On a particularly autumnal Friday, my friends and I dredged ourselves out of bed and into Cafe Mogador, a Moroccan restaurant in the East Village. I arrived first — which was fifteen minutes late. An hour after our planned rendezvous, we had gathered around a leafy pot of mint tea in the small dining area. Our bellies were full of Challah french toast when we sauntered into one of the many smoke shops that line Tompkins Square Park.  

It was the kind of November day that made me miss North Carolina, where the leaves fall ever so gently and apple cider pours like honey. It was my first November in New York – a month that I would come to find (more or less) consists of gallons of microwaved ramen. 

My friends and I scoped out a place to sit so we could absorb the sun. We saw a bench in the southwest corner of the park, next to the god-forsaken chess tables that are a great tourist attraction if you’re visiting Manhattan for the first time (I’m kidding, don’t sue me…). When I closed my eyes and heard the swaying of the trees, it almost felt like home. Until the smoke from our shared joint attracted the wrong kind of attention and we found ourselves unknowing participants in a drug deal. 

The woman in Tompkins Square Park first approached us with a smile. New Yorkers aren’t inclined to small talk, so it wasn’t unusual when she skipped conversational foreplay like names and greetings. 

“Do you have any weed?” She looked at my friend who quite obviously had weed — case in point, the joint burning in his right hand. She explained to us that she quit smoking cigarettes that week and “needed something to take the edge off.” It wasn’t that we were morally opposed, or whatever you might think, to giving her weed. Venmo just didn’t seem like an option in this situation, and a joint isn’t something you necessarily share with a middle-aged stranger in the park on a weekday afternoon. 

She looked at the three of us — baby-faced graduate students — and sized us up. Her eyes slanted when she turned to me: “So … you had time to put your Baptiste face on, but you didn’t have time to bring me my weed?” 

Her disbelief was delivered with the utmost sincerity — like an editor who’s disappointed that you missed another deadline. Yes, I chuckled, I did put on my Baptiste face and I don’t have your weed. She was like a bully at lunchtime, stealing my marijuana rations instead of milk. 

Wrong answer. She was irate. “You put on your Baptiste face; I knew it.” But now, I had context: Baptiste face = bad. No, no, I didn’t put it on; I needed to make her like me before she stuck my head in the porta-potty toilets. 

“Vamos,” my friend whispered, and the three of us bolted past her, along the outside of the fence. She followed. She walked fast; we walked faster. “I give you five seconds before I air this shit out.” 

Five, she counted, four. When I looked back, she was holding up the amount of fingers: Three. Two, we contemplated running but running might incite her to run after us, and in the instance of a sprinting emergency, I was the least likely to survive. (Thank you, chronic pneumonia and cigarettes.) One.

I got my ass beat … is how the story would have ended if I didn’t live on the street facing Tompkins Square. My friends and I crossed towards my apartment, and I entered the pin on the keypad. Like Michael Meyers from Halloween, the woman was still walking, moving slowly but somehow right behind us.

It was a few weeks before I saw the woman in Tompkins Square Park again. At the intersection on Avenue A where Ray’s Candy Shop is, she wore the same navy blue jacket and sat on the bench where we first met. This time, I passed, and we were two strangers in the darkness. She huddled under the weight of the December cold, and the goldish light of the streetlamp revealed a half-burnt cigarette poised between her fingers.