6
Bunch of Punks
Jayne County, New York Dolls, and
the teeming life inside Max’s Kansas City, a punk haven in Gramercy
“I left a bloodstain on that booth over there. I kissed that bartender. That one
slept on my couch last week. Anybody
who says punk isn’t queer doesn’t know what punk is.”
—Jane Su
“Okay, now!”
Jane jumps, and— She’s gone, again.
August sighs and steps onto the train before the doors close, making a note on the miniature steno she’s started keeping in her jacket pocket. Bergen Ave.: nope.
“This is getting repetitive,” says Jane’s voice, her chin suddenly on August’s shoulder. August yelps and stumbles back into her.
“I know,” August says, letting Jane right her, “but what if one of these stops is the one you can get off at? We have to know what we’re dealing with.”
They try it at every stop, starting at the shiny Ninety-sixth Street Station on the Manhattan end. Every time the door opens, August steps out and says, “Now!” And Jane tries to get off.
It’s not like she sees Jane physically disappear or reappear. Jane will take a step or a hop or—once in a moment of delirious frustration —a running leap through the open doors, and nothing happens. She doesn’t smack into an invisible barrier or vanish with a pop. She’s just there, and then she’s not.
Sometimes she resets to the place where she was standing when she started. Sometimes August blinks and Jane’s on the other end of the same car. Sometimes she’s gone completely, and August has to wait for the next train to find her waiting against a pole. Not a single passenger notices her sudden presence; they continue their audiobooks and mascara applications like she was there all along.
Like reality bends around her.
“So, you really can’t get off the train,” August finally admits under the glass and steel arches of Coney Island, the very last stop on the line. Jane can’t get off there either.
That’s the first step, figuring out how trapped Jane is. The answer is: very completely trapped. The next question is, how?
August has absolutely no fucking clue.
She’s only ever dealt with hard facts. Concrete and quantifiable evidence. She can reason her way through this right up to the point of understanding how it is happening, and then: dead end. A wall made of things that aren’t supposed to be possible.
Jane, ultimately, is a good sport. She’s adjusting remarkably well to being forty-five years from home and doomed to take the same subway ride every minute of every day—she grins and says, “Honestly, it’s nicer than my first apartment, according to the 0.5 seconds I remember of it.” She eyes August with some unreadable significance. “Better company too.”
But Jane still doesn’t know who she is, or why she is, or what happened to get her stuck.
August looks at her as the train reverses past Gravesend rooftops, this girl out of time, the same face and body and hair and smile that took August’s life by the shoulders in January and shook.
And she can’t believe Jane had the nerve, the audacity, to become the one thing August can’t resist: a mystery.
“Okay,” August says. “Time to figure out who you are.”
The afternoon sun falls in Jane’s brown eyes, and August thinks she’s going to need more notebooks. It’ll take a million to hold this girl.
When August was eight, her mom took her to the levee.
It was right after the Fourth of July. She was turning nine soon and really into her age that year. She’d tell everyone that she wasn’t eight but eight and a half, eight and three-quarters. Going to the levee was one of the few things they ever did without a case file between them—just a gallon-size bag of watermelon slices and a beach towel and a perfect spot to sit.
She remembers her mother’s hair, how the coppery brown would glow under the summer sun like the wet planks of the docks. She always liked how it was the same as hers, how they shared so many things. It was in those moments that August sometimes pictured how her mom looked when she was younger, before she had August, and at the same time, she couldn’t begin to imagine a time when they didn’t have each other. August had her and she had August, and they had secret codes they spoke in, and that was it. That was enough.
She remembers her mom explaining what levees were for. They weren’t made for beach towel picnics, she said—they were made to protect them. To keep water out when storms came.
It wasn’t long afterward that a storm too big for the levees came.
2005. Their apartment in Belle Chasse, the Idlewild place, got eight
feet of water. All the files, maps, photos, all the years of handwritten notes, a wet pulp shoveled out the window of a condemned building.
August’s mom saved one tupperware tub of files on her brother and not a single one of August’s baby pictures. August lost everything and thought that maybe, if she could become someone who didn’t have anything to lose, she’d never have to feel that way again.
She turned nine in a Red Cross shelter, and something started to sour in her heart, and she couldn’t stop it.
August sits on the edge of an air mattress in Brooklyn and tries to imagine how it would feel if she didn’t have any of those memories to understand what made her who she is. If she woke up one day and just was and didn’t know why.
Nobody tells you how those nights that stand out in your memory —levee sunset nights, hurricane nights, first kiss nights, homesick sleepover nights, nights when you stood at your bedroom window and looked at the lilies one porch over and thought they would stand out, singular and crystallized, in your memory forever—they aren’t really anything. They’re everything, and they’re nothing. They make you who you are, and they happen at the same time a twenty-three- year-old a million miles away is warming up some leftovers, turning in early, switching off the lamp. They’re so easy to lose.
You don’t learn until you’re older how to zoom out of that extreme proximity and make it fit into the bigger picture of your life. August didn’t learn until she sat knee-to-knee with a girl who couldn’t remember who she was, and tried to help her piece everything back
together.
The next few days go like this: August’s alarm goes off for class. Her shifts come up at Billy’s.
Her essays and projects and exams stay looming over her like a cave full of bats. She ignores all of it.
She goes back in to work exactly one time, to hang the opening day photo back up on the wall and waylay Jerry as he passes it on his way out of the bathroom.
“Hey,” she says, “I never noticed how cool this picture was. The seventies seem like a hell of a time.”
“That’s what I’ve been told,” Jerry says. “I barely remember ’em.”
“I mean, you must remember this, though, right? Opening day?
All the original Billy’s crew?”
She holds her breath as he leans in to squint at the photo.
“Buttercup, any one of these sons of bitches could walk in here and sock me in the face and I wouldn’t even know it was them.”
She pushes it. “Not even the one who invented the Su Special?”
