Fullepub 
Chapter 11
11
UMMMM on the Q this morning this little kid was getting picked on by two older kids and before i could do anything this hot butch girl jumped in and the bullies SCATTERED hello 911 how am i supposed to work now that i’ve seen an angel irl????
7:42 AM · 8 Nov 2018
Myla’s hair smells like Cajun fries.
August’s nose is buried in it, upside down behind Myla’s ear, sucking curls into her nostrils.
There’s something wrapped around her, something too warm and slightly itchy and, if her stomach doesn’t subside soon, in imminent peril of being puked on.
She tries to pull her arm free, but Wes has a freaky death grip on her wrist as he white-knuckles through REMs. There’s something lumpy with weird corners crushed between August’s arm and one of Niko’s shoulder blades. She cracks one eye open—a Popeyes box. Which churns up: one, a hazy memory of Niko putting on his soberest face at the Popeyes register downstairs, and two, the too-many apple cider margaritas in her stomach.
As far as August can tell, the four of them collapsed into a pile on the couch as soon as they stumbled through the door last night. Niko and Myla are on one side, tangled up in each other, Myla’s jean jacket thrown over their bodies like a blanket. Wes has spilled halfway off the couch, his shoulders digging into the floor where one of the rugs should be.
The rug that’s … wrapped around her?
Noodles trots over and starts cheerfully licking Myla’s face.
“Wes,” August croaks. She nudges one of Wes’s knees with her foot. He must have liberated himself of his pants at some point before they passed out. “Wes.”
“No,” Wes grunts. He doesn’t relinquish her wrist.
“Wes,” she says. “I’m gonna throw up on you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I literally am,” she says. “My mouth tastes like hot ass.”
“Sounds like a you problem,” he says. He cracks one eye halfway open, smacks his dry lips. “Where are my pants?”
“Wes—”
“I’m wearing a shirt and no pants,” he says. “I’m Winnie the Pooh-ing it.”
“Your pants are in the window by the TV,” says a voice, much too clear and much too loud for the hangover bog. August looks up, and there’s Lucie, glitter lingering around her eyes, glowering into the cabinets. “You said, ‘They need to get some air.’”
“Why,” August says. “Here. Why are you. Here?”
“You really don’t remember inviting me to Popeyes,” Lucie says flatly. “You are lucky Isaiah knows about the service elevator. Would have left you there.”
“Yikes.”
“Anyway,” she says. “Winfield helped me get you home.”
“Yes, but.” August finally manages to dislodge her arm from Wes’s and gingerly begins to de-crumple herself into an upright position she immediately regrets. “Why are you here? Why didn’t you leave with him?”
“Because,” she says, emerging triumphant with a skillet, “it was funny. I love to watch people with hangovers. Half the reason to stay at Billy’s.” She points the pan at August. “Slept in your room.”
She turns to the fridge and withdraws a carton of eggs, and August remembers her first week at Billy’s, when Lucie made sure she’d eaten. There’s another pinched smile in the corner of her mouth, like the one she saw last night.
“Making breakfast,” Lucie says. “Thankless job, being your boss, but someone has to do it.”
Another memory comes back at that: Wes, three drinks deep, lipstick marks on his cheek, Isaiah in his full Annie glory, wig and all, saving him from slipping in a puddle of vodka on the bar floor, and Lucie laughing. It was supposed to be Niko’s birthday thing but ended up a five-drinks-and-where’s-my-pants thing. Apparently only Lucie made it through intact.
At least August’s stomach has stopped threatening an Exorcist live show. She rolls onto the floor, and Myla and Niko start to stir.
She runs through everything she can remember: Lucie’s fur shrug, eggnog, water falling from the ceiling, being in love with Jane, Myla’s lipstick, Niko’s bandana—
She’s in love with Jane.
Shit, no, it’s worse than that. She’s in love with Jane, and she wants Jane to stay, and what she thought was her emergency emotional escape hatch for when Jane goes merrily back to the 1970s is just a trick door into more feelings.
