3
Location & Hours
MTA Lost and Found 34th St. and 8th Ave.
This service was NOT able to locate my lost items! I lost a very expensive hand-knitted red vicuña scarf on the Q train while visiting a friend in the city. I called the 511 number and told them exactly where I last saw the scarf, and they told me they didn’t have any items matching its description and wouldn’t even check the trains for it, even AFTER I told them how much the scarf was worth! The only helpful person I encountered in this EXTREMELY disappointing experience was a friendly passenger named Jane who helped me look for the scarf on the train. I can only assume it’s lost forever.
The envelope is waiting on the kitchen counter when August steps inside Friday afternoon, finally free from class and work until Sunday.
All she’s thought about the whole walk home is mainlining YouTube eyebrow tutorials and passing out next to a personal pizza.
“You got something in the mail today,” Myla says before August has even taken off her shoes in observance of Myla and Niko’s strict No Shoes Indoors policy.
Myla’s head pops up from behind the pile of mousetraps she’s been disassembling for the last three days. Unclear if this is for the same sculpture as the frog bones. Her art is maybe beyond August’s scope of appreciation.
“Oh, thanks,” August says. “I thought you had work?”
“Yeah, we closed early.”
By “we” she means Rewind, the thrift store responsible for her share of the rent. From what August has heard, it’s extremely musty and extremely expensive and has the best selection of vintage electronics in Brooklyn. They let Myla take whatever doesn’t sell home for parts. There’s half a Nixon-era TV next to the microwave.
“Fuck a dick,” Myla swears as one of the traps snaps on her finger. “Anyway, yeah, you got some huge envelope. From your mom, I think?”
She points at a thick plastic mailer next to the toaster. Return address: Suzette Landry, Belle Chasse, LA.
August picks it up, wondering what the hell her mom could have sent this time. Last week, it was half a dozen pecan pralines and a key chain mace.
“Yeah, for a second, I thought my mom sent some stuff for Lunar New Year?” Myla goes on. “I told you my mom is Chinese, right?
Anyway, she’s an art teacher and this year she got her kids to make Lunar New Year cards, and she was gonna send me one with some fah sung tong from this place—Whoa, what’s that?”
It’s not pralines, or self-defense paraphernalia, or a festive little Lunar New Year treat made by second graders. She doesn’t have to open the manila folder to know it’s full of archival documents, like the millions back home in August’s mother’s apartment, stuffed with public records and classified ads and phonebook entries. There’s a note paperclipped to the front.
I know you’re busy, but I found this friend of Augie’s who may have ended up in New York, her untidy scrawl says. Thought you might be able to look into it.
“God, seriously?” August grumbles at the folder. The tattered edges peer back at her around the sides, impartial.
“Uh-oh,” says Myla. “Bad news? You look like Wes when his dad sent the thing about cutting off his trust fund.”
August blinks dumbly at her. “Wes has a trust fund?”
“Had,” Myla says. “But, you…?”
“I’m fine,” August says, trying to shrug her off. “It’s nothing.”
“No offense, but it doesn’t look like nothing.”
“It’s not. I mean, it is. Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Myla says. “But if you want to talk—”
“Fine, okay, it’s my stupid dead uncle.” August clamps a hand over her mouth. “Sorry, that—sounded fucked up. I just, uh, it’s kind of a sore subject.”
Myla’s face has gone from curious to gentle and concerned, and it’s almost enough to make August laugh. She has no idea.
“I didn’t realize, August. I’m so sorry. Were you close?”
“No, I’m not, like, sad about it,” August tells her, and a look of faint alarm crosses Myla’s face. God, she’s bad at explaining this. That’s why she never tries. “I mean, it is sad, but he didn’t die, like, recently.
I never met him. I mean, I don’t even technically know if he’s dead?”
Myla sets the mousetrap she’s been toying with down. “Okay…”
So, August guesses now is when she finally figures out how to tell someone what the first eighteen years of her life were like. This is where the whole charming single-mom-and-daughter, best-friends- forever, us-against-the-world bit breaks down. It’s the thing that started August’s cynicism, and she doesn’t like to admit it.
But she likes Myla. Myla is surprising and funny and generous, and August likes her enough to care what she thinks. Enough to want to explain herself.
So she groans and opens her mouth and tells Myla the thing that’s governed most of her life: “My mom’s older brother went missing in 1973, and she’s spent almost her whole life—my whole life—trying to find him.”
Myla leans heavily against the refrigerator, nudging some photos out of place. “Holy shit. Okay. And so she sent you—?”
“A fuckload of information on some random person who might have known him and might have been in this area. I don’t know. I told her I don’t do this anymore.”
“‘Do this’ as in,” she says slowly, “look for a missing family member?”
When you put it that way, August guesses she does sound like a dick.
She doesn’t know how to make anyone understand what it’s like, how much she was hardwired to do this, to be this. She still memorizes faces and shirt colors, still wants to check the dust on every windowsill for handprints. Five years out, and her instincts still pull her back to this bootleg Veronica Mars act, and she hates it. She wants to be normal.
