes. You are looking at a uniform, and you are wearing it, and nobody ever told you the dress code — you just knew.

The talk turns to problems the way water turns at a bend: the trustee donor, the editorial, tenure. You eat your identical tray and add your voice to it, flat and certain, and the table makes room for your sentences like they've always had a slot there.