We haven’t really been competing; it’s not the kind of game where we’ve been trying to one-up each other. It’s like sharing the Sunday crossword, I guess—instead of passing the folded newspaper back and forth, trading clues and guesses, Reid and I had pointed out to each other the signs we noticed as we’d walked. And the same way the Sunday crossword-share never finishes without at least one concession to a Google search, Reid and I had adjusted some of the rules as we went along. A particularly impressive H on a vinyl sign inspired the “wild card” exception: one letter from a sign that’s not hand-drawn. A best out of three rock-paper-scissors practice implemented for when one of us would spot a good example that matched with one of the letters—A, E, R—that we both have in our names.

“The E,” Reid says, nodding up toward the mural he’s standing in front of on Bleecker, an amazing red, white, black, and gold image of Debbie Harry of Blondie wearing a leopard-print blouse and a look of challenge in her black-rimmed eyes. There’s a lot of lettering on this mural—a crooked version of the CBGB logo minus the decorative serifs, a narrow black script against a deep-red background, a blocky, clean all caps in the lower right corner.

Reid’s zoomed in and snapped the E in BLONDIE as it appears on a rendering of a concert ticket—1979; gates open at 6 p.m.; no bottles, cans, coolers, or pets. It’s red, the E, and the top arm is shorter than the bottom, a sturdy-looking thing, and even though all the images on his phone are out of order—no rule for having to find consecutive letters—it’s easy to reconstruct my name from these eight snapshots, to rearrange them. Here, Margaret doesn’t look so old-fashioned. It looks bright, colorful, cheerful. It somehow looks more Meg than Margaret.

I swipe my thumb over my own screen, tip it toward Reid so he can see the various building blocks of my own take. Reid Hale. His name, it sounds kind of . . . new-fashioned. And also stuck-up. But as with the letters from my own name, R-e-i-d looks different in the pictures. Noisy and alive and fun, like the game itself and the Bowery around us, coming to life on a Saturday evening.

My hands feel restless to sketch. I don’t even notice that my hair’s blown against him again until he clears his throat and straightens.

“I can send these to you,” he says, moving to tug down the sleeve of his jacket again. It’s stayed warm tonight, warm enough that I’ve never even taken my own be-buttoned jacket from where it’s stuffed inside my bag, but Reid has left his on the whole time.