“It’s—” She trips on her words and starts over. “Okay, it’s like— one time, when I was in sixth grade, we had our end-of-the-year party at a skating rink. My mom was supposed to pick me up, and she forgot. Because she was at a library two parishes over looking up police records from 1978. I sat on the curb for hours, and nobody offered me a ride home because Catholic schoolgirls are really shitty to the poor latchkey kid with a weird hoarder conspiracy theorist mom. So I spent the first week of summer vacation with the worst sunburn of my life from sitting in the parking lot until seven o’clock.
And that was just … life. All the time.”
August puts the file back in the envelope, shoving it on top of the fridge between a case of LaCroix and a Catan box.
“I used to help her—take the bus by myself to the courthouse to file public records requests, do shady shit for information after school. It wasn’t like I had friends to hang out with. But then I
realized why I didn’t have friends. I told her when I left for college that I was out. I don’t want to be her. I have to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to be doing with my life and not, like, solving cold cases that can’t be solved. And she can’t accept it.”
There’s an extremely long pause before Myla says, “Whoa,” and,
“that’s what it is.”
August frowns. “That’s what what is?”
“Your deal,” Myla says, waving her screwdriver. “Like, what’s going on with you. I’ve been wondering since you moved in. You’re, like, a reformed girl detective.”
A muscle in August’s jaw twitches. “That’s … one way to put it.”
“You’re like this hotshot film noir private eye, but you retired, and she’s your old boss trying to get you back in the game.”
“I feel like you’re missing the point.”
“Sorry, like, it’s your life and all, but do you not hear how badass that sounds?”
And it is August’s life. But Myla is looking at her like she doesn’t care—not in the way people have for most of August’s life—but like how she looks at Niko when he recites Neruda to his plants, or Wes when he stubbornly spends hours disassembling and rebuilding a piece of Ikea furniture someone put together wrong. Like it’s another inconsequential quirk of someone she loves.
The whole story does sound kind of ridiculous. One of Myla’s traps snaps shut and flips itself off the counter, skidding across the kitchen floor. It stops at the toe of August’s sock, and she has to laugh.
“Anyway,” Myla says, turning to open the freezer. “That sucks. I’m your mom now. The rules are, no Tarantino movies and bedtime is never.”
She wrenches a tub of cotton candy ice cream from one of the overstuffed shelves and plunks it on the counter by the sink, then opens a drawer and throws down two spoons.
“You wanna hear about my mom’s second graders?” she says.
“They’re nightmares. She had to get one off the roof the other day.”
August picks up a spoon and follows her lead.
The ice cream is a radioactive shade of blue and horribly sugary, and August loves it. Myla talks and talks about her adoptive mom, about her clumsy but well-intentioned attempts at cooking waakye for Myla growing up so she could feel connected to her birth heritage, about her dad’s woodworking projects (he’s making a guitar) and her brother back in Hoboken (he’s making his way through residency) and how their main family bonding activity is marathoning old episodes of Star Trek. August finds it soothing to let it wash over her. A family. It sounds nice.
“So … all these mousetraps…” August nudges the one on the floor with her foot. “What exactly are you making?”
Myla hums thoughtfully. “The short answer? No idea. It was the same with the frog bones, dude. I keep trying to figure out what the piece is for me, you know? The point-of-view piece. The thing that sums up everything I’m trying to say as an artist.”
August glances across the room at marshmallow Judy.
“Yeah,” Myla says. “I have no idea what the point of view of that thing is.”
“Um,” August attempts. “It’s, uh. A commentary on … refined sugars and addiction.”
Myla whistles through her teeth. “A generous interpretation.”
“I’m a scholar.”
“You’re a bullshitter.”
“That’s … true.”
“Here,” she says, “I’ll show you what I’m working on.”
She turns on her heel, hair swishing after her like the cartoon smoke of a fast getaway.
Myla and Niko’s room is like August’s—long and narrow, a single window at the end. Like her, they haven’t bothered with a bedframe, only a double-sized pallet on the floor beneath the window, a mess of linens and shabby throw pillows shot through with late afternoon sunlight.
Myla belly flops onto it and reaches for a crate overflowing with records. As she digs around, August waffles at the door, eyeing the desk covered in paint tubes and epoxy cans, the round table loaded with crystals and dripping candles.
“Oh, you can come in,” Myla says over her shoulder. “Sorry it’s such a mess.”
It is, admittedly, a mess, and the clutter makes August’s skin prick with memories of magazine stacks and file boxes. But the walls are covered only sparingly with sketches and Polaroids, and August only has to step around one abandoned sweater and a tin of charcoals to get through the door.
On a dropcloth in the center of the floor, there’s a sculpture slowly coming together. It looks almost like the bottom half of a person, nearly life-sized, and made up of crushed glass and computer parts and a million other fragments. Wires overflow between the cracks like vines eating it from the inside.
“I have absolutely no idea what this is going to be,” Myla says as August circles it slowly. Up close, she can see the bits of embedded bone, painted gold. “I’m trying to wire it to move and light up, but, like, what does it mean? Fuck if I know.”
“The detail is incredible,” August says. This close she can see all its tiny parts, but from across the room, it looked like an elaborate, shimmering work of delicate beading. “It’s more than the sum of its parts.”
Myla squints at it. “I guess so. You wanna listen to something?”
Most of her records look secondhand and well-loved with no discernible organization. It’s a level of comfortable chaos that has Myla written all over it.
