Left Behind

Her closet was empty and her bed was overflowing. Moving across the country was a little harsh on everyone and everything, including most of her clothes. Kayley was going to college and she couldn’t take everything with her.

She had friends going to school close to home and friends not going to college at all, but Kayley was determined to do something different. For the past 18 years she’d proved to herself she could live at home. It was being able to do anything else that she was unsure of. So it hurt a little that she couldn’t take all the clothes she loved with her, just to make things easier. For each piece she could remember at least one time she wore it, had at least one memory. Maybe it was fitting that she’d have to leave them behind too. She started sorting everything into two piles. The last time Kayley had cleaned out her closet was probably around ten years ago, and the year was somewhere in the 1970s. Not many clothes had made the cut into the keep pile that time. Sometimes Kayley looked back on her old fashion sense and questioned what she was thinking.

She rifled through the shirts and skirts and dresses she couldn’t bear to give away. The keep pile kept growing. From the tiny picture on the college brochure she knew it was too much to take along. Kayley started ruthlessly filling the give-away box with high school dances and amusement park trips and cancelled-school snow days. At the bottom was a skirt.

It must have been buried in the back of the closet, because she’d pretty much forgotten about it. Black and plaid, with pleats and buttons and a buckle, at one time it was her favorite. It wasn’t just a memory, it was fifty. It was her brother’s birthday and the drive-in movies and pizza Wednesday in the cafeteria. It was her high school life. And it was everything she was leaving behind her. Kayley tossed the skirt into the give-away box.

*****

Whenever Samantha drove when it was warm outside, the smell of her car would stick in her hair all day. Despite this she started the trek out to the freshman parking lot. As she yanked the car door shut it creaked with 25 years of old age. Samantha wondered if back in 1985 it even had a new car smell, or if it was always like this.

Her college was down the street from a thrift store but she’d never been. She’d never been to a thrift store at all. But it sounded fun. Samantha pulled into the parking lot and walked inside, not fully knowing what to expect. It looked like all the old garage sales her aunt and uncle used to take her to when they would watch her for the day. Racks of clothes stood next to boxes of shoes and crates of books. In the back looked like furniture and ties and possibly cassette tapes. She delved in.

Most of the clothes she couldn’t imagine ever being bought. She pictured the giant furry coats and strangely patterned dresses hanging in the same spot forever, until the store went out of business and they still hung there, covered in dust. She was even more surprised when in the midst of everything doomed to stagnation, she found something acceptable. It was a black plaid skirt with pleats all around, three black buttons and a silver buckle. Not something she’d particularly seen people wearing around, but she liked it. She looked for the price tag: four dollars. The price was clipped onto the brand tag, and that made Samantha stop. “The Original Ultra Pink Clothes For Fun.” She had no idea what that even meant. The original? For fun? Ultra pink? She got out her phone to look it up.

“Mainly in plaids, popular around 1984-1988.”

The thrift store’s air conditioner must have been broken because all the doors were open and box fans sat all around them. They whirred and swayed the rack of skirts. Samantha tried to imagine the girl who wore this when it was new, when it was fashionable rather than retro. She wondered if she had eighties hair. And mostly she wondered when and why she decided to give the skirt away, and how it ended up here.

Four dollars for ‘The Ultra Pink Clothes For Fun,’  Samantha thought, and bought the plaid skirt with three dollar bills and four quarters. She tossed it in the passenger seat of her creaking yellow car and drove back to the freshman parking lot.