“The other one was better.”

“Really?” She smoothed out the wrinkles in her skirt. “I guess. This is something my grandma would wear.”

I nodded, drawing in a full breath of air. Honestly, that girl could wear anything, and that fact was making my job both easy and hard. The yellow one had been better, though.

“Try on one of the ones I found.”

“So you’ll stop asking.”

She left me once again and I pulled out my phone. The geniuses at ESPN should win an award for coming up with score-checking features on their app—perfect for situations like these. As I was looking up which baseball teams had the best chances in the World Series, a string of shrieks and swears came from the dressing room.

“Ow, no,” Eliza cried.

I jumped up, pausing, unsure if I was allowed to go in there and help her. I guessed not . . .

“Eliza?”

“It’s my shoulder,” she shouted. “Lifting dresses over my head popped it again. Damn it. Oh, gosh, ow.”

What was the appropriate move here? From my self-taught obsession of how to prevent shoulder injuries, I—in theory—knew how to fix it. Did I volunteer to help her? Or would she think I was being a perv?

Luckily, she answered that for me.

“Would you be able to help? You can stretch it out, right? Nick, please, I think I pulled something.”

“Sure, but you should probably go to the ER. In case it got dislocated.”

I entered the women’s dressing room the way a burglar robs a jewelry store: you know you shouldn’t be there, and you’re afraid of accidentally touching something and setting it off. I hadn’t been in many dressing rooms in my life, other than the occasional trip to buy new jeans or whatever. From what I’d seen of men’s dressing rooms, this place was comparable to the Four Seasons. It had white saloon-style doors into each room, and was decorated with tall orchids, smelling like them too. Bottles of water stood on a gleaming white dresser, below a picture of that lady from that movie.

One dressing room door was closed, which I knocked on.

“Do you want me to come in?”

“Yeah. I still have that dress on. Couldn’t get it off.”

She opened the door and I rushed in before anyone, God forbid, saw me. Her right shoulder had swelled to the size of a softball, double her left shoulder. Her dress swept the floor.

This dressing room was not meant for two people, and it made a series of me bumping into either Eliza or the wall. There was only enough space for her to flail her arms around and try to get the clothes on. Which meant we were back to standing too close to each other. Again.

If Eliza was thinking about that, her face didn’t show it—at least not from what I could gauge from my occasional glances in the mirror. Mostly she winced, probably thinking about how much pain she was in, not about my hands on the bare skin her dress had left exposed.