“The collection,” she says, “used to belong to my parents—they KonMari’d all their vinyl a few years ago, but I saved them.”
“I have, like, the most boring taste in music,” August tells her. “All I listen to are podcasts about murder. I don’t know who half these people are.”
“We can change that,” Myla says. “What’re you in the mood for?
Funk? Punk? Post-punk? Pop punk? Pop? Old-school pop? New- school pop? New-school old-school—”
August thinks about yesterday, about Jane sliding into the subway seat next to her, talking breathlessly about the Clash and holding out her headphones. She’d seemed so disappointed when August awkwardly confessed she didn’t know the band.
“Do you have any ’70s punk?”
“Ooh, yes,” Myla says. She whips a record out and rolls onto her back like a lizard sunning itself. “This is an easy one. You probably already know it.”
She flashes the cover, black and covered in jagged, thin white lines. August thinks she recognizes it from a T-shirt but can’t place it.
“Come on,” Myla says. “Joy Division? Everyone who’s ever been within sniffing distance of a clove cigarette knows Joy Division.”
“I told you,” August says. “You’re gonna have to remediate me.”
“Okay, well.” Myla sets the record on the turntable in the corner.
“We’ll start here. Come on.” She fluffs a pillow beside her.
August stares. She’s adjusting to having friends like Winfield adjusts to days when he has to pick up a breakfast shift: cranky and bewildered. But she sinks down onto the bed anyway.
They stay there for hours, flipping the record over and over as Myla explains how Joy Division is technically not punk but post-punk, and what the difference between the two is, and how it’s possible for there to have been post-punk in the ’70s when there was also punk in the ’80s and ’90s. Myla pulls up the Wikipedia page on her phone and starts reading it out loud, which is new to August: someone else doing the research for her.
She listens to the bass lines spilling over one another, and it starts to make sense. The music, and why it might mean so much to someone.
She can picture Jane somewhere in the city, kicked back in her bed, listening to this too. Maybe she puts on “She’s Lost Control” while she drifts around the kitchen making dinner, doing the easy
waltz of routine, touching pans and knives she’s moved from one apartment to another, a whole life full of things. August bets she has way more than five boxes. She’s probably fully realized. She’s probably got a daisy chain of past loves, and kisses aren’t a big deal to her anymore because she’s got socks from an old girlfriend mixed up in her laundry and another one’s earring lost beneath her dresser.
Crazy how August can imagine a whole life for this girl she doesn’t even know, but she can’t begin to picture what her own is supposed to look like.
At some point, Myla rolls over and looks at her as the music plays
on.
“We’ll figure it out, right?” she says.
August snorts. “Why are you asking me?”
“Because you have, like, the energy of someone who knows
things.”
“You’re thinking of your boyfriend.”
“Nah,” she says. “You know stuff.”
“I don’t even know how to, like, make human connections.”
“That’s not true. Niko and I love you.”
August blinks up at the ceiling, trying to absorb her words. “That’s —that’s nice and all, but you two are … you know. Different.”
“Different how?”
“Like, you’re both your own planets. You have gravitational fields.
You pull people into them and that’s it. It’s, like, inevitable. I’m not half as warm or hospitable. No support for life.”
Myla groans. “Jesus, I didn’t know you could be so fucking dire.”
August scowls and Myla laughs. “Do you ever hear yourself talk, though? You’re cool. You’re smart. Maybe people at your stupid Catholic school were just dicks, man. You’ve got a brighter glow than you realize.”
“I—I mean, I guess. That’s nice of you to say.”
“It’s not nice, it’s true.”
They’re both quiet, the record spinning on.
“You do too,” August says to the ceiling at last. It’s hard for her to say stuff like this straight-on. “Glow.”
“Oh, I know.”
Classes exit the drop period, and it’s August and her packs of scantrons and lecture after lecture five days a week. This lands her with the latest shifts, and she finds herself audience to the weirdest characters and most bizarre events that descend upon Billy’s under the cloak of night.
Her first week, she spent twenty minutes explaining to a drunk man why he couldn’t order a bratwurst and, failing that, why he couldn’t do pelvic floor exercises on top of the bar. Part of being a Brooklyn institution, August has learned, is collecting all the New York strangeness at the end of the night like a pool filter full of june bugs.
Tonight, it’s a table of men in leather dusters loudly discussing the social scandals of the local vampire fetish community. They sent back their first order of pancakes with a demand for more chocolate chips and did not take kindly to the Count Chocula joke August attempted. They’re not leaving a tip.
At the bar, there’s a drag queen fresh from a gig, sipping a milkshake, all skintight catsuit and heels, her press-on nails arranged in two neat rows of five on the counter. She watches August at the register, smoothing the ends of her pink lace front. There’s something familiar about her that August can’t seem to pin down.
“Can I get you anything else?” August asks.
The queen laughs. “A frontal lobotomy to forget the night I had?”
August cringes, commiserative. “Rough one?”
“Walked in on one of the girls experiencing the very graphic aftermath of a vegan tuna melt in the dressing room. That’s why I’m —” She gestures widely to herself. “Usually I de-drag before I take the subway, but it was fucked up in there.”
“Yikes,” August says. “I thought I had it bad with the Lost Boys over there.”