Niko’s voice echoes in the back of her head from the first time she kissed Jane, Oh, you fucked up.
She fucked up. She fucked up bad.
She feels around inside her chest like it’s the bottom of her jeans pocket, grasping for anything less life-ruining than this. The harsh light of a sober morning should dull it, turn it back into a crush.
It doesn’t.
It was never a crush, if she’s being honest, not since she started planning her mornings around a girl she didn’t even know. Her last shred of self-preservation was pretending it was enough to have Jane temporarily, and she shoved that like a twenty-dollar bill down Annie Depressant’s tits last night.
“I wish I were never born,” August moans into the floor.
“Retweet,” Wes says solemnly.
It takes twenty minutes, but eventually they extricate themselves from the couch. Myla, who slithered across the floor to the bathroom and threw up twice before army crawling back out, looks half-dead and altogether unlikely to partake in the scrambled eggs. Niko has already chugged a full bottle of kombucha in an impressive show of faith in his intestines to work things out on their own. And Wes has dislodged his pants from the window.
August manages to smile blearily at Lucie as she dumps eggs out of the frying pan and onto a plate before throwing a handful of forks down.
“Family style,” she says, and man. Everything is a disaster, but August does love her.
“Thank you,” August says. “Don’t you have a morning shift?”
Lucie pulls a face. She’s wearing one of August’s T-shirts. “Billy is reducing my hours. Told me yesterday.”
“What? He can’t do that; you’re basically the only person keeping that place together.”
“Yes,” she says with a grim nod. “Most expensive person on the payroll.”
“Wait,” says Myla’s voice, muffled by the floor. She drags her head up and squints. “What’s going on with Billy’s?”
August sighs. “The landlord is doubling the rent at the end of the year, so it’s probably gonna shut down and become a Cheesecake Factory or something.”
With what looks like a Herculean effort, Myla pulls herself up onto her knees and says, “That is unacceptable.”
“Billy needs another hundred grand to buy the unit, and he can’t get the loan.”
“Okay, so.” She does an alarming closed-mouth burp, shakes it off, and presses on. “Let’s get the money.”
“We’re all broke,” Lucie says. “Why you think we work in food service?”
“Right,” Myla counters. “But we can find it.”
August tries to think, but it’s hard when her brain feels like a garbage bag full of wet socks and the socks are wet because they’re soaked in grain alcohol. Myla and Niko were right about Christmas in July—it’s the type of night you’ll never forget, if you can remember it. There must have been way more than the fire code max capacity in there—
Oh.
“Wait,” August says. “What if we did … a charity drag show.”
Myla perks up slightly. “Like, donate the tips?”
“No, what if we charged a cover? Sold drink tickets? We could use your pull at Delilah’s and get them to let us use the space, and we donate everything we make that night to saving Billy’s.”
“Winfield would perform,” Lucie offers.
“Isaiah too,” Wes chimes in.
“Oh, we could do a whole breakfast food theme!” Myla says. “Winfield and Isaiah can get their friends on the lineup.”
“I could probably get Slinky’s to donate some liquor,” Niko adds.
The five of them exchange unsteady eye contact, buzzing with possibility.
Lucie deigns to give them a smile. “I like this idea.”
The first week of July brings the transformation of apartment 6F into the Save Billy’s campaign headquarters.
Niko brings a whiteboard home from the pawn shop by Miss Ivy’s, and Myla starts making double portions of stir-fry, and they spend late nights circled up in the living room: Lucie and Winfield, Myla and Niko, Wes, Isaiah, the odd handful of servers, and August. Lucie’s the de facto leader, burdened with the combination of hating extracurricular activities and large groups of friendly people while also loving Billy’s and knowing Billy’s-related logistics. She’s taken to wearing a silver whistle around her neck like a sullen camp counselor just to keep them in line while she’s reading spreadsheets aloud.
