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

“No, it’s mine.” A lie. The words, monosyllabic, feel wrong rolling off your tongue. But it’s January; it’s Upstate; it’s finders keepers. To make your female accuser go away, to make her leave you alone with your hat, you lie again–”It’s mine.”

But it’s not. You found the hat yesterday abandoned outside the English Department. Black wool, pod-shaped, with a flowery vined cotton lining sewn inside by someone’s ring-laden fingers (you imagine this, of course). Crude fever stitches lace along the edges. Yesterday, after you found the hat, you pulled your treasure low over your forehead and tromped home in the snow, glad you had something new, something warm.

The next day, your first week back from break, you attend French 201. You hate the French and their abstract words, their words hurt your ears with their phlegm-laden sounds, but you need the damn credits to graduate. You’ve put off this class until your last semester. It lasts for hours. Outside during a break for coffee and cigarettes, everyone stomps around on the Arctic sidewalk; they blow smoke and vapored air. The little bitch with wiry hair approaches you. She points at your open bag, where the hat peeks out like a small scared animal.

“That’s my hat.”

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

“I lost it yesterday. And you’ve got it now. In there.”

“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 for me.”

“No, it’s my work.” Another lie. But you sound like a seamstress. Good. You walk out of arm’s reach, pull out the hat, plop it on your head. Break’s over.

You keep the hat on, but it’s hot in the stuffy room. You’re ashamed, cornered, but you keep up the front. The gray, shuffling professor rambles on in French about declensions and past pluperfect. Parlez vous shit.

The girl sits behind you and sends out glaring death rays. Maybe that’s why it feels so hot in the windowless room. She sighs and tisks. Meanly. You wish you’d told her the truth and said you’d found it.

You don’t know why you didn’t.

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

“Good to see you today.” You smile at her and head to back where the tall shelves hide you as you fold a Tree of Life tapestry into your bag–the pattern’s similar to the hat’s lining.

At home alone in your cold studio apartment, after you down some cold noodles and turn on the network news, you cut a large square from the stolen textile, centering on a perching turquoise bird. You rip out the hat’s lining, the lining sewn by a friend for a friend (though how someone could have like that bitchy girl is beyond you). You painstakingly sew in your own lining with new, silken stitches that are so much lovelier than the original handiwork.

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

Another version of this story was published in the Vestal Review, Issue 26, July 2006

Cate McGowan, a Georgia native, earned her MFA in 2003, and her 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 surfing, she teaches composition and creative writing to fabulously eager college students in Florida. Of the 163-odd jobs she has held (i.e. flight attendant, art gallery sales, rock band manager, stable hand, model, landscape designer, fabric designer, antiques shop owner), she still finds writing and teaching are the most rewarding.