The queen glances at the leather-clad disciples of darkness, who are patiently passing around the butter pecan syrup from one gloved hand to the next. “Never thought I’d see a vampire I absolutely didn’t want to fuck.”
August laughs and leans into the bar. This close, she can catch the sticky-sweet smell of hairspray and body glitter. It smells like Mardi Gras—amazing.
“Hold up, I know you,” the queen says. “You live above the Popeyes, right? Parkside and Flatbush?”
August blinks, observing the way her gold highlight gleams on top of her dark brown cheekbone. “Yeah?”
“I’ve seen you around a couple of times. I live there too. Sixth floor.”
“Oh,” August says. “Oh! You must be the drag queen who lives across the hall!”
“I’m an accountant,” she deadpans. “Nah, I’m playing with you. I mean, that is my day job. But yeah, that’s me, Annie.”
She makes an expansive gesture to mimic a marquee, milkshake in one hand.
“Annie Depressant. Pride of Brooklyn.” She thinks about it for a second. “Or at least Flatbush. Northeast Flatbush. Kind of.” She shrugs and returns the straw to her mouth. “Anyway, I’m very prolific.”
“I’m August,” August says, pointing to her nametag. “I’m, uh, not famous, by Flatbush standards, or any at all.”
“That’s cool,” Annie says. “Welcome to the building. Amenities include luxurious World War II–era plumbing and a vegetarian drag queen who can do your taxes.”
“Thanks,” August says. Her building must have the highest concentration of aggressively friendly people per square foot in the entire city. “Yeah, I kind of … like it?”
“Oh, it’s the best,” Annie says readily. “You moved in across the
hall? So you live with Wes?”
“Yeah, you know him?”
Annie takes a noisy slurp from her shake and says, “I’ve been in love with Wes for, like, five hundred years.”
August nearly drops the rag she’s been using to wipe down the bar. “What? Are y’all … a thing?”
“Oh, no,” Annie says. “I’m just in love with him.”
August opens and closes her mouth a couple of times. “Does he know?”
“Oh, yeah, I’ve told him,” Annie says with a dismissive wave of her hand. “We’ve kissed, like, three times, but he has that thing where he’s terrified of being loved and refuses to believe he deserves it. It’s so tedious.” She sees the look on August’s face and laughs. “I’m joking. I mean, that is his deal. But I’ve never found that boy tedious.”
Annie’s signing her bill when she clocks out, and August finds herself walking back to their building with a drag queen towering a foot over her, the clacking of her six-inch platforms cutting the soft thumps of August’s sneakers.
In the orange glow of the Popeyes, August reaches to unlock the door to the shabby little entrance of their building, but Annie heads for the Popeyes.
“Are you actually taking the stairs?” Annie asks her.
“Are you … not?”
Annie laughs and heads inside, and August’s curiosity wins out.
She follows. The guy at the register takes a furtive look around before sliding into the hallway that leads to the bathrooms, where he unlocks a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
Annie gives him a kiss on the cheek as she passes, and August waves awkwardly, buoyed along by the current of Annie’s energy.
They take a left and there, behind Popeyes boxes and jugs of soybean oil, is something August never imagined she’d find in this wonderful shithole of a building: an elevator.
“Service elevator,” Annie explains as she jams the button with her thumb. “Nobody uses it anymore, but the busted old bitch works.”
On the ride up, August unties her apron, and Annie starts pulling off all six pairs of her false eyelashes, depositing them in a retainer case alongside her nails. She’s got a confident meticulousness to her chaos, a perfectly contained party with champagne. August can picture her sitting in her apartment in the middle of the night, all the spare shitty bedrooms an accountant’s salary can buy, humming along to Patti LaBelle as she diligently returns each nail and lash to their places in her vanity.
The elevator dings six floors up, and the doors slide open.
“Everybody says New Yorkers are so unfriendly, but you just have to know how to win them over,” Annie says as she steps out. She’s holding her heels, leading the way down the hall on fishnet-covered feet, yet she seems like she could go all night. “Me and that guy go way back, ever since I broke up a fight between some drunk assholes over a chicken tender meal.”
“Over chicken that doesn’t even have the bones?”
Annie hums in agreement. “Right? I haven’t even eaten meat in nine years, but fuck.”
They reach their doors—August’s, 6F, Annie’s, 6E.
“Come to a show sometime,” Annie says. “And if you see me around and I’m a boy, you can call me Isaiah.”
“Isaiah. Okay.” August reaches into her purse and fishes her keys out. “Thank you for the elevator thing.”
“It’s all good,” Annie says. In the soft light of the hallway, August sees the way her face transforms, Annie and Isaiah blurring together.
“Tell Wes hi for me. And that he still owes me a slice of pizza and thirty bucks.”
August nods, and then. Well. She’s not sure what makes her ask.
Maybe it’s that she’s starting to feel like an extra in an extremely low- budget Love Actually, surrounded by people loving and being loved in all their messy, unpredictable ways, and she doesn’t trust or understand it. Or maybe it’s that she wants to.
“Does it ever, like … I don’t know. Make you lonely? To love somebody who can’t meet you there?”
She regrets it immediately, but Annie laughs.
“Sometimes. But, you know, that feeling? When you wake up in the morning and you have somebody to think about? Somewhere for hope to go? It’s good. Even when it’s bad, it’s good.”