“How soon are we doing this?” Niko asks, shoveling an enormous piece of tofu into his mouth. “Not to be a buzzkill, but Mercury is in retrograde for another week, which is … not optimal.”
“That’s okay,” August tells him. She glances at Lucie, who is poring over permit requirements on the kitchen floor. “We’re gonna need more time to set this up anyway. Plus, we have to advertise it, drum up publicity—that’s at least a month, right?”
Lucie nods. “Probably.”
August turns to the whiteboard and makes a note. They’ll plan on mid-August. Two weeks before the Q shuts down.
“So, what you’re telling me is, you’re gonna rally a bunch of queers to save Billy’s with pancakes and a drag show?” Jane says when August catches her up. She’s sun-warmed in the window of the train. August is trying not to think, In love, in love, I’m in terrible dumbass love.
“Yeah,” August says, “basically.”
“That’s so fucking hot,” Jane says, and she grabs August by the chin and kisses her hard and brilliant, an openmouthed exhale, shotgunning summer sunshine.
Terrible dumbass love,August thinks.
It comes together piece by piece. Isaiah and Winfield are down to headline, and after asking around, they get three more Brooklyn queens on board. Myla sweet-talks the manager of Delilah’s into donating the space, Isaiah calculates the costs, and Wes even convinces some of the artists at his shop to set up a booth for flash tattoos in exchange for donations. It helps that so many of them have an in with so many tiny Brooklyn businesses—no one wants to see Billy’s turned into an overpriced gourmet juice bar when they could be next.
It takes thirty minutes on the phone for Winfield to strong-arm Billy into accepting charity, and when he caves, he passes it off to August and tells her she’s in charge of figuring out food. Cut to: Jerry and August swearing up a storm, trying to average out the number of pancakes they need per person and how much it’ll cost. They get there, though.
All along, it hums under the surface—that feeling August felt when she stepped inside Delilah’s, when Miss Ivy calls her by name, when they paraded down to the Q behind Isaiah in his top hat, when the guy at the bodega doesn’t card her, when Jane looks at her like she could be part of her mental photo album of the city. That feeling that she lives here, like, really lives here. Her shadow’s passed through a thousand busted-up crosswalks and under a million creaking rows of scaffolding. She’s been here, and here, and here.
New York takes from her, sometimes. But she takes too. She takes its muggy air in fistfuls, and she packs it into the cracks in her heart.
And now, she’s gonna give it something. They’re gonna give it something.
It’s the end of the first week, a late night sitting around a pizza talking about flyers, when August’s phone rings.
She slides it out from under the box: her mom.
“Helloooo,” she answers.
A short pause—August sits up straight. Something’s up. Her mother never allows even half a second of silence.
“Hey, August, honey,” she says. “Are you alone?”
August climbs to her feet, shrugging at Myla’s concerned look. “Um, not right now. Hang on.” She crosses to her room and shuts the door behind her. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she says. “It’s your grandmother.”
August hisses out a long breath. Her grandmother? The old broad probably called her a test-tube science project baby again or decided to bankroll another Republican congressional campaign. That, she can deal with.
“Oh. What’s going on?”
“Well, she had a stroke last night, and she … she didn’t make it.”
August sits down heavily on the edge of her bed.
“Shit. Are you okay?”
“I’m all right,” her mom says in the tone she gets when she’s leafing through evidence, half-distracted and clipped. “She’d already made arrangements after your grandfather died, so it’s all handled.”
“I meant, like.” August tries to speak slowly, deliberately. Her mother has always been about as emotive as a mossy boulder, but August feels like this should probably be an exception. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m—I’m okay. I mean, she and I had said everything we were ever going to say to each other. I got closure a long time ago. It is what it is, you know?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m really sorry, Mom. Is there anything I can do? Do you need me to come down for the funeral?”
“Oh, no, honey, don’t worry about that. I’ll be fine. But I did need to talk to you about something.”
