It all starts with a cardigan. She stares at it in a shop window on a slushy day in April, dirty remnants of snow from a freak storm swirling around her boots, cigarette in hand, clutching her black pea coat around herself, cursing herself for leaving her hat on the tube. It wasn't her favorite hat, a plain black knitted affair with a bobble on crown that her flat mate's friend had forgotten, but it was warm. Perhaps it just needed to travel on in the world until it found someone who would appreciate it.
Molly drops her cigarette and crushes it beneath her boot, despite its being immediately doused by the sticky muck at her feet. A bell above the shop door tinkles as she steps inside. The shop will feel uncomfortably warm within minutes but in the first moment she sighs in relief as her hands begin to tingle.
The clerk, a bleached blonde with an asymmetrical haircut and the sort of soft, round body a person can get absolutely lost in looks up from a battered copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and asks if she needs any assistance.
"Er, the cardigan in the window?"
The girl, "Joss" according to her nametag, tears herself away from a last sentence, her eyes following the book all the way to the counter, and comes around to pull the jumper off of the mannequin.
"Cherry print's way overdone these days, but this one's alright. I couldn't pull it off. I'm way too butch. But I think it'd suit you." She holds it out to Molly, who holds it up to herself.
Soft, creamy white with bright red cherries. It even has ruffles down the front. It's like nothing Molly has ever worn. Her closet has been full of blacks and greys since her father died. It wasn't like some Victorian novel where she went out and replaced her entire wardrobe. It happened gradually, helped along by the habit she picked up from her mother of getting rid of one thing every time she bought something new, until one day Aanchal came in to look through her wardrobe for a shirt to borrow.
"Holy shit, Mols. Do you own anything in an actual color?"
Molly had looked up from her course work and shrugged. "It makes it easier to get dressed," she said. She never got much sleep, and stayed in bed until the last possible second every morning. "Besides, you look good in any color."
"Wrong. I look like a jaundiced prune in burgundy. Which is why my sister put me in a burgundy sari for her wedding, the dozy cow."
"You looked fantastic. And you should wear that one shirt."
"Which?"
"The black one."
Later she would stand in front of the wardrobe in her underwear, coerced into going out by Aanchal. Even all her summer clothes were black or grey. The last thing she'd sent to the charity shop was a purple sundress. It had been the only thing she'd packed other than bathing suits for her last holiday with her ex.
It had rained the entire time.
She finally chose a mini dress and tights, went out and got sensationally drunk, and then missed class the next morning for the first time since she'd had her appendix out.
It's been five years and two flat mates since then. Her clothes are now housed in the first flat she's ever had on her own, and they're still all black and grey.
The cardigan in her hands is ridiculous. She wouldn't have worn it before her father died. She wouldn't have worn it as a child. But on a day like this, when it seemed completely plausible that winter would go on forever, and she'd had to piece together the skull of an eight year old boy who'd fallen out a window, after a week of particularly gruesome corpses and her failure once again to give up smoking, this rather camp cardigan is an act of rebellion.
Molly doesn't try it on or look at the price tag. She takes it back to the counter and it's rung up and in a bag before a glimmer of a second thought can creep in. Looking over her shoulder, she returns Joss's smile. She hesitates just outside the door, but decides it'd be weird to go back in now. She does notate the name of the store and the street and commits them to memory. There'd been a lovely skirt with big red pink peonies on it over in one corner, after all.
When she gets home, she hangs the jumper in her closet, right in the middle of the rack where it looks like a beam of light shining through a barely opened door.