She looks at me.
“Back in a minute.”
I wait for her to nod before I head inside.
The shop is about the size of a spacious living room, making me feel twice as wide as I really am. Two women are workinginside. The woman at the register looks up and greets me with a friendly, “Hi there, can I help you?”
I look around at the rows of clothes arranged in a system I can’t decode. “I need… I actually have no idea what I need.”
She blinks. “Okay.”
“Clothes. For a woman.”
“We do have those,” she says slowly. “What size?”
I open my mouth and find nothing. I think about the approximate dimensions of Piper, but I don’t have that information in any useful format.
I lift a finger. “Can you hold on a minute?”
Walking back outside, I knock on the car window.
I rub the back of my neck. “I need to get you clothes, and I don’t know your size or… any of it. What do you normally wear?”
She blinks at me. “Like, jeans and stuff. Normal things.”
“Right, but whatsizes?”
She looks at the shop for a long moment, then wipes a smudge of mascara from under her eyes with the back of her hand and gets out of the car.
“Oh,” I almost choke out. She’s already walking toward the entrance. “Okay. We’re doing this in full bridal. Cool.”
I follow her mainly because I feel responsible for the social earthquake she’s about to cause.
The shop goes quiet the moment she enters. It happens in waves—the woman at the register notices her first, then the woman folding in the back, until the entire space is silent.
Piper stands barefoot in the entrance of the shop, radiating the energy of a woman who has simply run out of fucks to allocate.
The register woman recovers first. To her credit, she moves from shock to professional warmth in two seconds flat.
“Hi,” she greets Piper.
“Hi,” Piper whispers back. “I need clothes.”
There’s a half-second of silence before the woman at the back sets down a stack of shirts and comes forward.
“Oh, honey,” she says.
There’s so much meaning in those two words. It feels like a warm blanket wrapped around your shoulders, and I watch Piper’s face do something it hasn’t done all day. For a moment, her composure slips, and she looks like someone who desperately needed to hear that.
“We’re going to get you sorted,” the register woman says, shooting a look at her colleague.
“Don’t you worry about a thing,” the other one confirms, taking Piper gently by the arm. “What are we thinking? Comfortable? Practical?”
“Both,” Piper manages. “Comfortable and practical. Yes.”
“Come on, then.”
They disappear toward the racks, pulling things down and asking for sizes. Piper tells them quietly, never looking at me.