“What’s up?”
“Well, I got a call from the family lawyer last night. Your grandmother left you some money.”
“What?” August blinks at the wall. “What do you mean? Why would she leave me something? I’m the shameful family secret.”
“No. No, that’s me. You’re her granddaughter.”
“Since when? She’s barely spoken to me. She’s never even sent me a birthday present.”
Another pause. “August, that’s not true.”
“What do you mean it’s not true? What are you talking about?”
“August, I … I need to tell you something. But I need you not to hate me.”
“What?”
“Look, your grandparents … they were difficult people. It’s always been complicated between us. And I do think they’re ashamed of me because I decided to have you on my own. I never wanted to become the trophy wife with a rich husband they raised me to be. But they were never ashamed of you.”
August grinds her teeth. “They didn’t even know me.”
“Well … they did, kind of. I’d—I’d keep them updated, sometimes. And they’d hear from St. Margaret’s how you were doing.”
“Why would St. Margaret’s talk to them about me?”
Another pause. A long one.
“Because they keep the people paying a student’s tuition updated on their student.”
What?
“What? They—they paid my tuition? This whole time?”
“Yes.”
“But you told me—you always said we were broke because you had to pay for St. Margaret’s.”
“I did! I paid for your lunches, I paid for your field trips, your uniforms, your extracurriculars, your—your library fines. But they were the ones who wrote the big checks. They’d send one every birthday.”
August’s childhood and teenage years flutter into focus—the way kids used to look at her in her Walmart tennis shoes, the things her mom said they couldn’t afford to replace after the storm. “So then, why were we broke, Mom? Why were we broke?”
“Well, August, I mean … it’s not cheap, to pay for an investigation. Sometimes there were people I had to pay for information, there was equipment to buy—”
“How long?” August asks. “How long did they send money?”
“Only until you graduated high school, honey. I—I told them to stop once you turned eighteen, so they did. I didn’t want them to keep helping us forever.”
“And what if I had wanted help?”
She’s quiet for a few seconds. “I don’t know.”
“I mean, based on the will, they would have, right?”
“Maybe so.”
“You’re telling me, I’m sitting here on a mountain of student loans that I didn’t have to take out, because you didn’t want to tell me this?”
“August, they—they’re not like you and me, okay? They always judged me, and they would have judged the way we lived, the way I raised you, and I didn’t want that for you. I didn’t want to give them a chance to treat you the way they treated me, or Augie.”
“But they wanted—they wanted to see me?”
“August, you don’t understand—”
“So, you just decided for me that I wouldn’t have a family? That it’d be just you and me? This isn’t some Gilmore Girls fantasy, okay? This is my life, and I’ve spent most of it alone, because you told me I was, that I should be, that I should be happy about it, but it was only because you didn’t want anyone to come between us, wasn’t it?”
Her mom’s voice comes back sharp, with a bitter, defensive anger that August knows lives in her too. “You can’t even imagine it, August. You can’t imagine the way they treated Augie. He left because they made him miserable, and I couldn’t lose you like that—”
“Can you shut up about Augie for once? It’s been almost fifty years! He’s gone! People leave!”
There’s a terrible moment of silence, long enough for August to play back what she said, but not long enough to regret it.
“August,” her mom says once, like a nail going in.
“You know what?” August says. “You never listen to me. You never care about what I want unless it’s what you want. I told you five years ago that I didn’t want to work the case with you anymore, and you didn’t care. Sometimes it’s like you had me just so you could have a—a fucking assistant.”
“August—”
“No, I’m done. Don’t call me tomorrow. In fact, don’t call me at all. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to talk, but I—I am gonna need you to leave me alone for a while, Mom.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “I’m sorry about your mom. And I’m sorry they treated you like shit. But that didn’t give you the right.”
August hangs up and throws her phone onto the floorboards, flopping back on her bed. She and her mom have fought before—God knows two hardheaded people with a tendency to go icy when threatened in only seven hundred square feet of living space will go at it. But never like this.
