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I’m getting off the A train in Brooklyn around Hoyt, and I look back to see if David is following nearby (he is). He’s wearing a bright teal t-shirt, and I’m wearing my short shorts with a white and blue striped pullover, so naturally we fit in among the sea of navy and black bustling around us. “Why are you walking so fast?” he asks, probably in Italian or German. He’s obsessed with learning and speaking other languages. I’m obsessed with frustrating him to tears by pretending I don’t understand or can’t hear him. “Because New York” I say, and he silently nods his understanding.

I look behind me again to see if the G we’re connecting with stops here or further down the platform. The G’s I’ve been on so far are frustratingly tiny for the amount of riders in this part of Brooklyn, so much so that it’s sometimes just two cars. It wouldn’t surprise me if the MTA reduced service to just a Little Tykes train that holds a few toddlers, running over the rats along its route with its plastic tires. Ok, yes, the G stops further down. I start to turn around when I notice a guy in a pristine white t-shirt and basketball shorts gesturing at me. I think at me? I’m not sure. Until he shouts “Yeah, you!”

Um, alright. “Thanks kindly stranger!” I exclaim inside my head, thinking he’s alerting me to something that fell out of my pocket. Still walking away from him, I look down, around me, feel that my backpack is still there. Nope, no MetroCard on the ground. “YOU!” he shouts again, “WITH THE BACKPACK AND GLASSES! AND GREEN SHIRT!” Well, Green Shirt is probably David, who is blissfully unaware of this entire exchange, singing something cheerful from a musical in the middle of the subway that smells like hot garbage. No one around us cares that he’s singing out loud because everyone has headphones on. David is young and unscarred by the world, and is of the generation that will never know what a hood ornament was. No one makes the lambs in my head stop screaming quite like David.

So anyway, Backpack And Glasses can only be me. I turn around again. Yay! He’s not a kindly stranger. In fact, it’s now clear he’s pissed as fuck. 30 feet away and getting farther with every footstep I take, and he’s still gesturing. What I originally thought was a hand-flipper of “s’il vout plait, monsieur, could you kindly move to one side?” has become an apoplectic hand spiral of “TURN THE FUCK AROUND ASSHOLE”.

Oh, okay. I turn around, keep walking farther down the platform to where the clown car that is the G train will probably stop. But then he calls out to me again. “HEY BACKPACK AND GLASSES! STOP FUCKING LOOKING AT ME!” So I turn around at look at him again, because of course I do. This is when he starts striding towards me.

It probably goes without saying that I’ve never gotten my ass kicked, and honestly maybe I should. The closest I ever got was in my freshman year of high school, when sweet Anna (Lucero? Sanchez? Something-or-other) talked to me in math class and her boyfriend, human dumpster Taihi Jones threatened to kick my ass if I “flirted with his girlfriend” again. Oh sweet, dumb-as-a-box-of-hair Taihi, I have news for you. I was way more into the Ginger Superman who was Miles Adkins, who would have been the perfect boyfriend had he not constantly skipped leg day, and had he been slightly less straight. Wait wait wait was I supposed to change their names? Anyway, that incident resulted in me sobbing after class but I had to get to my English class and I loved writing so I literally opened my locker and stuck my head in and finished crying while the entire student body passed by in the hallway. And if that’s not my entire life in microcosm, I don’t know what is.

So there I am on the subway platform with someone hostile starting to walk towards me, all stompy-style. Did I mention that it’s around 1,000 degress? I would have killed for a damp cloth (but not a moist towelette, “moist towelette” is a triggering phrase for me). Once again I turn away from him, but this is causing a programming error in my brain: But he told me not to look at him! But he was trying to get my attention! Don’t turn around! But look at him! I wonder vaguely what a fist to the back of my head will feel like. I wonder if the cellphone-video of me getting my ass kicked will go viral and if I’m wearing something I would want to go viral in. I wonder if this is Weeping Angel rules (for the uninitiated, the Weeping Angels are a villain on the sci-fi show Doctor Who, who appear as statues with their faces in their hands most of the time. But if you don’t look at them, and this includes the split second when you blink, they advance upon you and eventually eat you). So if I looked at Kindly Stranger, did that mean he was no longer advancing, no longer going to eat me?

I decide to bank on ignoring him. I get my phone out, a tactic I usually only reserve for not making eye contact with people in elevators, or pretending not to notice someone I dated in the past, or when I’m driving on a busy freeway and bored. I open up Facebook, or at least try to. Instead of the current “Unable to establish connection” error message I’m actually seeing, I imagine I’m online. I make my face contort to how it would look if I saw the following things: 1) A cute cat picture (if you’re unsure of someone’s cat’s name, call it Bella because you’ll usually be right), 2) a gross video (seriously you don’t have to show me that turtle bleeding out of its fucking nose just tell me you got the straw out), and 3) a kind-of interesting thing that you did a few days ago and then decided to post EVERY GODDAMN PICTURE YOU TOOK OF IT AT ONCE.

I dare to glace back. He isn’t coming any closer, but he isn’t getting farther away either. He sees me looking back, though, and starts up again: “STOP LOOKING AT ME!” I couldn’t help it: my face forms a weird grimace, the kind of grimace I get when I see someone leaving a bathroom chewing on something. I’m strangely disappointed that he doesn’t ever call me faggot, not once. Can’t win ’em all, I guess.

I stand there and think of the simple hilarious perfection of somebody angrily flagging you down and getting your attention to make you stop looking at them, and then it happens, like it always does with me. I start to smile. And then a giggle takes root in the back of my throat. If I laugh out loud at this guy I am going to get a black eye and that makes me giggle even more. Just at the point I’m about to let out a guffaw and then promptly get stabbed in my exposed and deserving neck, the mouse-sized G train squeaks into the station to an adorable stop, and everyone on the platform clamors onto the postage-stamp sized car.

As the doors close and the H.O.-scale train pulls out of the station, David turns to me. “What are you smiling at?” he asks, speaking this time (weirdly enough) in English. I look around the car, all of us citizens swaying to the same beautiful, mechanical rhythm, and no sign of Kindly Stranger. “I’ll tell you later” I say, and then later I do.

I used to actually be a funny writer! Read about me turning the Age That Shall Not Be Named, and that time I went on a 30 Day Dating-App Cleanse. Let’s be horrible people together.