As the train lurched forward, I sighed with relief and leaned my back against the doors of the car. Wrapping my right arm around the edge of the box, I reached my left arm for my purse, hoping to grab my phone so I could text Cleo and Lola with my news. Just as my fingers grazed the hard plastic of my phone case, I felt a firm tug behind me.
“What the hell?” I muttered, trying to shift again. But I couldn’t move. It was like something had pinned me to the doors of the train, securing me in place. I stepped forward, inadvertently leaning my weight against a pregnant woman who was holding on to a handrail for balance. Why didn’t anyone offer her a seat? I thought as I apologized for bumping into her. My brain was skipping around between worrying about her to wondering why I couldn’t move, and then suddenly my ears connected with something else:
The sound of my dress ripping down the back.
My heart rate picked up, beating its own chant of Oh my god, oh my god. My dress—the gorgeous locally-made-in-Brooklyn, cost-a-small-fortune soft silk dress that I’d splurged on at Alter in Williamsburg—had gotten stuck in the subway doors and ripped straight down the seam, from the back of my neck right past my butt. My fancy sack was now a fancy mess.
“Oh my god,” I said out loud.
New Yorkers are well practiced in the art of not staring, but dare to step into their personal space and their eyes turn into lasers that can incinerate upon contact. Unfortunately, no one’s personal space was safe around me as I frantically tried to grab the back of my dress with my free hand and hold it shut. At first, my elbow smacked into someone’s arm, and I was met with a “Jesus Christ” from the skateboarder who’d been on the receiving end.
“Sorry!” I stepped forward to recalibrate and squashed someone’s foot underneath mine.
“Excuse me,” hissed a woman in fancy athleisure wear as she recoiled.
“Sorry!” I squeaked again. God, my arms ached. I shifted the box onto my left side and shimmied as far as I could against the door, hoping I could buy myself some time before the next stop. But as I grabbed the material by my butt and held it shut, the dress started to slip off my shoulders.
Is it possible to laugh and cry at the exact same time? Because just as tears pricked along the edge of my eyes, hot and huge, I let out a guffaw. This day.
“You okay?” the pregnant woman asked, a look of genuine concern on her face.
“My dress.” I gestured toward my back. As I did, the right shoulder strap slipped off my body completely.
“Oh no,” she said, horrified.
“I know,” I replied, the panic evident in the high octave of my voice. “I’m having a massively shitty day, and in a few minutes I’m going to be mooning the station when the doors open.” All it took was one blink before the tears began dripping down my face. Everything awful that had just happened to me was spilling out, in the most public place possible.
Before I could stop her, the pregnant woman shouted into the crowd of commuters, “Does anyone have any safety pins?” Her voice was loud enough to startle almost every person nearby. “Safety pins? Anyone?”
A few people looked up and then looked back down at their phones. A girl in an NYU hoodie, her hair in a giant topknot on her head, glanced over and offered me a sympathetic smile. The older woman began to dig into her massive purse.
“It’s fine. I’m fine,” I tried to assure her, even though I was obviously not. I pressed myself against the door as we chugged toward the next station.
“Here, honey!” The older woman waved, and the pregnant woman reached out her hand. “It’s not a safety pin, but it might help.”
When the pregnant woman stepped back toward me, she opened her palm and revealed a small hair clip.
“Do you want me to try to close it up with this?” she asked me, a skeptical look on her face. But before I could tell her no, a deep, calm voice shot through the din of the subway.
“Here.”
It was the giant suit standing next to me, except now he was just crisp white shirt and soft blue tie, his shoulders hitting right at my eyeline. His navy jacket was dangling neatly from his hand. “Here,” he said again, clearly perplexed by my inability to understand exactly what he wanted me to do with his coat.
I looked up to meet his eyes.
Even in my Holy shit, my dress has ripped open straight down the back, and I’m in the one thong I own and never wear, because thongs are miserably uncomfortable, but I bailed on doing laundry last night, so here I am, and to top it all off, I just got let go from my job and I still have at least five more years of student loans to pay state, I could register that he was handsome. The kind of good-looking stranger that causes you to think Whoa when you pass them on the street.