The girl was one of those creatures that you couldn't ignore, that just gutted you on sight. 

With eyes tired of so much ordinariness, you would alight upon her, and your neck would instantly flush, your heart stumble mid-leap. She appeared - "manifested" rather than came, or went - as if simply dropped into the scenery by an invisible, obliging hand - leaving you greatly in doubt as to the world in which you lived, and prickly all over. Wherever one found her, one felt she had to be there for some cosmically special reason. 

From behind the bakery rack I stared at her in secret, paralyzed, as if I'd suddenly spotted the main character in my own story. 

Trying to meet her gaze was ruinous, but pretending not to look at her would be truly pitiful. Not to mention deeply unsatisfying. So I walked around the storefront with a smile, chatting lightly with the customers and freely distributing some misshapen dough balls that Amelia failed to form properly with her new store-branded cookie mold. A little opportunistic, but the shrinkage should not come as a surprise: my manager had such absolute high standards, it was only natural that she too had to fail them sometimes!

As I got closer to the girl, she seemed to perceive me and turned away, which I couldn't help but take personally. I'm not sure why, in hindsight. She looked about my age, and practically hid inside her jacket. But, I didn't understand her at all at the time. 

My eyes continued to follow her as she slowly stepped outside and leaned against the storefront, her vacant eyes directed out at the deck. She pulled her heavy grey windbreaker closer to herself, as if it were very cold (as the seasoned waiter: ...no, it really wasn't). Extremely long black hair floated about her tiny face, like a gossamer cocoon. 

Perhaps I would have also fallen under her spell - maybe - if Jo wasn't equally special. But that was the problem, wasn't it. They were the only two like them. And I knew, without any further hints beyond what nature made apparent, that she was definitely there for him. 

My worst fears were realized when he rounded the corner of the shop, and came into sight.

"Sailor," he yelped, apropos of nothing, and I thought for a second that he was having an episode. 

There were many things wrong with the picture that confronted my eyeballs, and it took me an appreciable moment to fully upload all of this new information. 

Gone was the weekend bag, the open shirt, the ill-advised pants. He was wearing a lint-flecked hoodie with a crossbody that hugged the drum of his chest, and the strap still hinted at the equidistant folds of newly-opened product. His usual bottoms he'd swapped for cargo shorts: a long white rip ran down one pantleg and transitioned into asphalt grey, suggesting they were not shorts at all, but an amputee with a story. The spiralling curls that once danced across his face were now pinned back tightly by the signature sunglasses, as well as some...distinctly shiny and pearlescent hair clips. 

And, he was holding an ice cream sandwich - the wrapper still sticky with frozen residue. I'd almost forgotten that we had a freezer at the back of the house. The one and only time I remembered cleaning it out was when I first started working here, and found one of Amelia's cosmetic jars and a used disposable syringe lying on the bottom. 

So basically, the object of all my unfounded interest looked like a suburban dad from Newton on a breakaway. But his shoes were still daffy, so I could reliably peg him as Jo. 

"Hey Jo," I called out, just to be sure. 

I could have stomached any type of reaction, anything at all. I was not prepared for him to simply walk across to her without hearing me. 

"You can eat this product," he said. Funny, it almost sounded like there was some emotion there. "Don't be picky. If you don't fuel your body, you'll starve."

"No," she squirmed.

"It's just ice cream with some cookies grafted on - "

"I don't know what that is!! Why does ice cream need to be covered with cookies?"

I wasn't sure what was happening anymore, he was shaking her with both hands, like she was a bin liner he was trying to unfurl. "Sailor. Sailor. Listen to yourself. You've read half the books at Copley Square and you understand the mechanics of military submarines, but you're scared of a frozen confection because you think it's got something to hide?"

And at the word "hide", he suddenly straightened, as if it finally dawned on him where they were and what kind of a place it was, and looked up - directly into my eyes.

Oh, boy.