Chapter 13

13

Radio transcript from WTKF 90.9 FM

Broadcast November 14, 1976

STEVEN STRONG, HOST: That was “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers, and you’re listening to 90.9 The Mix, your home for everything you want to listen to at the push of a button. Hope you’re staying warm out there, New York—it’s a cold one tonight. Up next, I have a request from a Jane in Brooklyn, who wanted to hear from some of our favorite British boys. This is “Love of My Life” by Queen.

Jane’s not on the train.

August tries to pick her way through the people clogging the aisle, but it’s packed tight and she’s too short to see over their heads. She ends up jostled to the end of the car, and she clambers up onto the one empty seat to see if the boost helps.

It doesn’t.

Something lodges in her throat. Jane’s not there. She’s never not been there before.

No, no, no, not possible. It’s only been a few days since August saw her, less than an hour since she heard from her. That song was just on the radio. She doesn’t completely understand this tether between them, but it can’t be that fragile. Jane can’t be gone. She can’t be.

She drops down onto the floor, panic prickling along the bones of her fingers and wrists.

August didn’t have enough time. They’ve spent months digging Jane up, one scoop at a time, and she’s supposed to live. Jane is supposed to have a life, even if it’s not with her.

The track bends, and August stumbles. Her shoulders hit the metal wall of the car.

Maybe she missed her. Maybe she can get off at the next stop and try another car. Maybe she can grab a train in the opposite direction and Jane will be there, like always, book in hand and a mischievous smile. Maybe there’s still time. Maybe—

She turns her head, glancing through the window at the end of the car.

There’s someone sitting in the last seat of the next car over, absently looking back at her. The collar of her jacket’s flipped up around her jaw, and her dark hair is falling in her eyes. She looks miserable.

“Jane!” August shouts, even though Jane can’t hear her. All she must see is the cartoonish shape of August’s mouth miming her name, but it’s enough. It’s enough for her to jump out of her seat, and August can see Jane call her name back. It might be the best thing she’s ever seen.

She watches Jane lunge sideways—the emergency exit—and she reaches for hers. It comes open easily, and there’s the tiny platform she remembers so well, and Jane’s on the next one, close enough to touch, beaming out the back of a speeding train, and August was wrong—this is the best thing she’s ever seen.

There aren’t perfect moments in life, not really, not when shit has gotten as weird as it can get and you’re broke in a mean city and the things that hurt feel so big. But there’s the wind flying and the weight of months and a girl hanging out an emergency exit, train roaring all around, tunnel lights flashing, and it feels perfect. It feels insane and impossible and perfect. Jane reels her in by the side of her neck, right there between the subway cars, and kisses her like it’s the end of the world.

She lets August go as they exit the tunnel into blazing sunlight.

“I’m sorry!” Jane shouts.

“I’m sorry!” August shouts back.

“It’s okay!”

“Do you fuckin’ mind?” a guy yells from behind her.

Oh fuck. Right. Other people exist, somehow.

“You better get over here before someone pushes me off!”

Jane laughs and jumps over, grabbing August’s shoulders on the way, the momentum carrying them through the door. August catches Jane right before she staggers into the pissed-off guy in a Yankees hat.

“You done?” he says. “It’s the fuckin’ subway, not the fuckin’ Notebook. Wanna get us all fuckin’ stuck here for an hour while they scrape a couple of lesbians off the fuckin’ tracks—”

“You’re right!” Jane says through a slightly hysterical laugh, snatching August’s hand up and tugging her away. “Don’t know what we were thinking!”

“I’m actually bisexual!” August adds faintly over her shoulder.

They make their way to the other side of the car, past strollers and umbrellas, past khaki-covered knees and bags of groceries, to a pocket of space near the last pole, and Jane whips around to face her.

“I was—”

“You were—”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“I should have—”

Jane stops, holding in a mouthful of laughter. August has never been so happy to see her, not even those early days when she was a fever of an idea. She’s not an idea anymore—she’s Jane, hardheaded Jane, runaway Jane, smart-mouthed Jane, bruise-knuckled, soft-hearted agitator Jane. The girl stuck on the line with August’s heart in the pocket of her ratty jeans.

“You go first,” she says.

August leans her shoulder against the pole, edging closer. “You were—not totally wrong. I was doing this for you, or at least I think I was, but you’re right. I didn’t want you to go back.” Her instincts say to shift her eyes anywhere but to Jane, but she doesn’t. She looks Jane straight in the eyes and says, “I wanted—I want you to stay here, with me. And that’s fucked up, and I’m sorry.”

