Spring and Thompson Streets, New York City

This week you were walking west on Spring very fast with your bags jouncing against your sides and at least seven things on your mind. If I had to guess, I’d say your name was a monosyllable. Your parents, I think, gave you something longer and fancier, but you feel more yourself with a three-letter abbreviation. You appreciate the way there’s a kind of neutrality to it. Sometimes, because of your monosyllable name, people think you’re a dude before they meet you and you kind of like that.

It was close to the place where you can queue up to buy the thing that frankensteins a French breakfast pastry with a donut, in a name that people love to hate to say. Which is maybe why they stand in line so long to buy one: so they get to use the word a lot when they tell their friends how it did or did not live up to expectations.

You did not have time for that shit. You were late, I’m pretty sure. You just had a lot on, but you were dealing with it, because that’s what you do. I was late too, but I was walking slowly and not dealing with it, too morose for the person waiting five blocks away. Being this slow then, I had ample time to see your t shirt as you strode past. In black on white across your big boobs it said CUERVO NO CHASER and in a snap I heard the way she makes that word a flourish or sound effect — ch’ssahhh — a pop and a hiss like a soda can cracked open, and my smile did too — crack, I mean — and I only know this because in that moment your attention and your gaze, which had been way off in the future and urgency of a to-do list, popped into surprised focus on me, feeling that smile. The best thing was the tiniest fraction of a second of confusion, why’s this bitch smiling, before you remembered what t-shirt you were wearing, what your chest said. Your smile back was both reluctant and inescapable, a graceful kind of grudging, because you still had all the stuff on your mind, but I’d seen your t shirt and you’d seen me and Beyonce was between us. Brief and wry, your smile said, said yeah, I go off, I go hard, et cetera et cetera.

Two blocks on, I considered the fact that you had chosen a lesser known lyric, a plain product placement, really, and I respected you for it. Because your t-shirt could have just said “I SLAY” and I don’t think I would have smiled.

Hermione Hoby writes about culture for the Guardian and others.