"That's how they dress"

Odd things happen in the dog days... Yesterday evening - 97 under a high white sky - at the bus stop in Laurel (the main one, at the Mall), I was waiting for the B bus amid a crowd of people waiting for all the buses. Suddenly, a police car pulled up and a woman with a pull suitcase went up to it. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but she quickly made it clear that her agitation was due to someone who'd been on the bus she'd just been on. Two someones, actually, who were standing next to the bus shelter I was sitting in.

"They're prostitutes!" she declaimed and walked toward us. "That's how they dress."

"They" were a couple of college-age women (don't know if they were students or not) dressed ... fairly normally. One was in a finger-tip-length short-sleeved tunic over knee-length leggings, the other in a sleeveless sundress, both in sandals.

Two more cops pulled up and now we have three of them trying to calm the woman down. One of them has walked over to talk to a driver, who shakes his head. The cop walks back. The woman is gesturing wildly. "I felt threatened!" she says loudly. The girls are ignoring the whole thing. Finally I hear a cop say, "Ma'am, you just can't pull the cord all the time."

"I felt threatened!" she says again. The cops are doing nothing except talking to her, and after a while she walks away. The cops just stand there, chatting, and the buses pull up. The girls get on the G for College Park and the Metro, the woman gets on the D for Whiskey Bottom, I get on the B, and the cops chat away while all the buses leave.

I'm not sure what was going on. I do sincerely doubt the girls were hookers, and even if they were, surely they'd have better things to do than surreptitiously menace a middle-aged woman. Even one who has no clue how younger women dress in the summer nowadays.