There’s a second of quiet, Jane looking at her, and then she shrugs her backpack off and hands August something from the side pocket.

“You’re not the only one who has notebooks,” Jane says quietly.

It’s a tiny, battered Moleskine folded open to a page covered in Jane’s messy handwriting: Overwatch. Frank Ocean. Easy Mac. Apple vs. PC. Postmates. Barack Obama. The Golden Girls. Instagram. Jurassic Park. Gogurt. Jolly Ranchers. Star Wars. What is a prequel?

“What is this?”

“It’s a list,” Jane says. “Of things and people you’ve mentioned, or Niko or Myla or Wes, or people I’ve overheard on the train. There’s a lot I have to catch up on.”

August pulls her eyes up to search Jane’s face. She looks … nervous.

“How long have you been making this?” August asks.

She rubs a hand over the short hairs at the back of her neck. “A few months.”

“You—you want to know all this stuff? You never asked. I thought you didn’t want to know.”

“I didn’t, at first,” Jane admits. “I wanted to go back, and I was so determined to get there that I didn’t care about anything else. I didn’t want to know anything that might make it harder. But then there was you, and I wanted to know what made you you, and I—I don’t know.” She kicks the toe of her sneaker against the floor. “At some point I guess I decided … it wouldn’t be the worst thing if I had to stay. It could be okay.”

August clutches the Moleskine to her chest. “I—I know I said—but I didn’t think you’d actually want to stay. You really mean that?”

“Part of me, yeah. You were right. There’s a lot more to it than going back to where I started. I mean, I ride this train every day, and I see gay people just holding hands in public, in front of everyone, and most of the time, nobody fucks with them, and that’s … I don’t know if you realize how crazy that is to me. I know things aren’t perfect, but at least if I stayed, it’d be different.” She’s been studying her cuticles, but she looks up. “And I could be with you.”

August’s mouth falls open.

“With me.”

“Yeah, I—I know what it would cost me, but … I don’t know. All this—this whole mess—it scares the shit out of me.” She swallows, sets her jaw. “But the thought of staying with you doesn’t scare me at all.”

“I didn’t—I thought this was just a good time to you.”

That earns her a short, quiet laugh.

“I wanted it to be, but it’s not. It hasn’t ever been.” Her eyes have this way of swallowing up the grimy fluorescent light of the train and transforming it into something new. Right now, when she looks at August: stars. The goddamn Milky Way. “What is it to you?”

“It’s—you’re—God, Jane, it’s … I want you,” August says. It’s not eloquent or cool, but it’s true, finally. “Whatever it means, however you want me, as long as you’re here, that’s what it is to me, and maybe that sounds desperate, but I—”

She never gets to finish, because Jane’s yanking her in and kissing her, drinking down the rest of her sentence.

August touches her face and opens her eyes, breaking off to demand, “What does that mean?”

“It means I—you—” Jane attempts. She leans down for another kiss, but August holds her stubbornly in place. “Okay—yeah, I want that. I want what you want.”

“Okay,” August says. She licks her lips. They taste like a clean room and a full house and a 4.5 GPA. Like her own specific heaven. “So, we’re—we’re together until we’re not, if that’s what it comes down to.”

“Yeah,” Jane says.

It’s as simple as that, one syllable dropping off Jane’s tongue, two pairs of sneakers tucked between each other, this long career of wanting but not having and having but not knowing folded up into a word.

“Okay,” August says. “I can live with that.”

“Even if I end up leaving?”

“It doesn’t matter,” August says, even though it does. It matters, but it doesn’t make a difference. “Whatever happens, I want you.”

She rises up on her toes and kisses Jane, short, soft, a flashbulb burst, and Jane says, “But in case I do end up staying … you have to teach me about my list.”

August opens her eyes. “Really?”

“I mean, I can’t just jump into the twenty-first century without knowing how the wifey works—”

“Wi-Fi.”

“See!” She points at August. “Tip of the iceberg, Landry. You’ve got so much to teach me.”

August grins as the train stops at Union Square and commuters start piling off, freeing up a few spaces on the bench. “All right. Sit down. I’ll tell you about the Fast and Furious franchise. That’ll be a good hour.”

Jane does, kicking one foot up and folding her hands behind her head.

“Man,” she says, smiling up at August. “I’m having one hell of a year.”