And August—well, August finds herself without a single damn thing to say to that.
There are two things coiled in August’s chest these days.
The first is her usual: anxiety meets full-on dread. The part of her that says, trust nobody, even and especially anyone that pushes softly into the chambers of your heart. Do not engage. Carry a knife.
Don’t stab them, but also, maybe stab them if you have to.
The other, though, is the one that really freaks her out.
It’s hope.
August finished her final semester at U of M last fall in a haze of final exams and half-packed cardboard boxes. Her Craigslist roommate was always at her boyfriend’s, so August spent most days alone, to campus and back in her shitty secondhand Corolla, rolling past Catfish Cabin and people spilling out of juke joints, wondering what everyone else got that she didn’t. Memphis was warm, its humid afternoons and the way its people treated one another. Except August. For two years, August was a cactus in a field of Tennessee irises.
She’d moved to get some space—some healthy space—from her mom and the case and all the New Orleans ghosts she doesn’t believe in. But Memphis wasn’t her place either, so she filed the transfer papers.
She picked New York because she thought it would be every bit as cynical as her, just as comfortable killing time. She thought, honestly, she’d finally land somewhere that felt like her.
And it does, a lot of the time. The gray streets, people with their shoulders braced against the weight of another day, all sharp elbows and tired eyes. August can get into that.
But, dangerously, there are people like Niko and Myla and Wes, and like Lucie and Winfield and Jerry. There’s a kindness she doesn’t understand and evidence of things she convinced herself weren’t real. And worst of all, for the first time since she was a kid,
she wants to trust in something.
And, there’s Jane.
Her mom can tell something’s up.
“You sound all dreamy,” she says on one of their nightly calls.
“Um, yeah,” August stammers. “Just thinking about a pizza.”
Her mom hums approvingly. “You’re really my kid, huh?”
August has had crushes before. Girls who sat two seats over in freshman geometry, boys who touched the back of her hand at hazy UNO parties, people who passed through her classes and part-time jobs. The older she’s gotten, the more she prefers thinking of love as a hobby for other people, like rock climbing or knitting. Fine, enviable even, but she doesn’t feel like investing in the equipment.
But Jane is different.
A girl who gets on the train at some blurry point and off at an unknown destination, who totes around a backpack full of useful items like a cheerful video game protagonist, whose nose scrunches hard when she laughs, like, really laughs. She’s a beam of warmth on cold mornings, and August wants to curl up in her the way Noodles curls up in patches of sunlight that haunt the apartment.
It’s like touching a hot stove and laying her hand on the burner instead of icing it. It’s insane. It’s irrational. It’s the antithesis of every wary, thousand-yard distance she’s ever kept. August believes in nothing except caution and a pocketknife.
But Jane’s there, on the train and in her head, pacing the floorboards of August’s room in her red sneakers, reciting Annie’s words back to her, Even when it’s bad, it’s good.
And August has to admit, it’s good.
Wednesday morning, she steps onto the train with dangerous optimism.
It’s a pretty typical crowd—a half-dozen teenage boys huddled around someone’s phone, a professional-looking couple toting briefcases, an enormously pregnant woman and her daughter hunched over a picture book, tourists buried in Google Maps.
And Jane.
Jane’s leaning against a pole, leather jacket shrugged down to her elbows and backpack slouching off one shoulder, headphones on, black hair falling in her eyes as she nods to the beat. And it’s just … hope. August looks at her, and hope blooms like crepe myrtle blossoms between her ribs. Like fucking flowers. How absolutely mortifying.
Jane looks up and says, “Hey, Coffee Girl.”
“Hey, Subway Girl,” August says, grabbing the pole and pulling herself up to all her five feet four inches. Jane’s still taller. “Listening to anything good?”
She pushes one headphone back. “New York Dolls.”
August huffs out a laugh. “Do you ever listen to anything released later than ’75?”
Jane laughs too, and there it goes again, desperate and cloying hope in August’s chest. It’s gross. It’s new. August wants to study it under a microscope and also never think about it for the rest of her
idiot life.
“Why would I?” Jane asks.
“Well, you’re missing out on Joy Division,” August says, referring to the talking points she may or may not have written down after Myla’s punk lesson. “Though they do owe a lot to the Clash.”
She quirks an eyebrow. “Joy Division?”
“Yeah, I know they’re technically post-punk and all, but. You know.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard of them. Are they new?”
Jane’s fucking with her. August puts on her sarcastic voice and tries to be smooth. “Yeah, brand-new. I’ll make you a mixtape.”
“Maybe,” Jane says. “Or maybe if you’re nice, I’ll let you go through my collection.”
The light shifts as they pass into a tunnel, and there’s a jerk in the train’s momentum. August, who has been subconsciously leaning into Jane’s space like one of Niko’s most desperate houseplants reaching for the sun, loses her balance and stumbles right into her chest.
Jane catches her easily, one hand on August’s shoulder, the other at her waist, and August can’t stop the gasp that escapes at her touch. It’s lost in the grind of the train against the tracks when it
shudders to a halt.
The lights black out.
There’s a low murmur, a few swears from the group of boys.
“Shit,” August says into the darkness. She can feel the palm of Jane’s hand burning into her waist.