“I was what you might call an alcoholic at the time,” Jerry says.
“I’m lucky I can remember what goes in the sandwich at all.”
“Are you sure?”
Jerry raises a bushy eyebrow at her. “Y’know people in New York mind their business, right?”
He trudges back to the kitchen, August frowning after him. How can he have forgotten Jane?
She flags down Lucie on her way out, asking about the last time Billy himself visited the restaurant, thinking maybe she could ask him —but, no. He’s mostly retired, lives in Jersey now with his family and almost never comes in, just signs the paychecks. He’s put Lucie and Winfield in charge and doesn’t seem to be welcoming phone calls from rookie servers new to the city.
So, she leaves. She skips class. She calls in sick to work. She listens to Lucie tut at her over the phone, like she knows August is faking. She doesn’t care.
Instead, she shoves her legs into jeans and her feet into Vans and her heart deep, deep down into her chest where it can’t do anything stupid, and she swipes her way into her station.
Every morning, Jane’s there. Usually the seats are a cool, clean blue, the lights shiny and bright, but occasionally, it’s an old train, burnt orange seats with FUCK REAGAN scrawled down the side in faded marker. Sometimes there are only a few sleepy commuters, and sometimes it’s packed with finance guys barking down their phones and huskers singing into the morning rush.
But Jane’s always there. So August is too.
“I still don’t understand,” Wes says, when August finally manages to wrangle everyone into the same room. He’s just stumbled home from the tattoo shop, bagel in hand, while Niko blearily pours himself coffee and Myla brushes her teeth over the kitchen sink. The bathroom plumbing must be acting up again.
“She’s stuck on the train,” August explains for what feels like the five hundredth time. “She’s lost in time from the ’70s, and she can’t leave the Q train, and she doesn’t remember anything before she got there.”
“And you, like,” Wes says, “definitely ruled out the possibility that she’s making it up?”
“She’s honest,” Niko mumbles. He looks perturbed at having to open his third eye before eight in the morning. He’s barely opened his two regular ones. “I met her. I could tell. Honest and sane.”
“No offense, but you said the same thing about the guy who moved in downstairs, and he stole all my weed and ghosted me and moved to Long Beach to be stoned all the time. Less honest and sane and more comatose in California.”
Myla spits in the sink. “Comatose in California is my favorite Lana Del Rey album.”
“He’s right,” August cuts in. “I believe her. She’s never not on the train when I get on, even if it’s a different train a minute later. I don’t see how she can do that unless she’s not living by the laws of reality.”
“So, what are you gonna do? 50 First Dates? Girlfriend with no memories?”
“First of all,” August says, gathering up her bag and sweater, “that movie was about short-term memory loss, not long-term memory loss—she remembers who I am. Second of all, she’s not my girlfriend.”
“You’re wearing that red lipstick for her, though,” Myla points out.
“I—that is a style choice.” August maneuvers her sweater over her head so nobody can see what color her face is and talks through
the wool. “Even if she wanted me to be her girlfriend, I can’t. We don’t even know who she is. Figuring that out is way more important.”
“So altruistic of you,” Wes says, unwrapping his bagel. “I—Oh goddammit, they got my order wrong. How absolutely dare they.”
“Criminal,” Myla says.
“I go there every single morning and order the exact same thing, and they still can’t get my order right. The disrespect. We live in a society.”
“Good luck with that,” August says, shouldering her bag. “I gotta go un-amnesia a ghost.”
“She’s not a ghost,” Niko says, but she’s already out the door.
Wes did give her an idea, though. She doesn’t know how to fix Jane, but rule one is start with what you know. She knows Jane was a New Yorker. So they start there: with her coffee and bagel order.
“I don’t remember,” she says when August asks. “That’s how it is with a lot of stuff. I remember I got here. I know there was stuff before it. But I don’t remember what it was or how I felt, until something sparks. Like when I saw that lady who reminded me of my neighbor with the pierogies.”
“It’s okay,” August says, and she hands over a coffee with one sugar and a plain bagel with cream cheese. “You lived in New York for at least a couple of years. There’s no way you don’t have a coffee and bagel order. We’ll do process of elimination.”
Jane takes one bite and wrinkles her nose. “I don’t think this is it.”
For the next four days, August brings her a different coffee and bagel. Black and an everything with lox. Cappuccino with cinnamon and a toasted parmesan with garlic herb. It’s not until day five (chocolate chip and peanut butter) that she opens the paper bag and sniffs and says, “Oh my God. Chocolate.”
“Jesus,” August says, as Jane downs half of it in one bite like a boa constrictor. “Every New Yorker in a thirty-mile radius just became irate and they don’t know why.”
“Yeah. The guy at the deli always looked so disgusted.”
“Like, at that point, why not eat a donut?”
“Less filling,” she says through a mouthful. And then she grabs August’s hand and says, “Wait. Five sugars!” And that’s how they discover Jane’s incorrigible sweet tooth. She takes her coffee with two creams and five sugars like some kind of maniac. August starts bringing her a chocolate chip bagel with peanut butter and a coffee full of sugar and cream every morning.
She rides the line up and down and back up again. On a Tuesday afternoon, across the East River and over the Manhattan Bridge, alongside all the landmarks she grew up pressing into the corners of envelopes in the shape of postage stamps. On a Saturday morning, down to Coney Island and the arching rafters of the station, jostled by toddlers with floppy hats and sunscreen streaks and resigned parents with beach bags.
“Who goes to the beach in March?” August mumbles as they wait for the train to pull back out of Coney Island, the end of the line. It’s the longest the train is ever stationary. Jane likes to claim you can hear the ocean if you try hard enough.
“Come on, end of winter picnics near the shore?” Jane says, waving her bagel in the air. “I happen to think they’re romantic as hell.”
She glances at August like she expects a response, like there was a joke and August missed the punchline. August pulls a face and keeps eating.
They sit and eat their bagels and talk. That’s all there is to do— August has hit a dead end. Without clues about her family or her life before New York, Jane is the primary source.
