In a New York Minute(7)

My face froze in a horrified, mouth-open look.

She continued. “You guys are flirting. Your hands are all over him, rubbing his chest. And then he leans in for a hug, or maybe a kiss—I couldn’t quite tell. Did he kiss you?”

“What?” I shrieked, racing to my bed to grab my phone. “The train stopped short, and I fell into him, and he lost his balance. We definitely did not kiss, Lo. Or rub. Or hug and rub. Why would I do any of that with a stranger I literally just met on the subway?”

My voice was a growl now. I had morphed from bird to cougar in an instant.

Lola raised her brows at me, biting her bottom lip. “I don’t know—for fun?”

I turned and waved both my middle fingers in her face.

“Oh, Fran, I’m just teasing. Of course I believe you.” Lola sat down next to me on the edge of my bed. “But I also spent like ten minutes staring at photos of someone who looks exactly like you crying in a hot dude’s arms as he wrapped his coat around your shoulders.”

My stomach didn’t flip anymore. It dropped dead. I pounded at my phone, my fingers too slow to keep up with what my brain wanted them to do. I found her texts gently telling me I was possibly about to become an internet sensation, with the screenshots to prove it.

“Holy shit.” I tossed the phone next to me. Then I stood up almost immediately. I sat back down. I had no idea what to do with my body, other than run to the bathroom and throw up.

“Some girl posted it all on her Instagram Stories,” she said.

“I wanna see it,” I demanded.

Lola pursed her lips and, with a reluctant sigh, picked up my phone, unlocked the home screen, and started typing away.

“How do you know my password?” I asked.

“You told it to me once in college when you were drunk and wanted me to order you a pizza,” she said, like it was the most obvious reason in the world. “You should probably change it at least once a decade.”

When she passed my phone back to me, my hands were shaking. Because there I was, on my own phone screen, in an Instagram Highlight titled SubwayQTs.

I said the words slowly, out loud.

“That’s what they’re calling you,” she said matter-of-factly. “SubwayQTs.”

“What?!” I was back to being loud and squeaky.

“QTs, like ‘cuties,’ and because you were on the Q train,” she explained in an overly kind voice. “It’s a pun.”

“Lola, I get the freakin’ pun!” I snapped. “I just— That’s not what happened. I ripped my dress, and this guy on the train insisted I take his suit jacket, which, I’ll have you know, turns out to be Gucci. And he was, like, weirdly nonchalant about the whole thing, and I didn’t get his name, and he doesn’t want it back, so now I’m just stuck with it.”

“Ooooh. Well, that makes much more sense,” Lola said with a smirk. She was enjoying herself.

“Your sarcasm is not helping.”

I looked back down at my phone and clicked on the story. Someone who’d been near us on the subway had—oh my god—snapped a whole series of back-to-back photos of me on the train, sweaty and blotchy with tears, and clearly freaking out. OMG this poor woman just got her dress stuck in the door of the Q train, she had written over a blurry photo of me, mouth agape, with a line of crying-face and shocked-face emojis under it.

I scrolled forward. Always look for the helpers was typed on a photo of the pregnant woman leaning toward me, offering the hair clip. A GIF of Mr. Rogers waved in the upper right-hand corner. Jesus, this was embarrassing.

Super hot guy now saving the day!!! is what she captioned a picture of him leaning over me with his jacket in hand. In another, I’m smiling up at him through my tears—I don’t remember smiling—and it actually looks like we’re having an intimate conversation.

“Holy shit, this is not what happened.” I gave Lola a panicked look, and she instinctively put her arm around my back. “Like, at all. I mean, kind of, but I just want to reiterate that I did not mean to touch Hot Suit. I fell into him because the train moved! And he gave me his coat because my dress ripped, which honestly was a lifesaver.”

“Hot Suit?” Lola repeated with a laugh.

I crossed my arms in a huff. “He needed a nickname,” I explained.

“Okay.” She tilted her head in exaggerated thought. “It’s kinda literal for my tastes, but I’ll give you a B for effort.”

I leapt up and paced the length of my bed, which wasn’t much bigger than my entire room. In New York terms, my place qualified as a junior one-bedroom, a glorified way of saying it was a studio that came with a corner nook, where you could shove a full-size bed—a queen, if you were lucky. I’d managed to get a queen in there, plus a bedside table next to it. Making furniture work in tiny spaces was my superpower.

“Whose Instagram is it?”

“Some girl who goes to NYU. But it’s getting shared everywhere. And I mean, the Stories will disappear, but she added them to her Highlights, and she also put a picture of you two in her grid. Which surprised me, if I’m being honest. I mean, the grid is, like, a sacred space.” She shook her head, her digital-media-dork brain coming into focus.

“I truly don’t get how this generation uses social media,” she said disapprovingly, as if she were an aging grandmother and not someone who had gotten One Direction lyrics tattooed on her back as a dare just last year.