UNRANKED BEFORE THE END: Everyone had a rank except me

The Coat

AMELIA — DAY FOUR INTO DAY FIVE

---

Gray.

The band is thin plastic and it's cold when they snap it on, and it stays cold for a long time before it warms to my skin. There's a chip inside it. They said it holds my name, my tier, my room number.

I look at it on my wrist all afternoon and it looks like a hospital bracelet.

Ashley got gold. He didn't brag about it that's not his way but he came to find me in the quad afterwards with his sleeve pulled down over his wrist like a man hiding a watch. "It's ridiculous," he said. "It's a piece of plastic."

"It's not ridiculous," I said. "You'll be warm."

He looked at me for a long moment and then said, "So will you," and I didn't know what that meant and I didn't ask.

Vanessa got blue. She showed me at dinner, holding up her wrist under the light, and she said, "I'd give it to you if I could," and she meant it, and that's the thing about Vanessa. She always means it in the moment.

Blue gets a warm room. Gray gets the cold one.

I don't cry about it. I'm too tired to cry about it.

---

There's a coat outside my door on Friday night.

I open the door at half past ten to put out the bin bag, and it's there on the floor, folded, resting against the wall like it was left a minute ago.

It's new. That's the first thing. The fabric is still stiff, the way new things are. Dark green, long, with a thick hood and deep pockets, and inside it's lined with something soft that holds the heat like an animal.

No note. No bag. No label on the outside.

I look up and down the corridor. Empty. A door closes somewhere two floors down.

I take it inside and stand there holding it, and I feel stupid, because it's just a coat. But my hands are cold and my room is cold and nobody has given me anything all week.

Vanessa comes in from the bathroom with a towel around her hair.

"What's that?"

"I don't know. It was outside the door."

She comes over and touches the sleeve. "It's nice. That's a real coat." Then her face changes just slightly, just a flicker and she says, "No note? That's weird, Amelia."

"Somebody probably"

"Somebody probably what? Left a four-hundred-pound coat outside your door?" She says it gently. Vanessa never says anything unkind in a sharp way. She says it gently, so it lands. "It's a bit creepy, isn't it?"

"Maybe."

"I'm just saying. If someone wanted to give you a coat, they'd knock."

She's right. That's the annoying thing. She's always right in the way that makes you feel a little worse rather than a little better.

I hang the coat on the back of my chair anyway.

---

The clinic is warm.

That's the only reason I go, honestly the queue is long and my wrist hurts from carrying the books, and the clinic has a working radiator.

Dr. Ezra sees me at quarter past eleven. He takes my wrist in both hands and turns it, gently, and says, "A sprain. From books?"

"From carrying everyone's whole life around in a bag."

He laughs. It's a real laugh, not a polite one, and it surprises me.

He wraps it with something he says is better than a bandage and costs nothing, and while he works he tells me about a patient he had last week who came in with a sprained thumb from playing a game on his phone for nine hours. He does the voice. The patient's voice, the mother's voice, his own voice trying to keep a straight face.

I laugh. Properly. Out loud, with my hand over my mouth, the way you laugh when you didn't expect to.

And then I stop laughing, and I feel strange, because I can't remember the last time I did that.

"Better?" he says.

"My wrist? Yes."

He looks at me over his glasses and doesn't correct me, and I like him for that.

---

I get back to the room at midnight.

Vanessa's asleep. I don't turn on the light. I just walk over to the desk in the dark, the way I've done ten thousand times, and I reach for the drawer to put my notebook my own notebook, the blue one, my lecture notes away.

The drawer is open. Just an inch. Just enough.

I stop with my hand on the handle.

I close it. I open it. I do it slowly, in the dark, the way you test a thing that shouldn't have moved.

The black leather notebook is exactly where it always is, under the blue one, on the left side.

I lift it out. It's the same. The same soft cover, the same tape on the spine with my father's handwriting, the same worn corner where he used to hold it.

But it's not sitting the way I left it.

I know how I left it. I've taken that notebook out and put it back a thousand times since he died, and I always set it down with the spine facing the wall, because it slides in easier that way.

It's facing out.

I stand in the dark room holding my father's notebook with both hands and I don't know what to do with the fact that it has been moved.

Vanessa breathes slowly in the other bed. The radiator ticks. Outside the window, the wind pushes against the glass.

I sit down on the edge of my bed.

Then I reach for the coat.

---

It's warm before I even get it on. That's the strange thing it doesn't feel like the air in the room. It feels like it was warmed somewhere else, somewhere with a working boiler, and carried up here still holding the heat.

I pull it around my shoulders.

It fits. Not the way a coat fits when you buy it in the right size, but the way a coat fits when someone knew the shoulders, the arms, the place where it hangs past my hands.

And it smells like floor wax.

Just faintly, under the new fabric. Floor wax, and clean cold air, and something like a workshop.

I sit very still on the edge of my bed with my father's notebook in my lap and a stranger's coat on my back, and I listen to the building breathe.

Somebody on this campus knows my size.

Somebody on this campus has been inside this room.