Her primary source, and her friend, now.
That’s all. Nothing more than that. That’s all it can be.
August glances at the peanut butter left behind on Jane’s lip.
It’s fine.
On a Wednesday, Jane’s on her third bite of bagel when she remembers her elementary school.
The city’s vague, but she remembers a tiny classroom, and other kids from her neighborhood sitting in tiny desks and tiny chairs, and a poster of a hot-air balloon on the wall. She remembers the smell of pencil shavings and her first best friend, a girl named Jia who loved peanut butter sandwiches, and the foggy walk between their homes, the smell of wet pavement from shopkeepers hosing down their sidewalks at the end of the night.
Another day, she’s just finished her coffee when her eyes light up, and she tells August about the day she got to New York. She talks about a Greyhound bus, and a friendly old man at the station who explained how to get to Brooklyn, winked, and slid a button into her pocket, the little pink triangle pinned below her shoulder. She tells August about paying cash for her first ever ride on the subway, about climbing up from underground into a gray morning and turning in a slow circle, taking it all in, and then buying her first cup of New York coffee.
“You see the pattern, right?” August says when she’s done writing everything down.
Jane turns the empty cup over in her hands. “What do you mean?”
“It’s sensory stuff,” August says. “You smell coffee, it brings back something associated with the smell. You taste peanut butter, same thing. That’s how we can do this. We just have to experiment.”
Jane’s quiet, studying the board mapping out stops. “What about a song? Could that work too?”
“Probably,” August says. “Actually, knowing you and music, I bet it could help a lot.”
“Okay,” Jane says, sitting up suddenly, attention rapt. The look on her face is one August has come to recognize as readiness to learn something she doesn’t understand: head cocked slightly, one eyebrow ticked up, part confusion, part eagerness. Sometimes Jane exudes the same energy as a golden retriever. “There’s this one
song I halfway remember. I don’t know who it was by, but it goes like, ohhhh, giiiiirl…”
“That could describe a lot of songs,” August says, untucking her phone from her pocket. “Do you remember any of the other lyrics?”
Jane bites her lip and frowns. She sings under her breath, warm and off-key and a little crackly, like the air around her feels. “How I depend on youuu, to give me love how I need it.”
August tries very hard to think only of scientific curiosity as she consults Google. “Oh, okay. When. It’s give me love when I need it.
The title of the song is ‘Oh, Girl.’ It’s by a band called the Chi-Lites.
Came out in 1972.”
“Yeah! That’s right! I had it on a seven-inch single.” Jane closes her eyes, and August thinks they’re picturing the same thing: Jane, cross-legged on a bedroom floor somewhere, letting the record spin.
“God, I wish I could listen to it right now.”
“You can,” August says, swiping through apps. “Hang on.”
It takes her all of three seconds to pull it up, and she unwinds her earbuds from her pocket and hands one to Jane.
The song fades in soulful and longing, strings and harmonica, and the first words come exactly how Jane sang them: Ohhhh giiiiiirl … “Oh my God,” Jane says, sitting back in her seat. “That’s really it.
Shit.”
“Yeah,” August says. “Shit.”
The song plays on for another minute before Jane sits up and says, “I heard this song for the first time on a radio in a semitruck Which is weird, because I definitely don’t think I ever drove semitrucks. But I think I rode in some. There are a few—like, flashes, you know?”
August jots it down. “Hitchhiking, maybe? That was a big thing back then.”
“Oh yeah, it was,” she says. “I bet that’s it. Yeah … yeah, in a truck from California, heading east. But I can’t remember where we were going.”
August sucks on the bud of the pencil eraser, and Jane looks at her. At her mouth, specifically.
She pulls the pencil out of her mouth, self-conscious. “That’s okay, this is a great start. If you remember any other songs, I can help you figure them out.”
“So you can … listen to any song you want?” Jane says, eyeing August’s phone. “Whenever you want to?”
August nods. They’ve been through some pretty rudimentary explanations of how smartphones and the internet work, and Jane has picked up a lot from observation, but she still gets all wide-eyed and awed.
“Would you want me to get you a phone like this?” August asks.
Jane thinks about it. “I mean … yes and no? It’s impressive, but there’s something about having to work for it when you want to listen to a song. I used to love my record collection. That was the most money I ever spent in one place, shipping it to a new address whenever I landed in a new city. I wanted to see the world but still have one thing that was mine.”
August’s pencil flies across the paper. “Okay, so you were a drifter. A drifter and a hitchhiker. That’s so…”
“Cool?” Jane suggests, raising an eyebrow. “Daring?
Adventurous? Sexy?”
“Unbelievable that you weren’t strangled by one of the dozens of serial killers murdering hitchhikers up and down the West Coast in the ’70s, is what I was gonna say.”
“Well,” Jane says. She kicks one foot up, crossing her ankle over her knee, and peers at August, hands behind her head. “What’s the point of life without a little danger?”
“Not dying,” August suggests. She can feel color flaring inconveniently in her cheeks.
“Yeah, I didn’t die my whole life, and look where it got me,” Jane says.
“Okay. Point.” August shuts her steno. “That was a big memory, though. We got ourselves a lead.”
August gives Jane her burner phone and teaches her how to use it and they experiment, like some kind of amnesiac scavenger hunt.
Jane texts her snippets of lyrics or images from movies she snuck into dollar theaters to watch, and August tears through thrift stores for records familiar to Jane’s hands and a vintage Jaws lunchbox.
August brings every food she can think of to the Q: sticky buns, challah, slices of pizza, falafel sweating through its paper wrapper, steamed sponge cakes, ice cream melting down her wrist.
“You know, this train used to be called the QB,” Jane remembers casually one day. “I guess it’s just the Q now. Weird.”
Things start coming back slowly, in pieces, one moment at a time.
A box of greasy pepperoni split with a friend on a patio in Philly.