---

August waits until the next day to bring it up.

Sometimes, the process of bringing back Jane’s memories feels mystical and profound, like they’re digging around in invisible magic, pulling up wispy roots. But a lot of the time, it’s this: August shoving a PBR tallboy into a brown paper bag and carrying it down to the subway at one in the afternoon like a lush, hoping the smell of shitty beer will jog something in Jane’s brain.

“Okay, so,” August says when she sits. “I found something out, and I—I didn’t tell you because we weren’t talking, but I need to tell you now, because you need to remember the rest. This might be really big.”

Jane eyes her warily. “Okay…”

“All right, so, um, first let me give you this.” August hands her the beer, shooting a glare at a tourist who looks up from his guidebook to goggle at them. “You don’t have to drink it, but Jerry mentioned that the two of you used to drink them together, so I thought the smell might help.”

“Okay,” Jane says. She cracks the can open. The tourist makes a disapproving noise, and Jane rolls her eyes at him. “You’re gonna see worse things than this on the subway, man.” She turns back to August. “I’m ready.”

August clears her throat. “So … have you ever heard of the New York blackout of 1977? Huge power outage across most of the city?”

“Um … no. No, I guess that was after I got down here. Sounds like hell, though.”

“Yeah, so … you remember Jerry? The cook at Billy’s?”

Jane nods, her mouth quirking in a fond smile. “Yeah.”

“I talked to him about you, and he … um, I think he told me how you got stuck.”

Jane’s been holding the PBR up to her nose to sniff it, but she lowers it at that. “What?”

“Yeah, he—the last time he saw you was your last day in New York. The two of you went to Coney Island and got drunk together, and y’all were waiting for the Q when the blackout happened. He said he never saw or heard from you again. And if that was supposed to be your last day, it would explain why none of your friends looked for you when you disappeared. They basically thought you ghosted them.”

“I thought you said I wasn’t a ghost.”

“No,” August says, biting back a smile, “it’s, like, an expression for when you cut contact with someone without explanation.”

“Oh, so they … they thought I just left without saying goodbye?”

That brings August up short.

She leans in, touches Jane’s knee. “Do you want to take a break?”

“No,” Jane says, shrugging it off. “I’m fine. What’s your question?”

“My question is if you can remember anything else that happened that night.”

Jane squeezes her eyes shut. “I’m—I’m trying.”

“He said he fell on the tracks, and you jumped down to help him back up.”

Her eyes are closed, hand still curled around the beer. Something faint slides over her face.

“I jumped down…” she repeats.

The doors open at a new stop, and a tourist pushes past them, his suitcase slamming into Jane’s knee. Her beer sloshes out of the can and all over the sleeve of her jacket, dripping onto her jeans.

“Hey, asshole, watch where you’re going!” August yells. She reaches out to brush the beer off, but Jane’s eyes have snapped open. “Jane?”

“He spilled a beer,” Jane says. “Jerry. We were … we were drinking Pabst from my backpack on the beach. It was the middle of a heat wave, and he kept giving me shit for carrying my leather jacket around, but I told him he just didn’t understand my devotion to the punk lifestyle, and we laughed. And he…” Her eyes slide shut, like she’s lost in the memory. “Oh man, then a wave knocked him off-balance and he spilled his whole beer, and I told him it was time to get him home before I had to fish his stupid drunk ass out of the Atlantic. We went to catch the Q, and he started throwing up, then he fell on the tracks. I—I remember he was wearing a fucking CCR T-shirt. And I helped him out, but then I—oh. Oh.”

She opens her eyes, looking right back at August.

“What?”

“I tripped. I dropped my backpack, and every—everything I care about is in here, so I was trying to get it, and I tripped. And I fell. On the third rail. I remember seeing the third rail right in front of my face, and I thought, ‘Fuck, this is it. This is how I die. That’s so fucking stupid.’ And then … there’s nothing.”

She looks scared, like she just lived it all over again.

“You didn’t die.”

“But I should have, right?”

August pushes her glasses up into her hair, rubbing at her eyes, trying to think. “I’m not Myla, but … I think you touched the third rail at the exact moment of the power surge that caused the blackout. It must have been enough of a burst of energy that it did more than kill you. It threw you out of time.”

Jane considers this. “That’s kind of cool, actually.”

August pushes her glasses back down, blinking Jane into focus and checking her face for the warning signs she didn’t pay enough attention to the last time they brought back something big. She doesn’t see any.