“Stay still,” Jane says, and she’s so close that August can feel her breath ruffling her hair in the dark. She smells like leather and sugar.
Her hand slides from August’s waist to the small of her back, sturdy, holding her in place. “I got you.”
Physically, August doesn’t react, but spiritually, she’s fully on fire.
“The emergency lights are gonna come on…” Jane says confidently. “Now.”
The emergency lights flick on, washing the whole car in sickly yellow light, and August blinks at Jane suddenly right there, a breath’s space between their faces. She can feel the soft juts of Jane’s hip bones against her, see the buzzed hairs on the nape of her neck and the soft amusement tugging at one side of her mouth.
August has never wanted to be kissed so badly in her life.
A garbled voice crackles over the intercom for thirty indecipherable seconds.
“Anybody catch that?” says the guy in the business suit.
“We’re delayed on account of electrical problems,” Jane says.
Her hand is still settled on the small of August’s back. “Indefinitely.”
A collective groan goes up. Jane offers a commiserative smile.
“You speak MTA?” August says.
“I’ve been taking this train for a long-ass time,” Jane says. She removes her hand and strides to an empty seat, slumping into it. She looks at August and nods next to her. “Might as well make yourself comfortable.”
So, there they are. The two of them and a train full of strangers, trapped.
August shuffles over and takes her spot, and Jane smoothly stretches an arm across the back of the seat, behind her shoulders.
She has this way of moving through the world like she owns every place she walks into, like she’s never once been told she can’t do something. She carries it well, because she probably has been told what she can’t do—plenty of times—and doesn’t care.
A sideways glance: Jane in profile, chin tilted up to the emergency lights. Her nose is rounded at the tip, kissable. August cannot keep thinking about kissing if she wants to make it out of this alive.
“So, you’ve never mentioned where you’re from,” Jane says toward the ceiling. She’s still got her head back, like she’s sunbathing in the dark.
“New Orleans, originally,” August tells her. “Well, right outside it.
What about you?”
“New Orleans, huh?” she says. She lowers her eyes finally, and when she cuts them over, August forgets she ever asked a question.
Or what questions are. Or the entire process of speech. “What brought you here?”
“Um, school,” August says. The lighting is already unflattering, so it can’t be helping the shade of red she turns when confronted with significant eye contact from butch girls in leather jackets. “I transferred. I’ve tried a few schools in different cities, but I’ve never really fallen in love with any of them.”
“You’re hoping you fall in love here?”
“Um—”
“Hey, maybe you will,” Jane says, and she honest-to-God winks.
August is going to take out a full-page ad in the Times to scream
about it. The city needs to know.
“Maybe so.”
Jane laughs. “How’s Billy’s?”
“It’s all right. I’m starting to get the hang of it. I kind of scammed them on my references, so I had to fake it until I figured out what I was doing.”
She raises her eyebrows. “I hadn’t pegged you for a scammer.”
“Well,” August says. “Maybe you’re underestimating me.”
It surprises a laugh out of her, a good laugh, deep in her chest.
Jane nudges her shoulder and leans in, close enough that the creases of her leather sleeve brush August’s arm. “So, what do you think’s their story?”
She jerks her chin toward the professional-looking pair a few seats down. He’s in a razor-sharp suit and she’s in a deep blue dress, her heels practical and pointed at the toe, and he’s laughing at whatever story she’s telling him.
“Those two?” August examines them. “Well, I’ve never seen them before, so maybe they don’t usually take our train. They’re both wearing wedding bands, and she’s got their bags under her feet, so I’m guessing they’re married. They commute together, so maybe they work at the same place. Maybe they met there.” She squints through the low light. “Oh, the cuffs of his shirtsleeves are damp— someone forgot to put the laundry in the dryer last night. That’s why they’re not on their usual train; they’re running late.”
Jane lets out a low whistle.
“Damn. That was … detailed.”
August cringes. She did the thing—the stupid detective thing— without even realizing.
“Sorry, bad habit. I grew up on true crime so I, like … notice stuff.”
She twists her hands in her lap. “I know, it’s creepy.”
“I think it’s cool,” Jane says. August turns to check her expression, but she’s watching the couple. “I was imagining them as
Soviet spies in deep cover.”
August bites the inside of her cheek. “Oh. Yeah, okay, I can see that.”
“Okay, Nancy Drew. What about that kid over there? The one in the red jacket.”
And August, who was pretty convinced this was the most unattractive side of her, sits back and lets Jane have it.
“Taller than his friends, more facial hair. Had to repeat a grade, but it made everyone think he’s cooler because he’s older—look how they’re all facing him, he’s the gravitational center of the group.”
“Interesting. I think he’s Spider-Man.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, he’s got the build for it.”
August snorts. “He does look aerodynamic.”
Jane laughs, which is rocketing straight up August’s list of favorite sounds in the universe. She’s gonna trap it in a shell like a sea witch.
It’s fine.
“Okay,” August says. “The pregnant lady. What’s her story?”
“Not pregnant. Smuggling a big bag of pierogies.”
“A bold suggestion.”
“Yep. She reminds me of this Polish lady in my building who makes the worst pierogies ever.” August laughs, and Jane pulls a face like she’s tasting them all over again. “I mean it! Oh man, they’re so bad! But she’s nice so I eat them anyway.”
