Trench Coat

Sherrie Flick

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After hours her high school has an other-worldly glow. Later the memory of it would remind Natalie of an art museum at night—the glass and polished floors, the distinct silence after a bustling day. But on this night she has not yet been to an art museum. 

She has seen Boy George dance with wide open arms on MTV. She knows Duran Duran and Flock of Seagulls. She’s wearing a black trench coat she bought at a thrift store. It hits her calves and is slightly too big, fanning out, with a wide 1970’s collar, big black buttons. Her favorite piece of clothing. She can’t know yet that in a week her mother will hide it so she won’t find the coat again until she’s in her 50s and going through a closet looking for her mother’s mink stole. The trench coat shoved to the back is now too small for her. When Natalie last wore it she wasn’t done growing. She’ll clench her hands into fists, will herself not to cry, standing in the closet. Her elderly mother calling up the stairs to ask what’s keeping her so long. Natalie will pull herself together, of course. Of course. But this night isn’t the future. It’s now, and she wears the coat, and the high school has shut down for the day. The art club students plan to paint a mural in the gymnasium. She isn’t an artist and will never be an artist. She’ll be an art historian. But this night she’s here to support her friend Christie and to feel, she doesn’t know, a kind of freedom, just driving to the school by herself now that she has her license. Just leaving her home and clicking her seatbelt and driving to the school, making that decision. Natalie feels amazing. 

She wears sneakers with the trench coat, of course. In a couple years at college far away from home she’ll wear faded red Chuck Taylors she finds at a thrift store, a little too small for her feet. But for now she has her Addidas sneakers she bought at the mall with her mom. Natalie feels free. The musicians on MTV seem radical, a voice for her generation. New Wave. She’s cut her hair short on top and left a long tail running down her back. The front curling around her face. She wears pink lipstick, just a little, and some eye liner. Her skin shines like moonlight. Christie said she’d meet her by the water fountain by the auditorium and then they could walk to the gym together. 

Christie’s parents made her finish a long list of chores before she could leave the house. The single-spaced typed list hung on a wall right outside the kitchen. The list looked endless. It spilled into two columns. Christie would never finish all the chores on it, ever. And Christie said yes, that was the point her parents loved to make. She could always find something to do. Something more. And then she said, “Who types a chore list?” And they both laughed because no one typed lists except Christie’s mom, who typed everything, even shopping lists on her humming electric typewriter, always with a plastic cover over it. It sat centered on a desk near the kitchen. Natalie had never seen her in the act of typing, but evidence in the form of lists lay everywhere in their house. Christie just shrugged. “I hear the motor hum and her tapping at the keys sometimes really late at night. My mom says it’s soothing. I don’t know,” she said. “I think she just wanted to be a secretary and instead became a mom.” And they both nodded at that because Christie’s mom did not seem to love them. Not the way Natalie’s mom loved her and all her friends. Always wanting them underfoot, even still as obnoxious teenagers. Natalie’s mom took her job as mom seriously and at this moment, this night, Natalie thinks she has a nearly perfect mom. She doesn’t yet understand the ways in which she doesn’t know how to think for herself. 

When Natalie thinks back on this night, it feels pure, full of freedom, without complication. She pulls open the thick glass doors and walks into the brightly lit foyer. She knows the freshman, even the sophomores, think she’s cool. Natalie tucks her car keys into her coat pocket. Cool. She just likes being observed, in her trench coat, car keys in her pocket, feeling absolutely comfortable in this second-home building what with track practice and volleyball practice, dances and school itself. She’s there all the time and never gets lost in the hallways the way she did just a few years ago. 

She walks to the auditorium water fountain and leans against the wall, taps her head back against it, one knee bent so her sneaker is on the wall too. The future remains unknown. Hands in the pockets of her trench coat, waiting for her friend, fingering her car keys. 

Someday she’ll rewrite so much of this, but not this particular evening, because Christie arrives, not very late, wearing her favorite Bruce Springsteen t-shirt under her brother’s flannel shirt. She’s happy because her mom let her off drying the dishes for once. She rushes in, grabs Natalie’s hand and they run through the hallways to the gym, sneakers squeaking, their hair lifting from their open faces. 

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Sherrie Flick is the author of two short story collections: Whiskey, Etc. and Thank Your Lucky Stars, both out with Autumn House Press. Recent fiction appears in Puerto del Sol, Western Humanities Review, and Booth. Co-editor for the 2023 Norton anthology Flash Fiction America, she also served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 and works as a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. She received a 2023 Creative Development Award from The Heinz Endowments and a 2015 Creative Nonfiction Foundation fellowship. Her debut essay collection Homing is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in September 2024.

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