Walking down the block in her sandals on a hot July afternoon to buy soft green tea cakes with nickels from the couch. A girl she loved briefly who drank three Arnold Palmers a day. A girl she loved briefly who snuck a bottle of wine out of her family’s Seudat Purim because they were both too poor to buy one. A girl she loved briefly who worked at a movie theater.
There are, August notices, a lot of girls that Jane loved briefly.
There’s a secret set of tally marks in the back of one of her notebooks. It’s up to seven. (She’s completely fine with it.) They go through Jane’s backpack for clues—the notebooks, mostly filled with journal entries and recipes in messy shorthand, the postcard from California, which has a phone number that’s disconnected. August takes pictures of Jane’s buttons and pins so she can research them and discovers Jane was something of a radical in the ’70s, which opens up a whole new line of research.
August digs through library archives until she finds copies of pamphlets, zines, flyers, anything that might have been pinned up or pasted or crammed under a door into a seedy bar when Jane was stomping through the streets of New York. She digs up an issue of I Wor Kuen’s newspaper, pages in Chinese and English on Marxism
and self-determination and escaping the draft. She finds a flyer for a Redstockings street theater performance about abortion rights. She prints out an entire issue of the Gay Liberation Front’s magazine and brings it to Jane, a bright pink sticky tab marking an essay by Martha Shelley titled “Gay Is Good.”
“‘Your friendly smile of acceptance—from the safe position of heterosexuality,’” Jane reads aloud, “‘isn’t enough. As long as you cherish that secret belief that you are a little bit better because you sleep with the opposite sex, you are still asleep in your cradle … and we will be the nightmare that awakens you.’”
She folds the page down and licks her bottom lip.
“Yeah,” she says, smirking. “Yeah, I remember this one.”
To say that the papers unlock new parts of Jane would be a lie, because they’ve always been there. They don’t reveal anything not already spelled out by the set of her chin and the way she plants her feet in the space she takes up. But they color in the lines, pin down the edges—she thumbs through and remembers protests, riots, curls her hands into fists and talks about what made the muscle memory in her knuckles, hand-painted signs and black eyes and a bandana tied over her mouth and nose.
August takes note after note and finds it almost funny—that all the fighting only conspired to make Jane gentle. Fearsome and flirty and full of bad jokes, an incorrigible sweet tooth and a steel-toe boot as a last resort. That, August is learning, is Jane.
It would be easier, August thinks, if the real Jane weren’t someone August liked so much. In fact, it’d be extremely convenient if Jane was boring or selfish or an asshole. She’d love to do one piece of casework without the whole halfway-in-love-with-her-subject thing getting in the way.
In between, when Jane needs a break, August does the thing she’s done her best to avoid most of her life: she talks.
“I don’t understand,” August says when Jane asks about her mom, “what does that have to do with your memories?”
Jane shrugs, touching the toes of her sneakers together. “I just want to know.”
Jane asks about school, and August tells her about her transfers and extra semesters and her freshman roommate from Texas who loved Takis Fuego, and it reminds Jane of this student she dated when she was twenty and couch-surfing through the Midwest (tally mark number eight). She asks about August’s apartment, and August tells her about Myla’s sculptures and Noodles barrelling through the halls, and it brings back Jane’s neighbor’s dog in her Brooklyn apartment, one door down from the Polish lady. (They almost never talk about 2020 and what it’s like above ground. Not yet. August can’t tell if she wants to know. Jane doesn’t ask.) August sits next to her or across from her or, sometimes, on the seat beneath her, when Jane gets worked up and paces the car.
They huddle by the map of the city posted near the subway doors and try to trace Jane’s old paths through Brooklyn.
Two weeks in, August has three notebooks filled with Jane’s stories, her memories. She takes them home at night and spreads them out on her air mattress and take notes of her notes, looking up every name Jane can recall, searching the city for old phone books.
She takes the California postcard home and reads it over and over: Jane—Miss you. Catch me up? It’s signed only with the words Muscadine Dreams and a phone number with an Oakland area code, but none of the Jane Sus in 1970s San Francisco lead anywhere.
She buys two maps: one of the United States and one of New York, all five boroughs spread out in pastels. She tapes them on her bedroom wall and tucks her tongue between her teeth and presses push pins into every place Jane mentions.
They’re going to find Jane. She must have left things behind, places and people that remember her. August watches her light up over the steady shake of the train every day and can’t imagine how anyone could ever forget.
August asks her one afternoon, when she’s blowing off an exam review to make quiet jokes about the people who get on and off the train, “When did you realize you were stuck?”
“Honestly?” Jane says. She reaches over and gently swipes frosting from that morning’s donut off August’s bottom lip. The eye contact is so terribly close that August has to look down before her face says something she can’t take back. “The day I met you.”
“Really?”
“I mean, it wasn’t clear right away. But it was kind of … foggy before. That was the first time I was really aware of staying in one time and place for a few days. After a week or so, I realized I hadn’t moved. At first, I could only tell by counting when I saw you and when I didn’t. The week you didn’t come? Everything started getting blurry again. So…”
It drops quietly into the space between them: maybe it’s them.
Maybe it’s August. Maybe she’s the reason.
Myla bribes August with a bag of Zapp’s from a bodega four blocks over to introduce her to Jane.
After Niko, she’s held off on introducing anyone. It’s not like Jane doesn’t have enough to deal with, recently being informed that she’s a scientific anomaly trapped forty-five years in the future with no memory of how she got there and all. She’s still getting used to the idea that she’s not going to get arrested for being gay in public, which was a whole three-day emotional roller coaster. August is trying to take it easy on her.
“You could just take the Q yourself,” August tells Myla, tucking the chips onto her shelf in the pantry. After a moment of consideration, she attaches a Post-it note that says TOUCH THESE AND DIE. “She’s always on it.”
“I tried,” Myla says. “I didn’t see her.”