“Well, I think she’s a seamstress.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Magnifying glasses sticking out of her purse,” August points out.
“Way too young to need those unless she does fine detail work. And look, the bottom of her right shoe is more worn off than the left.
Sewing machine pedal.”
“Holy shit,” Jane says, sounding genuinely impressed. “Okay. A
seamstress and a pierogi smuggler.”
“Every woman a universe.”
She hums under her breath, letting a comfortable lull swell between them, until she turns to August and says, “What about me?”
August blinks at her. “What about you?”
“Come on, what’s your guess? If you have one for them, you must have one for me.”
And of course August has a mental file on her. August has spent weeks ticking off a list of clues about Jane, trying to parse the buttons on her jacket and the patches on her backpack to figure out how she’d kiss August if she got her alone. But Jane doesn’t need to know that part.
“Um,” August says. “You—you have a super regular commute— every morning, every afternoon, but you’re not a student, because you don’t get off with me at the BC stop. Almost the same outfit every day, so you know exactly who you are and what you’re about, and you don’t work anywhere formal. Past of working in food service.
And everyone you meet seems to love you, so—um, so. You work the breakfast-to-lunch shift at a restaurant off this line, and you’re good at it. You make good tips because people like you. And you’re probably only doing it to fund some kind of passion project, which is what you really want to do.”
Jane looks at her like she’s assessing everything about August too. August can’t tell if that’s good or bad. She just knows Jane’s cheekbones look really nice from this angle.
“Hm. That’s a good guess.”
August raises her eyebrows. “Close?”
“You got the job part wrong.”
“Then what do you do?”
She sucks her teeth, shaking her head. “Uh-uh. Where’s the fun in that? You gotta guess.”
“That’s not fair! You’re being mysterious on purpose.”
“I’m mysterious by nature, August.”
August rolls her eyes. “Fuck off.”
“It’s the truth!” She chuckles, nudging her elbow into August’s side. “You gotta put in a little more work to crack this egg, baby.”
Baby. It’s just the way Jane talks—she probably calls everyone baby—but it still goes down like sweet tea.
“Fine,” August says. “Give me some more clues.”
Jane thinks, and says, “All right, how ’bout this?”
She scoots down one seat, unzips her backpack, and upends it in the space between them.
On top of her scarf and cassette player and orange headphones are a dozen cassette tapes, a paperback with the cover torn off, and a battered hardback. Two packs of gum, one almost empty, from a brand August doesn’t recognize. A few Band-Aids, a Swiss army knife, a GREETINGS FROM CALIFORNIA postcard, a jar of Tiger Balm, a set of keys, a lighter, a tube of Lip Smackers chapstick August hasn’t seen since she was a kid, three notebooks, five pencils, a sharpener.
She must keep her phone in her jacket, because it’s not in the mix.
“They’re kind of just whatever I’ve found,” Jane says as August starts picking through the cassettes. “They can be hard to come across, so I take what I can get, mostly. Sometimes if I sweet-talk someone who has a lot, I get lucky and find something I want.”
They’re from different eras—first editions from the ’70s, a mixed bag of ’80s and ’90s. There’s a Diana Ross, a Michael Bolton, a Jackson Five, a New York Dolls. Each one well-loved, kept safe from scuffs and cracks. It looks like she treats them like the most valuable things she owns. Since most have to be out of production, August
imagines that might be true.
“Why cassettes?”
Jane shrugs. “It’s like vinyl, but portable.”
August picks up the boxy player, turning it in her hands. “I haven’t seen one of these in forever. Where’d you even get it?”
It takes Jane a second to answer, carefully reeling in a cassette’s tape with her fingertip. “I don’t remember. Between you and me, I have no idea how this thing works.”
“Me neither,” August says. “It looks ancient.”
“This one,” Jane says, pulling a cassette from the bottom of the pile, “is one of my favorites.”
Its case is a photo washed out in blue, the words RAISING HELL in
lime green letters.
“Run-DMC. You know ’em?”
“Yeah,” August says. “‘It’s Tricky,’ right?”
Jane takes the player and pops open the compartment. “You know … I have this theory that Run-DMC can start a party anywhere.”
She snaps the tape into place and unplugs her headphones.
August’s stomach drops.
“Oh God, you’re not—”
“Oh, but I am,” she says, rising to her feet. “Don’t you think these nice stranded commuters deserve some entertainment?”
“Oh no, no no no, please don’t—”
“Watch this,” she says, and to August’s extreme distress, starts to undo her belt. August’s brain cues up a Magic Mike number set to Run-DMC in terrifying and erotic detail, before Jane threads her belt through the handle of the player and fastens it back up.
Oh. Oh no.
“I’m gonna kill you,” August says.
“Too late,” Jane says, and she punches the play button.
The cymbals start up short and sharp, and when the first line hits, August watches in muted horror as Jane grabs a pole and swings herself out, toward the rest of the train, her mouth lining up with the words about how this speech is her recital.
And, God, that tiny, ancient speaker has got pipes. It’s loud enough to cut through the car, but it’s New York, so barely anyone looks up.
Unswayed by the lack of response, Jane jumps onto a seat, sneakers squeaking on the plastic, and August buries her face in her hands as Jane shouts the lyrics.
And, against all odds, Spider-Man kid shouts down the car, “It’s
tricky!”