She can hear everyone in the living room laughing. She feels as separate from it as she did the day she moved in.
Her whole life, the gnaw of anxiety has made people opaque to her. No matter how well she knows someone, no matter the logical patterns, no matter how many allowances she knows someone might make for her—that bone-deep fear of rejection has always made it impossible for her to see any of it. It frosts over the glass. She never had anyone to begin with, so she let it be unsurprising that nobody would want to have her around.
She slides her hand over the bedspread and her knuckles brush something cool and hard: her pocketknife. It must have slid out when she threw her bag down earlier.
She scoops it up, turns it over in her palm. The fish scales, the sticker on the handle. If she wanted to, she could twirl it between her fingers, flip the blade out, and jimmy a window open. Her mom taught her. She remembers it all. She shouldn’t have had to learn any of it, but she did.
And now she’s using everything she learned to help Jane.
Shit.
You can try, she guesses. You can tear yourself apart and rebuild from scratch, bring yourself to every corner of the map, sew a new self from the scraps of a thousand other people and places. You can try to expand to fill a different shape. But at the end of the day, there’s a place at the foot of the bed where your shoes hit the floor, and it’s the same.
It’s always the same.
The next day, August takes the file her mother mailed her down from the top of the fridge.
She didn’t open it after the first time, didn’t think about it, but she didn’t dump it in the garbage either. She wants it gone, so she crams it into her bag and climbs onto the Q heading toward the post office. It feels heavy in her bag, like a relic of the family religion.
It’s incredible, really, how the sight of Jane sitting there like she always is, picking at the edge of the seat with her Swiss Army knife, unspools the tension in her shoulders.
“Hey, Landry,” Jane says. She smiles when August leans down to kiss her hello. “Save Billy’s yet?”
“Working on it,” August says, sitting beside her. “Have any epiphanies yet?”
“Working on it,” Jane says. She gives August a once-over. “What’s going on? You’re, like … all staticky.”
“Is that a thing you can do?” August asks. “Because of the electricity thing? Like, can you feel other people’s emotional frequencies?”
“Not really,” Jane says, leaning her face on her hand. “But sometimes, lately, yours have started coming through. Not totally clear, but like music from the next room, you know?”
Uh-oh. Can she feel terrible dumbass love radiating off of August?
“I wonder if that means you’re becoming more present,” August says, “like how the wine worked on you even though you couldn’t get drunk before. Maybe that’s progress.”
“Sure as hell hope so,” Jane says. She leans back, hooking one arm over the handrail beside her. “But you didn’t answer my question. What’s going on?”
August hisses out a breath and shrugs. “I got in a fight with my mom. It’s stupid. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
Jane lets out a low whistle. “I got you.” A short lull absorbs the tension before Jane speaks again. “Oh, it’s probably not that helpful, but I did remember something.”
She lifts the hem of her T-shirt, baring the tattoos that span her side from ribs to thigh. August has seen them all, mostly in hurried glimpses or in semidarkness.
“I remembered what these guys mean,” Jane says.
August peers at the inky animals. “Yeah?”
“It’s the zodiac signs for my family.” She touches the tail feathers of the rooster sprawling down her rib cage. “My dad, ’33.” The snout of the dog on her side. “Mom, ’34.” The horns of a goat on her hip. “Betty, ’55.” Disappearing past her waistband and down her thigh, a monkey. “Barbara, ’56.”
“Wow,” August says. “What’s yours?”
She points to her opposite hip, at the serpent winding up from her thigh, separate from the others. “Year of the Snake.”
The art is beautiful, and she can’t imagine Jane got any of them before she ran away. Which means she sat through hours of needles for her family after she left them.
“Hey,” August says. “Are you sure you don’t want me to…?”
She’s asked before, if she should try to find Jane’s family. Jane said no, and August hasn’t pushed it.