August frowns, sliding a packet of strawberry Pop-Tarts out of the pantry. No time for a bagel. “Really? That’s weird.”
“Yeah, guess I don’t have the whole magical soul mate bond you have with her,” she says. It’s a rainy Friday afternoon, and she’s got a bright yellow rain jacket on like the Morton Salt girl with 4A hair.
“We do not have a magical soul mate bond. Why are you so invested in our relationship anyway?”
“August, I love you very much, and I want you to be happy, and I’m very confident that you and this girl are, like, fated by the universe to fingerblast each other until you both die,” she says. “But honestly? I am in this for the sci-fi of it all. I’m living a real life episode of The X-Files, okay? This is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me, and my life has not been boring. So, can we go, Scully?”
On the watery platform, Myla launches herself at the train so fast, she nearly shoves August into an old woman tottering out.
“Bye, Mrs. Caldera!” Jane calls after her. “Tell Paco I said hi and that he better study for his algebra test!” She sees August, and her smile shifts from friendly into something August still can’t name. “Oh, hey, August!”
Myla nudges ahead, extending a hand to Jane. “Hi, wow, I’m Myla, huge fan. Love your work.”
Jane bemusedly takes her hand, and August can see Myla making a whole catalog of scientific observations as they shake. She really should have pushed her onto the tracks when she had the chance.
“Can you please sit down?” August hisses, nudging her toward a seat. She pulls the Pop-Tarts out of her pocket and hands them over, and Jane immediately rips into them. “Um, Jane, this is one of my roommates I told you about.”
“I’ve been dying to meet you,” Myla says. “I had to bribe August with chips. Zapp’s. Sweet Creole Onion.”
Jane looks up from the Pop-Tarts wrapper she’s brutalizing.
“Zapp’s?”
“It’s a Louisiana chip brand,” August tells her. “They’re amazing.
I’ll bring you some.”
“Whoa,” Myla interjects, “you can eat?”
“Myla!”
“What? It’s a fair question!”
Jane laughs. “It’s okay. Yeah, I can eat. And drink, though I don’t think I can get drunk. I found a flask of whiskey once, and it didn’t really do anything.”
“Maybe your first mistake was drinking out of a flask you found on
the subway,” August suggests.
Jane rolls her eyes, still grinning.
“Look,” she says through a mouthful, “if I turned my nose up at everything that’s left on the subway, I would have nothing to do.”
“Wait, so,” Myla says, leaning forward, elbows on her knees, “do you get hungry?”
“No,” Jane says. She thinks for a second. “I can eat, but I don’t
think I have to.”
“And … digestion?”
“Myla, I swear to God—”
“Nothing happens,” Jane says with a shrug. “It’s like…”
“Suspended animation,” Myla supplies.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Wow, that is fascinating!” Myla says, and August is mortified, but she can’t pretend she’s not taking mental notes to be recorded later.
“And you really don’t remember anything?”
Jane frowns thoughtfully around another bite. “I remember more now. It’s sort of like … muscle memory? Pop culture stuff is easier than personal stuff for some reason. And for a lot of stuff, I have a sense that I’ve done it before, even if I can’t remember it specifically.
Like, I know how to speak Cantonese and English, even though I can’t remember learning either. More stuff comes back every day.”
“Wow. And—”
“Myla,” August says, “can we maybe not treat her like a creature of the week?”
“Ah, sorry,” Myla says with a wince. “Sorry! I’m just—this is so cool. I mean, obviously, it’s not cool for you, but it’s fascinating. I’ve
never heard of anything like you.”
“Is that a compliment?” Jane asks.
“It can be.”
“Anyway,” August says. “Myla’s a genius and very into science fiction and multiverse theory and, like, smart-people stuff, so she’s gonna help figure out what exactly happened to you and how we can fix it.”
Jane, who has moved on to the second Pop-Tart and is plowing through it like she’s trying to beat a land speed record, squints at August and says, “Are you assembling a task force, Landry?”
“Not a task force,” August says, heart skipping at the sound of her last name in Jane’s mouth. “Just a … ragtag band of misfits.”
The corners of Jane’s mouth press in a sly grin. “Love it.”
“Very Goonies,” Myla chimes in.
“What’re goonies?” Jane asks.
“Only one of the greatest adventure movies of 1985,” Myla says.
“Wait, oh man, you missed Spielberg completely, didn’t you?”
“She would have caught Jaws in ’75,” August automatically supplies.
“Thank you, Encyclopedia Brown,” Myla says. She leans in and tells Jane, “August knows everything about everything. It’s her superpower. She should be teaching you all the ’80s movies.”
“I do not know everything.”
“That’s true, you didn’t know about ’70s punk. I had to teach you that.”
Jane looks at her, smirking slightly. August swallows.
“You’re the one who taught her that?”
“Oh yeah,” Myla chirps happily, “I think she wanted something to talk to y—”
“Anyway!” August interrupts. They’re pulling into a station, and she yanks Myla up by her sleeve. “Billy’s isn’t far from this stop, and I’m hungry. Aren’t you hungry? Let’s go, bye, Jane!”
Myla and Jane both seem visibly put out, but August is one embarrassing non sequitur away from throwing herself out the
emergency exit. Those two are a dangerous combination.
“Wait, what’s your sign?” Myla shouts over August’s shoulder.
Jane scrunches her face up like she’s trying to remember where she left her keys, not her own birthday. “Don’t remember. Summer, though? I’m pretty sure I was born in the summer.”
“I can work with that!” Myla says, and August is smiling apologetically back at Jane and whisking Myla away, and Jane is lost in the crowd of commuters.
“I’m gonna kill you,” August says as they pick their way toward the stairs.
“The most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me!” Myla
yells over her shoulder.
“What did you think of her?”
Myla hops up on the landing, tugging her miniskirt down. “I mean, honestly? That’s wife material. Like, three kids and a dog material. If she looked at me the way she looks at you, my IUD would have shot out like a party popper.”
