“That’s my hat.” Your accuser’s black hair frizzes in a calamitous scribble—she really needs the hat more than you do.

You respond with a lie.

“No, it’s mine.” Yes, you lie, and the monosyllabic words feel all wrong as they roll off your tongue. But it’s January; it’s Upstate; it’s finders keepers. So you repeat yourself. You’re dishonest again, and this time you say it with conviction—”It’s mine.”

But the hat isn’t yours. You found it yesterday; it lay forgotten and abandoned on a hard wooden bench outside the English Department vestibule. The topper’s a velvety black wool and pod-shaped with a flowered cotton lining sewn inside; its crude fever stitches sprout along the seams’ edges like vines. You were glad to find it— you had something new, something warm, and you pulled it low over your forehead and tromped home in the snow.

*****

So today, your first week back from break, you attend French 201. You hate the French and their abstract words, but you need the credits to graduate. You’ve put off this course until your last semester. It lasts for three hours.

After two hours in the classroom, everyone takes a break outside for coffee and cigarettes, stomping around on the arctic sidewalk, blowing smoke and vapored air towards the grey sky.

You sit on the wall and watch squirrels who scamper over the quad, digging for rare acorns inside the drifts. As you pull on your gloves, the little bitch with wiry hair approaches you. She points at your open bag, where the hat peeks out like a scared animal.

“That’s my hat.”

“No, it’s mine.” You jerk at your bag’s loose flap, pull it over the chapeau. “It’s mine.” You stand taller. You aren’t cold anymore. She persists.

“I lost it yesterday.”

“Sorry.”

“Let me see.” People stare as bitchy antennae-haired girl’s voice shrills. “Let me see!” She grabs for your closed bag. But you catch her dark eyes, square her gaze and pretend you’re strong. She stops her advance and uses reason. “I saw the lining. A friend sewed it.”

“No, I sewed this one.” Another lie. You walk out of arm’s reach, pull out the hat, plop it on your head. Break’s over.

The hat’s hot in the stuffy room. You’re ashamed, cornered, but you keep up the front. Your hippie professor, squat and smelly the way the French are, rambles on about declensions and past pluperfect. Parlez vous shit.

And behind you all the while, the girl sends out glaring death rays. They bore into the back of your head—through her hat. She sighs meanly. You still don’t know why you didn’t say you’d found it when she asked. You could have easily handed it over. Now you wish you had.

You go shopping after class. A bell trills, incandescence embraces you as you enter the shop, and the East Indian lady, wrapped in her bright scarves and the scent of curry or something that smells exotic like a balmy night, looks up and, as always, says something kind.

“Good to see you today.” She smiles, her teeth smudged a little with dots of magenta lipstick. You smile back at her. Then head to the shelves behind the wind-chimes, indoor fountains, and paper lanterns, and you find a bedspread with a pattern similar to the hat’s lining. You fold the Tree of Life tapestry into your bag, and leave when the saleslady helps a couple of teenagers who are looking at glass pipes in the case.

At home in your cold apartment, you cut a large square from the stolen textile, center on a perching turquoise bird. You rip out the girl’s crude lining, sew the hat with new, silken stitches, taking hours to perfect your surgery. The hat now bursts inside with colors, the bird scrunched within poises for flight at any moment, his wings only clipped at the very tips.

The next day, you drop the French class. You seldom step foot on campus for fear of running into the girl. You don’t graduate for another year. For years, you hide the transformed hat in your bottom bureau drawer where it will sit unworn but not forgotten. Funny, but you cannot throw it out.

This story originally appeared in the Summer 2006 Vestal Review.

A native Georgian, Cate McGowan developed her editorial skills working as a travel editor and arts journalist. She earned her MFA in writing from Spalding University, where she was chief student editor of the Louisville Review literary magazine. Her own award-winning fiction and poetry has appeared in various publications such as Glimmer Train, Wordsmitten, Snake Nation Review, GSU Review, and Tank Magazine. When she is not writing her novel or bodyboarding, she teaches composition and creative writing to in Florida.