Oh, not your usual sort of trouble — not the sticky-fingered tween who thinks she can smuggle out a bottle of nail polish and a couple of statement buttons with no one noticing. Not the privileged princesses from the hills who just loved to take a buttload of clothes into the dressing room and leave them all there for the “staff” to pick up. And not even the wannabes in long black coats that my friend Joanna and I referred to as the “knee-hilists” (usually pronounced in a fake German accent similar to the one employed by the would-be kidnappers in The Big Lebowski). Anyway, I was used to the hipsterish flotsam and jetsam that floated in and out of the store. This guy didn’t match any of the types who tended to haunt the place. For one thing, he wore a long brown coat and a brown fedora. Now, it was cold enough outside that the coat itself made some sense, especially for wimpy SoCal natives who thought anything below 70 degrees was freezing. However, no one who knew what they were doing would be caught dead wearing brown inside a Hot Topic.