“Jesus Christ,” August says. And, involuntarily, “How do you think she looks at me?”
“Like you’re her Pop-Tart angel. Like you shit sunshine. Like you invented love as a concept.”
August stares at her, trying to take that in, then turns on her heel and heads off toward the exit. “No, she doesn’t.”
“Like she wants to eat you alive,” Myla adds, jogging to catch up.
“You don’t have to lie to make me feel better,” August says.
“I’m not lying! She—oh, fuck.”
Myla has screeched to a halt—literally, the rubber of her boots squeaking on the damp tile floor—in front of a sign posted on the station wall. August backtracks to read it.
SERVICE ALERT, the sign declares.
Below, there’s the yellow bubble of the Q. Commuters keep walking right past it, just another inconvenience in their day, but August freezes and stares and feels all her rides on the Q spin out around her in a film reel until a breaker flips and they all go black.
“They’re shutting the line down for maintenance at the end of the summer,” Myla reads.
“Shutting it down?” The dates indicate September 1 through October 31. “Two months? I won’t be able to see her for two months?”
Myla turns to her, eyes wide. “Didn’t you say—if she doesn’t see you—?”
“Yeah,” August says. “When I stopped riding the Q, everything got blurry again for her. Do you … do you think she would…?”
August pictures Jane trapped for months, alone and confused and staticky and forgetting, or worse—tripping back out of this precise moment in time just like she tripped into it, lost again, gone further than August’s research could ever uncover. They have no idea how firmly she’s planted here and now.
August just found her. It’s too soon to lose her.
At Billy’s, Lucie does not look happy to see August, considering she’s been faking mono for weeks. But she shoves two menus and two rolls of silverware at her and wordlessly seats them at the bar.
Winfield drops off a plate of fries, and once he’s gone, August leans over and asks, “What the hell do we do?”
“Okay,” Myla says. “I have a theory.”
August opens her mouth before snapping it shut when Winfield drops off the ketchup. As soon as he’s gone, she asks, “What?”
Myla leans in. “Do you know anything about time slips?”
August blinks. “No.”
“Okay,” Myla says. She seizes the ketchup, dumping it over the fries. August pulls a face, and Myla waves it off. “It’s this sci-fi trope where somebody gets lost in time. So, like, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Mark Twain book. Guy gets hit in the head and wakes up in Camelot. Maybe something happened to her on the train that threw her out of time.”
August frowns. “Like, she time traveled?”
“Sort of,” Myla says thoughtfully. “But you found proof she was around in the ’80s and ’90s, right?” August nods. “So it’s not only
then to now. Maybe she’s been, like … flickering through time.
Maybe she’s stuck on the subway because some big event, some big anomaly, tethered her there. She’s, like, trapped in the in-
between.”
“In between what?”
“Dead and alive, maybe,” she says. “Real and not real.”
“So the train is like … purgatory?” How very Catholic.
“Yeah, but … not. Like, okay. You and me, we’re real. We’re stuck to reality, in this timeline. Linear. We started at point A, and we move forward through points B, C, D, et cetera. This is because nothing has ever interfered with our reality. There’s never been an event that could have disrupted our timeline. So our points A, B, C, D, correspond to the same order of points in linear time. But say there was an event like—like on Lost, when they detonate the H bomb and get thrown forward in time. Something just big enough to make a crack that one person could slip through, and it knocked her loose from the timeline of reality. Her point B could be our point D, her point E could be our point C. It’s not linear for her. She can be in 1980 one moment and 2005 the next and 1996 after that, because she came unstuck.”
August scrunches her hands up in her hair, trying to wrap her brain around it.
“Okay, so like … like music on the radio,” she attempts. “Like, the radio waves start in one place and they’re picked up by whatever receiver catches them. She’s the transmission, and her receivers are —”
“All at different moments in time, right,” Myla says. “So, if we look at it that way, she’s the music, and we’re the receiver picking her up.”
“And the other people that have seen her and interacted with her on the train over the years, those were—”
“Like antennas on cars catching a radio station as they pass through town. She’s—she’s always broadcasting out of the same tower.”
August feels like her brain is going to melt out of her nose. “The Q. She’s broadcasting out of the line.”
“Right. So … whatever it was must have happened while she was on the train,” Myla says slowly. The fries are going soggy. “We just
need to figure what.”
“How do we do that?”
“No idea.”
August straightens, shoving her glasses up her nose. She can do this. Her brain is wired to solve things. “I mean, a big enough event to throw a person out of time—there would be a record of that, right?”
Myla looks at her. “Girl, I don’t know. This is all hypothetical.” She must see the frustration flash across August’s face, because she picks up a fry and points it at her. It flops over pathetically, dripping ketchup onto the table. “Look, you might be right. But it could have been totally localized. People could have missed it completely.”
August sighs. Props her elbows up on the table. Tries to avoid the ketchup. “What about her memories? Why are those gone?”
“Like I said, I don’t know. Could be because she’s not rooted to anything. She’s not fully real, so her memories aren’t either. The important thing is, they’re not gone for good.”
“So…” August says, “so we have to get her to remember what happened. And…”
“And then maybe we can find a way to fix it before the end of summer.”
August lets that settle in the air between them: the idea that they could get Jane out. She’s been so focused on helping Jane figure out her past, she hasn’t thought about what comes after.
“And then wh-what?” August asks, wincing at the way her voice goes shaky. “If we figure out what happened and how to fix it, what happens when we do? She goes back to the ’70s? She stays here?
She … she’s gone?”
“I don’t know. But…”
August puts down her French fry. She’s lost her appetite. “But what?”
“Well, she said it’s only felt like a few months for her, until now? I think she’s gotten anchored here and now. And from what you’ve told me, this is the first time that’s happened.”
“So, we might be her only chance? Okay,” August says. She folds her arms across her chest and tucks her chin down, jaw set. “No matter what, we try.”