She holds a breath. There’s one more thing.

From her pocket, she pulls out the postcard from California. She hands it to Jane, pointing at the signature.

“There’s something else,” August says. “This might sound crazy, but I … I think Augie sent you this. I just don’t understand how. Do you remember it at all?”

She turns it over in her hands, touching the paper like she’s trying to absorb it through her skin.

“He’s alive,” she says slowly. It’s not a recitation of a fact she already knew. It sounds fresh. August has shown this postcard to her a dozen times, but this is the first time she’s looked at it with recognition.

“It came out of nowhere,” Jane says. “I don’t … I don’t even know how he found me. I was fucking terrified when I got it, because I was sure he was dead and I was getting mail from a ghost. I almost didn’t call the number, but I did.”

“And it was him?”

“Yeah,” Jane says with a gradual nod. “Something happened, on his way to work that night. I don’t even remember—some neighbor needed help, someone had a flat tire or something. He missed his shift. He was supposed to be there when the fire happened, but he missed his shift. He wasn’t there. He survived.”

August releases a breath.

He told her, Jane says, that he couldn’t bear that he lived when his friends didn’t, so he left, sick and blind with grief. He borrowed a car and drove out of town and woke up three days later strung out in Beaumont and decided not to come back. Started drinking too much, started hitchhiking, lost himself for a year or two, until a truck driver dropped him off in Castro, and someone pulled him off the sidewalk and told him they’d get him some help.

“He was doing well,” Jane remembers, smiling a little. “He was sober, he’d gotten his life together. He had a steady boyfriend. They were living together. He sounded happy. And he told me he thought I should come home, that San Francisco was ready for people like us now. We’ll take care of each other, Jane.”

“Jerry said,” August says, “well, he said you were supposed to be moving back to California.”

“Yeah, it was … the way Augie talked about his family … that’s what did it for me,” she says. “He felt like he missed his chance with them, and I—I saw through the guilt for a second. I realized I didn’t have to miss mine.”

She swallows, palming her side, the dog inked there for her mother. August waits for her to go on.

“New York was—it was good. It was really good. It gave me a lot of stuff I hadn’t had since New Orleans. It was like I finally figured out who I was. How to be who I was,” Jane says. “And I wanted my family to know that person. So, I mailed Augie my record collection, and I was gonna call him when I got into town.”

“Did they know?” August asks. “Your family, did they know you were coming back?”

“No,” Jane says. “I haven’t talked to them since ’71. I was too nervous to call.”

August nods.

“Can I ask you something else?”

Jane, still examining the handwriting, nods without looking up.

“Did he say … did Augie tell you why he stopped writing home?”

“Hmm?”

“He used to write my mom every week, until summer 1973. She never heard from him again after that.”

“No, he—he told me he was still writing to her. He said she hadn’t written back in years, and he didn’t think she wanted to hear from him anymore, but he was still writing.” Her eyes move from the card to August’s face, studying her. “She never got them, did she?”

“No,” August says. “She didn’t.”

“Shit.” It hangs unsaid in the air: someone else must have gotten to those letters first. August has a pretty good idea who. “What a fucking mess.”

“Yeah,” August agrees. She slides her hand over Jane’s at her side and squeezes.

They ride in quiet for a few stops, watching the sun set behind apartment blocks, until Jane stands and starts pacing the aisle in that way she does, like a tiger in captivity.

“So, if you’re right about how I got stuck,” she says, turning to August, “what does that mean for getting me out?”

“It means, if we can … somehow re-create the event, and have you touch the third rail the same way you did last time, maybe it’d reset you.”

Jane nods. “Could you do that?”

She’s rallying, throwing memories over her back like luggage, cracking the knuckles of one hand against the palm of the other like she’s getting ready for a fight. August would kill for her. Space and time are nothing.

“I think so,” August says. “We’d have to cause a surge, and we’d need access to the power controls for the substation that manages this line, but I’m close. I’m waiting to get some public records about exactly which one that is.”

“Then it’s only a matter of … breaking into city property and not electrocuting yourself.”

“Yeah, basically.”

“Sounds simple enough,” Jane says with a wink. “Have you tried a Molotov cocktail?”

August groans. “Man, how did you avoid the FBI watch list? That would have made this whole mystery so much easier to solve.”