“Yeah, no, I—I can’t,” Jane says, tucking her shirt back in. “I don’t know what’s worse—the idea that they’ve been looking for me and missing me and probably thinking I’m dead, or the idea that they just gave up and moved on with their lives. I don’t want to know. I can’t—I can’t face that.”
August thinks of her mom and the file in her bag. “I get it.”
“When I left home,” Jane says after a few seconds. She’s returned to her Swiss Army knife, carving a thin line into the shiny blue of the seat. “I called from LA once, and God, my parents were furious. My dad told me not to come back. And I couldn’t even blame him. That was the last time I called, and I … I really believed that was the best thing I could do for them. For us. To drift. But I thought about them every single day. Every minute of the day, like they were with me. I got the tattoos so they would be.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“I like permanent marks, you know? Tattoos, scars.” She crosses the letter A she’s been carving and moves on to N with a soft chuckle. “Vandalism. It’s like, when you spend your life running, sometimes that’s the only thing you have to show for it.”
She carves a small plus sign underneath her name and looks up at August, extending the knife. “Your turn.”
August glances between her, the knife, and the blank space below the plus sign for a full ten seconds before she gets it. Jane wants August’s name next to hers in the permanent mark she’s leaving on the Q.
Reaching into her back pocket, August clears the feelings out of her throat and says, “I have my own.”
She flicks the blade of her knife out and gets to work, scratching a clumsy AUGUST. When it’s done, she sits back, holding the knife loosely in her palm, admiring their work. JANE + AUGUST. She likes the way they look together.
When she turns to look at Jane, she’s staring down at August’s hand.
“What’s that?” Jane asks.
August follows her gaze. “My knife?”
“Your—where did you get that?”
“It was a gift?” August says. “My mom gave it to me; it belonged to her brother.”
“August.”
“Yeah?”
“No. August,” Jane says. August frowns at her, and she goes on: “That was his name. The guy who owned that knife. Augie.”
August stares. “How did you—”
“How old is he?” Jane cuts in. Her eyes are wide. “Your mom’s brother—how old is he?”
“He was born in ’48, but he’s—he’s been missing since—”
“1973,” Jane finishes flatly.
August never told Jane any of the specifics. It was nice to have one thing in her life that wasn’t touched by it. But Jane knows. She knows his name, the year, and she—
“Fuck,” August swears.
Biyu Su. She remembers where she saw that name.
She fumbles the fastening on her bag three times, before she finally pulls out the file.
“Open it,” August says.
Jane’s fingers are tentative on the edge of the manila folder, and when it falls open, there’s a newspaper photograph paperclipped to the first page, yellowing black and white. Jane, missing a couple of tattoos, in the background of a restaurant that had just opened in the Quarter. In the cutline, she’s listed as Biyu Su.
“My mom sent me this,” August says. “She said she’d found someone who might have known her brother and traced them to New York.”
It takes a second, but it comes: the fluorescent above their heads surges brighter and blinks out.
“Her brother—” Jane starts and stops, hand shaking when she touches the edge of the clipping. “Landry. That was … that was her brother. I knew—I knew there was something familiar about you.”
August’s voice is mostly breath when she asks, “How did you know him?”
“We lived together,” Jane says. Her voice sounds muffled through decades. “The roommate—the one I couldn’t remember. It was him.”
August knows from the look on her face what the answer is going to be, but she has to ask.
“What happened to him?”
Jane’s hand curls into a fist.
“August, he’s dead.”
Jane tells August about the UpStairs Lounge.
It was a bar on the second floor of a building at the corner of Chartres and Iberville, a jukebox and a tiny stage, bars on the windows like all the spots in the city used to have. One of the best places for blue-collar boys on the low. Augie was short-haired and square-jawed, shoulders filling out a white T-shirt, a towel over his shoulder behind the bar.