So, that’s it. August kind of knew, but now she knows. She can’t do this and have a crush on Jane at the same time.
It’s fine. It’s only that August used to love Say Anything before life intervened to make her hate everything, and Jane is the first person to ever make her feel all John-Cusack-and-Ione-Skye. It’s not a big deal that Jane’s hand is the perfect size to brace against August’s waist, or that when Jane looks at her, she can’t look back because her heart starts doing things so big and loud that the rest of her can barely hold the size and sound. She’ll live.
The bottom line: there’s no chance. Even if somehow Jane feels the same, August has a deadline. She has to help Jane figure out who she is, how she got stuck, and how to get her out.
And if she manages to pull that off, Jane’s not exactly here permanently. She’s not exactly here at all. And, well, August has never truly had her heart broken before, but she’s pretty sure that falling in love with someone only to send them back to the 1970s would, as first heartbreaks go, win the Fuck You Up Olympics.
Anyway, she can compartmentalize. She spent her childhood getting paid in Happy Meals to break into people’s personal archives and pretending that was normal. She can pretend she’s never thought about Jane holding her hand in a cute East Village brownstone with a West Elm sofa and a wine fridge. This crush, she decides, is just not going to work for her.
Which means, of course, the next time August steps on the Q, Jane says, “I think I should kiss you.”
It doesn’t start that way. It starts with August, too busy thinking about not thinking about Jane to check the weather for the morning’s freak thunderstorm, slipping in her own puddle of rainwater.
“Whoa,” Jane says, catching her under the elbow before she hits the subway floor. “Who tried to drown you?”
“The fucking MTA,” August says, letting Jane help her to her feet.
She pushes her sopping hair out of her eyes, blinking through the raindrops on her glasses. “Twenty-minute delay on an outdoor platform. They want me dead.”
August takes off her glasses and desperately checks herself for a single dry inch of fabric to wipe them on.
“Here,” Jane says, pulling up the tail of her shirt. August sees the smooth skin of her stomach, hints of a secret tattoo spilling up over her waistband on one hip, and forgets to breathe. Jane takes her glasses to wipe off the lenses. “You didn’t have to come today.”
“I wanted to,” August says. She adds quickly, “We’ve been making good progress.”
Jane looks up, halfway grinning, and stops, August’s glasses still
in her hand.
“Oh, wow,” she says softly.
August blinks. “What?”
“It’s—without your glasses, the wet hair.” She hands them back, but her eyes, distant and a little dazed, don’t leave August’s face. “I
got a flash of something.”
“A memory?”
“Sort of,” Jane says. “Like a half memory. You reminded me.”
“Oh,” August says. “What is it?”
“A kiss,” Jane says. “I don’t—I can’t remember exactly where I was, or who she was, but when you looked at me, I could remember the rain.”
“Okay,” August says. She’d take a note if her notebook wasn’t completely soaked. Also if she thought she was steady enough to
hold a pen. “What, uh, what else can you remember?”
Jane chews on her bottom lip. “She had long hair, like yours, but maybe blond? It’s weird, like—like a movie I saw, except I know it happened to me, because I remember her wet hair stuck to the side of her neck and how I had to peel it off so I could kiss her there.”
Jesus Christ.
Life-ruining descriptions of things Jane can do with her mouth aside, it does present a … possibility. The fastest way to recover Jane’s memories has been to make her smell or hear or touch something from her past.
“You know how we did the thing with the bagels,” Jane says, apparently thinking the same thing, “and the music, the sensory stuff? If I—if we—can re-create how that moment felt, maybe I can remember the rest.”
Jane looks around—it’s a slow day for the Q, only a few people at the other end of the car.
“Do you want to—you could try, um, touching my neck?” August offers lamely, hating herself. “For, like, research.”
“Maybe,” Jane says. “But it was … it was in an alley. We had ducked out of the rain into an alley, and we were laughing, and I hadn’t kissed her yet, but I’d been thinking about it for weeks. So—”
She turns distractedly toward the empty back wall of the car, next to the emergency exit.
“Oh.” August follows, wet sneakers squelching unattractively.
Jane turns to her, drags two fingers across the back of her hand.
The look on her face is intent, like she’s holding the memory tight in her head, transposing it over the present. She grabs August by the wrist, backing her into the wall of the car, and, oh shit.
“She was leaning against the wall,” Jane explains simply.
August feels her shoulders hit smooth metal, and in a panic, she imagines bricks scraping against her back instead, a sky instead of handrails and flickering fixtures, herself with any kind of grace to survive this.
“Okay,” August says. She and Jane have been pressed closer than this during commuter rushes, but it’s never, not once, felt like this. She tips her chin up. “Like this?”
“Yeah,” Jane says. Her voice hushed. She must be concentrating.
“Just like that.”
August swallows. It’s almost funny, how much she’s absolutely going to die.
“And,” Jane says, “I put my hand here.” She leans in and braces one hand against the wall next to August’s head. Her body heat
crackles between them. “Like this.”
“Uh-huh.”
It’s research. It’s only research. Lie back and think of the fucking
Dewey Decimal System.
“And I leaned in,” Jane says. “And I—”
Her other hand ghosts over August’s throat before sliding backward, her thumb grazing August’s pulse, and August’s eyes close on instinct. She touches August’s hair with her fingertips and pulls it gently away from the side of her neck. The cool air is a shock
to her skin.
“Is—is it helping?”
“Hang on,” Jane says. “Can I—?”
“Yeah,” August says. It doesn’t matter what the question is.
Jane makes a small sound, ducks her head, and there’s breath against August’s bare skin, close enough to mimic the gesture but only just not making contact, which is somehow worse than a kiss would be. It’s more intimate, the silent promise that she could if she wanted to, and August would let her, if they both wanted the same thing in the same way.
Jane’s lips skim August’s skin when she says, “Jenny.”
August opens her eyes. “What?”
“Jenny,” Jane says, drawing back. “Her name was Jenny. We
were a block from my apartment.”