“Jesus lord,” August mutters.
And the thing is, in New York, everyone ends up worn down by the MTA and tourists and rent prices. Everybody’s seen it all. But that also means, sometimes, everyone is the smallest nudge away from delirium—from being trapped on the subway on a Wednesday morning and turning it into a ’90s hip-hop dance party. Because the bass line comes in, and Jane lunges down the aisle, and the high school boys start whooping at the tops of their lungs, and that’s it. It is well and truly on.
It’s possible, August thinks, that it’s not only New York catastrophe delirium making this happen. It’s possible it’s Jane, irresistible and blazing, her shoulders narrow but sturdy under her leather jacket, cassette player swinging from her belt as she rocks her hips. Even the emergency lights seem to glow brighter. Jane is lightning on long legs—the dark never stood a chance.
Suddenly the song tumbles out of the first chorus, and Jane is in front of her.
She throws one foot up on August’s seat, leaning in on her knee, the rips in her jeans spreading open, and her expression absolutely wicked.
“I met this little girly.” She reaches out to skim a hand past August’s jaw, tucking her hair behind her ear. The pad of her thumb grazes August’s earlobe. August feels like she’s astral projecting.
“Her hair was kinda curly.”
Jane winks, gone as fast as she came, stomping down the aisle, instigating the riot, leaving August’s mouth hanging open.
As the song pounds on, the couple across the way starts getting into it, her hitting the smoothest Milly Rock August has ever seen, him holding onto the pole in front of her to shake his ass. The woman throws her head back and cackles when he drops it down to the subway floor, and the kid in the red jacket and his friends scream with laughter. Even Pierogi Mom is chuckling.
The next song is “My Adidas,” and then “Walk This Way,” and Jane manages to keep the party going for the entire side of the cassette. She finds her way back to August, grinning with that
crooked front tooth, and she jumps up onto a seat and starts loudly
reciting the cassettes she has.
“Phil Collins?”
“No!” Suit Guy shouts back.
“Britney Spears?”
The teenage boys boo.
“Jackson 5?”
A mumble of assent, and she fishes a Greatest Hits tape out and puts it in. “I Want You Back” erupts from her speakers, and it starts again.
August is leaning on a pole now, bobbing her head along, and it’s impossible not to watch Jane. She’s always charming, always coaxing surly commuters into happy conversation, but she’s something else today. A smirking shot of dopamine.
Even if she’s sworn off solving mysteries, August needs to know Jane’s story. She has to know how someone like this exists.
After the Jackson 5, the teens take over with a Bluetooth speaker from a backpack. The adults shout down Post Malone when they attempt it, but they find a compromise in Beyoncé and crank the volume up on “Countdown.”
Jane’s laughing so hard, tears get caught in the crinkled corners of her eyes, and she peels her jacket off and throws it down atop her pile of cassettes.
“Hey,” she says, turning to August, and then she has August by the hand. “Dance with me.”
August freezes. “Oh, uh, no, I can’t dance.”
“Can’t or don’t?”
“Both? It’s, like, better for the world if I don’t dance.”
“Come on,” she says, “you’re from New Orleans. People got rhythm there.”
“Yes, none of which was absorbed by me.”
The music keeps grooving, Beyoncé wailing through a key change in “Love On Top.” People keep shouting and laughing and
gyrating in the aisle, and there’s Jane’s hand on the small of August’s back, pulling her closer until they’re almost chest to chest.
“Coffee Girl, don’t break my heart,” Jane says.
So, August dances.
And something happens when she starts dancing.
Jane’s face lights up—really lights up, like Rockefeller Center’s Christmas tree, Frenchmen Street at two in the morning, full-scale sunshine. She lifts August’s hand above their heads; August does a clumsy spin. It should be embarrassing. But Jane looks at her like she’s never been more delighted in her entire life, and August can’t do anything but laugh.
It’s like slow motion. Like somebody came into August’s room and threw all her textbooks out the window and said, learn this instead.
Jane pulls her back in, fingers brushing through her hair, just behind her ear, and for a second, Jane is the whole point of being in the city in the first place.
August is opening her mouth to say something when the fluorescents come back on. The train shudders back into tentative motion to a round of cheers, and Jane sways with it, away from August. She looks flushed and thoroughly pleased with herself.
August checks her phone—nearly noon. Classes are a bust. The seedy little bar where Niko works is squirreled away a few blocks from here. It should be opening soon.
She looks at Jane, a step away but still close, and she thinks about the way Jane’s hand trailed through her hair, her gasp of laughter in August’s ear. Just because Jane didn’t come to Billy’s doesn’t mean it’s hopeless.
“I don’t know about you,” August says, “but I could use a drink.
There’s a pretty cool dive bar right by my stop, if, uh, you’re not doing anything?”
And Jane … stares at her, like she’s trying to work out if August really asked what she thinks she did.
“Oh,” she says finally. August can hear the wince in her tone before she even says the next part. “I don’t think I can.”
“Oh, I—”
“I mean, that sounds nice, but I can’t.”
“No, it’s totally okay, I was, um—I didn’t mean—uh. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m sorry,” Jane says. She looks like she means it.
August is saved by the creak of the brakes as they pull into a station. Before Jane can say anything else, she’s gone.