Page 68 of Hello Stranger

Just as I realized what she was doing, I spun away.

Without even skipping a beat, as if she were perhaps a person whostole other people’s cell phones all the time, Parker lunged again in a one-two—this time around my other side, and with a lot more force.

It might even have worked—how hard is it to overpower someone in a coffee shop, after all?—but in the end, it didn’t. Because just at that moment, a woman with very unfortunate timing was walking toward us, and when Parker lunged to my side, she slammed right into her hard enough to knock her to the ground.

I remember it in slo-mo. Theoofthe woman made as her bottom hit the floor. Theslooshof her cold brew spilling. The tintinnabulation of ice cubes hitting the tile. Her shocked, shallow breaths at the cold shower of it all.

In the aftermath, we both stared at the woman, her white linen outfit now saturated brown with iced coffee like a sopped-up paper towel—and then Parker did the most Parker-esque thing a person could possibly do.

“Hey!” Parker said, checking her clothes for coffee splatters, like she’d been the victim all along. “Watch it!”

And then, done with both of us, she sailed out.

Anyway, that’s when the woman in the white linen dress started to cry.

I bent down beside her. “Hey. Are you okay? Bet that was cold.”

“I’m okay,” she said.

“I’m so sorry about that,” I said then, helping her up. I glanced at the doorway Parker had just blown through. “She is the actual devil.”

Once she was vertical, the woman looked down to survey the damage—and started crying harder.

“Can I run up and grab you some sweatpants or something?” I asked. “I just live upstairs.”

But the woman said, “I don’t have time. I have to get to the airport.”

I shook my head. “You can’t go like that.”

We both stared at her coffee-drenched clothes. “I have to go,” she said. “I’m late to pick up my boyfriend.”

“You can’t pick up a boyfriend like that, either,” I said.

She started crying harder. “I know.”

“Okay,” I said. “Two minutes. Let’s get this solved,” and I pulled her by the hand behind me toward the bathroom.

There I toweled her off while she just stood there like a little kid. And I thought—as I often did—about how my mom would handle this situation. “Let’s switch outfits,” I said. “We’re about the same size.”

She hesitated like I was nuts.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I live right upstairs. I’ll just pop up and change.”

She wasn’t sure, but there was no time to argue, and before she fully knew it, we were in our underwear in side-by-side stalls, flopping our clothes over the divider.

“Are you sure?” she asked as I watched my dress slither away and disappear on the other side.

“I’m sure,” I said, wincing a bit as I slid my arm into her cold brown linen sleeve. “And, anyway, there’s no time to argue.”

“But… you looked so pretty in this.”

“Ha!” I said, the way women do, like she couldn’t possibly mean it, just as her compliment took its place as the best moment of my entire night. Then I went on, trying to stress how totally okay it was for her to walk out of the Bean Street bathroom in my favorite dress. “That dress was twenty dollars at Target,” I said. “It was on super clearance.”

“That just makes it more valuable,” she protested.

Good point, in fact. She wasn’t wrong.

When we stepped out, I covered how wet and cold I now felt with massive enthusiasm for the sight of her in my dress. “You look phenomenal!” I practically sang. “You were born to wear that dress!”

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