“Where?”
“I can’t remember,” Jane says. She frowns and adds, “I think I
should kiss you.”
August’s mind goes searingly blank.
“You—what?”
“I’m almost there,” Jane says, and fuck if August can’t suppress a shiver at those words in that voice from that soft mouth. “I think—”
“That if you—” August clears her throat and tries again. “You think that if you—if you kiss me—”
“I’ll remember, yeah.” She’s looking at August with a precise kind of interest. Not like she’s thinking about a kiss, but more like she’s focusing hard on an objective. It happens to be a disastrously good look on her. Her jaw goes all jutty and angular, and August wants to give her anything she wants and then change her own name and skip the continent.
Jane’s watching her face, tracking a raindrop that rolls from her hairline to her chin, and August knows, she knows, if she does this, she’s never going to stop thinking about it for the rest of her life. You can’t un-kiss the most impossible person you’ve ever met. She’s never going to forget what that tastes like.
But Jane looks hopeful, and August wants to help. And, well. She believes in in-depth, hands-on evidence gathering. That’s all.
Compartmentalize, August tells herself. For the love of God, Landry. Compartmentalize.
“Okay,” August says. “It’s not a bad idea.”
“You sure?” Jane says gently. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“That’s not—” That’s not the issue, but if Jane doesn’t know that by now, she probably never will. “I don’t mind.”
“Okay,” Jane says, visibly relieved. God, she has no idea.
“Okay,” August says. “For research.”
“For research,” Jane agrees.
August squares her shoulders. For research.
“What should I do?”
“Can you touch me?” Jane takes one of August’s hands and holds it to her chest, right below the hard line of her collarbone.
“Right here?”
“Okay,” August says, more of a shaky exhale than a word. “Then what?”
Jane’s leaning in, taking advantage of her height to bracket August in, burning so hot that August can’t make sense of the chill sweeping up her spine. So steady and beautiful and close, too close, never close enough, and August is so completely, irreversibly,
spectacularly screwed.
“And,” Jane says, “I kissed her.”
The train plunges out of a tunnel and back into the deafening rain.
“Did she kiss you back?”
Jane’s other hand finds its way to August’s waist, to the place that feels designed by the profound unfairness of the universe to fit it so
exactly.
“Yeah,” Jane says. “Yeah, she did.”
And Jane kisses her.
The truth about wanting someone to kiss you for ages is, it rarely lives up to whatever you’ve imagined. Real kisses are messy, awkward, too dry, too wet, imperfect. August learned years ago that movie kisses don’t happen. The best you can hope for in a first kiss
is to be kissed back.
But then, there’s this kiss.
There’s Jane’s hand on her waist, and the rain rushing down onto the roof of the train, and a half-remembered moment pinned against a brick wall, and this kiss, and August couldn’t have imagined it would feel like this.
Jane’s mouth is soft but insistent, and August feels the press of it in her body, in a place much too close to her heart. If looking at Jane feels like flowers opening, being kissed by her feels heavier, the weight of a body that’ll be gone by morning settling into bed beside her. It reminds her of being homesick for months and tasting something familiar and realizing it’s even better than you remember,
because it comes with the sweet gut punch of knowing and being known. It melts in her mouth like ice cream at the corner store when she was eight. It aches like a brick to the shin.
Jane kisses her and kisses her, and August has completely lost track of what this was even supposed to be about, because she’s kissing Jane back, swiping her thumb into the dip of Jane’s collarbone, and Jane’s tongue is tracing the soft seam of her lips, and August’s mouth is falling open. Jane’s hand drops from the wall to brace against August’s face, tangled up in her wet hair, and she’s everywhere and nowhere—in her mouth, at her waist, against her hips, touching too much for August to pretend this isn’t real to her but not enough to know if it’s real to Jane too.
And then Jane pulls back and says, “Oh, fuck.”
August has to blink five times before her eyes remember how to focus. What the fuck was she doing? Kissing her way to self- destruction, that’s what.
“What?” she asks. Her voice comes out strangled. Jane’s hand is still in her hair.
“New Orleans,” she says. “The Bywater. That’s where I was.”
“What?”
“I lived there,” she says. August is staring at her mouth, dark pink and swollen, and trying desperately to drag her brain in the opposite direction. “I lived in New Orleans. A year, at least. I had an apartment, and a roommate, and—oh, holy shit, I remember.”
“Are you sure?” August asks. “Are you sure you’re not getting it mixed up because I’m from there?”
“No,” Jane says, “no, I remember now.” She moves suddenly, the way she does when she’s feeling something big, and scoops August up in her arms and spins her around. “Oh my God, you’re fucking magic.”
August thinks, as her feet lift off the ground, that nobody has ever called her magic in her entire life.
They slide right back into their normal places: August perched on the edge of a seat with her notebook open to the dryest page she
can find, and Jane pacing the aisle reciting everything she can recall.
She talks about a burger joint in the Quarter where she worked, about Jenny (tally mark eleven), about a shotgun apartment on the second floor of an old house and a sweet-faced roommate whose name she can’t remember. August writes it all down and doesn’t think about how Jane kissed her—Jane kissed her—Jane put her hand on August’s face and kissed her, and August knows how her lips feel, and she can’t ever stop knowing, and— “Did you get that?” Jane says, pausing her pacing, apparently completely unaffected. “The snowball place in the Marigny? You look like you spaced out for a second.”
“Oh, yeah,” August says. “Definitely got it.”
When she stumbles back into the apartment that night, Niko takes one look at her and says, “Oh, you fucked up.”
“It’s fine!” August says, shouldering past him toward the fridge.
“You are projecting so many feelings right now, I can’t believe your skin’s still on.”
“I’m repressing it!” She yanks a carton of leftover sesame chicken out and pops the top, shoveling it into her mouth cold. “Let me repress it!”
“I can see how you would think that is what you’re doing,” he says, sounding genuinely sorry for her.