It was the summer of ’73, Jane tells her, but August already knows. She could never forget it. She’s spent years trying to picture that summer. Her mom was sure he’d left the city, but August used to wonder if he was hidden away a few neighborhoods over, if ivy climbed the wrought iron on his balcony, or power lines heavy with Mardi Gras beads dipped into the oak trees outside his window.
Her mom had theories—he got a girl pregnant and ran away, made enemies with the guys who bribed the NOPD to guard their craps games and skipped town, got lost, got married, got out of town and disappeared beyond the cypress trees.
Instead, instead, Jane tells August he was loved. She remembers him at the stove of their tiny kitchen, teaching her how to make pancakes. She tells August how he used to frown at the bathroom mirror and run a wet comb through his hair trying to tame it. He was happy, she says, even though he never talked about his family, even though she heard him through the walls sometimes, on the phone using a voice so gentle that he must have been talking to the round-faced, green-eyed little girl whose picture he kept in his wallet. He was happy because he had Jane, he had friends, he had the job at the UpStairs and guys with sweet eyes and broad shoulders who wanted to kiss him in the streetlamp light. He had hope. He liked to march, liked to help Jane make signs. He had dreams for a future and friends all over the city, tight-knit circles, hands that slapped his back when he walked into a room.
He was the guy you called if you needed to move a couch or someone to tell the guy across the hall that if he ever says that word to you again, he’ll get his ass beat. He made people laugh. He had a pair of red shorts that he loved especially well, and she has this stark memory of him wearing them, smoking a cigarette on the porch, perched on the top step, hands spread wide across the floorboards as the first drops of a summer storm started falling.
They talked about their dreams a lot, Jane says. They wanted to travel and would pass a bottle of Muscadine wine back and forth and talk about Paris, Hong Kong, Milan, New York. She told him about her hometown, San Francisco, and the sprawling woods and winding roads to the north, and he told her he’d always, always wanted to drive the Panoramic Highway, ever since he read about it in a library book. He loved books, brought home stacks and stacks from thrift stores and secondhand shops.
The day it happened was the last day of Pride. The beer was free that night, but it was the best night of the summer for tips. For the first time, he mentioned his little sister to Jane as he was shrugging on his jacket on his way out for his shift. He was going to buy her an encyclopedia set for her birthday, he said. He was worried their parents weren’t letting her read enough. The night’s tips would be just enough for it.
And then, that night at the UpStairs, gasoline and smoke. And then, the ceiling falling in. And then, fire, and bars on windows, and a door that wouldn’t open. Arson. Thirty-two men gone.
Augie didn’t come home.
There are a couple of unmarked graves, Jane explains in a low, hoarse voice. It wasn’t uncommon for there to be people like her or Augie, queer people who ran away and didn’t want to be found, who didn’t have families who could or would claim them, people who kept secrets so well nobody would even have known they were there.
And that was bad enough. The empty bedroom, the rolls of socks, the milk left in the fridge, the aftershave in the bathroom, it was all bad enough. But then there were the months that came after.
The city barely tried to investigate. The news mentioned the fire but left out that it was a gay bar. The radio hosts made jokes. Not a single politician said a goddamn word. Church after church refused to hold the funerals. The one priest who did gather a handful of people for prayers was nearly excommunicated by his congregation.
It hurt, and it hurt again, this horrible thing that had happened, this ripping, unfathomable, terrible thing, and it only hurt more, spreading like the bruises on Jane’s ribs when the cops would decide to make an example out of her.
New Orleans, Jane tells her, was the first place that convinced her to stay. It was the first place she was herself. She’d spent a year on the road before she ended up there, but she fell in love with the city and its Southern girls, and she began to think she might put down roots.
After the fire, she made it six months before she packed up her records and left. She moved out in January of ’74, nothing of her left in New Orleans but a name scratched into a couple bar tops and a kiss on a stone with no name. She lost touch with everyone. She wanted to become a ghost, like Augie.
And then she found New York. And it finished the job.