---

Myla agrees with August’s theory. So now, they have a plan. But when they’re not trying to figure out how to take down part of New York City’s power grid, they’re selling out double Delilah’s capacity for the Save Billy’s Pancakepalooza, which means there are two weeks to find a new venue. They’ve been through bars, concert venues, art galleries, bingo halls—all booked or asking for a fee they can’t begin to afford.

For August, it’s nights waiting tables and days split between research on substations and every logistical snag of planning a massive fundraiser. With whatever she has leftover, she’s on the Q, threading her fingers through Jane’s and trying to memorize everything about her while she still can.

Her mom has given up on texting her, and August really doesn’t know what to say. She can’t tell her what she’s found out over the phone. But she also isn’t ready to see her.

It occurs to August that it’s just as fucked up to keep this information to herself as it was for her mom to hide things. At least, she tells herself, she’s doing it to protect her. But maybe that really is what her mom thought too.

It’s a train of thought that always brings her back to Jane. She thinks about Jane’s family, her parents and sisters, none of them ever knowing what happened to her. August has checked the records enough times to know that there was never a missing persons report filed for Biyu Su. As far as Jane’s family knew, Jane left and didn’t want to be found.

August wonders if any of them have boxes of files like her mom. When this is over, one way or the other, she’ll find them. If Jane goes back to her time, she’ll probably find them on her own. But if she stays, or if—well, if she’s gone, they deserve to know.

That’s what she’s thinking about when she clocks out of her late shift and takes her Su Special from the window. People who leave, people who get left behind. The Q closes in a month, Billy’s in four, and it’s all over unless they find a way to stop it.

“So,” Myla says when August slides into the booth. She’s been giving August significant eyes across the dining room since she and Niko sat down, so she must have some news. “You know how I’ve been, like, shaking down all my old Columbia classmates to find out if anyone has any MTA connections?”

August swallows a bite of sandwich. “Yeah.”

“Well … I found a lead.”

“Really? Who? What do they do?”

“Um,” Myla says, watching her pancake slowly absorb syrup, “he actually works at the Transit Power Control Center.”

“What?” August says, nearly upsetting a ketchup bottle. “Are you kidding me? That’s perfect! Have you talked to him about it?”

“Yeah, so, uh…” She’s being something she never is: cagey. “That’s the thing. It’s kind of … my ex.”

August stares at her. Beside her, Niko continues serenely eating his cinnamon roll.

“Your ex,” August says flatly. “As in the one you dropped the night you met him.” She points at Niko with a fork, but he looks unbothered, chewing like a contented cow.

“Yeah, so,” Myla says, wincing. “In retrospect, maybe not my finest moment. The Libra jumped out. In my defense, though, he, like, high-key sucked. Way too into himself.”

“Is he still mad?”

“I mean, uh. He has me blocked on social. I found out from a friend of a friend who talks to him. So…”

August wants to scream. “So, we have a perfect in at the exact place we need access to, but we can’t use it because of your inability to keep it in your pants.”

“Says the woman getting subway head from a revenant,” Myla counters.

“The heart wants what it wants, August,” Niko says sincerely.

“I’m gonna murder both of you,” August says. “What are we gonna do?”

“Okay, anyway,” Myla says. “I have an idea. The Billy’s fundraiser, right? Obviously we need a new venue. I’ve been looking into a lot of unconventional places, like public spaces, condemned warehouses—”

“I thought you meant an idea for the Jane thing.”

“I’m getting there!” Myla chides. “Have you ever seen what the substations look like?”

She’s pretty sure she’s read and looked at every shred of information on substations in existence over the past couple of weeks, so, “Yeah.”

“They’ve got a kind of old-school techno-punk industrial vibe, right?” Myla continues. “And I was thinking, what if we could convince the city to let us use the Control Center as a venue? People use decommissioned subway stops for art installations all the time. We could say we’re into the aesthetic and want somewhere with a greater capacity to bring in more people. I can reach out to Gabe and see if he’ll help—he used to work at Delilah’s, maybe he’ll be sympathetic to the cause. Then once we get in, we just have to keep people distracted while I fuck with the line, which should be easy with a party that size. It’ll only take a couple of minutes, I think.”

August stares at her across the table.

“So … your idea is … a heist. You want us to pull off a heist.” August gestures helplessly at Niko, who has given up on his meal with a quarter left to go. “Niko can’t even pull off that cinnamon roll.”

Niko pats his stomach. “It was really filling.”

“It’s not a heist,” Myla hisses. “It’s … an elaborate, planned crime.”

“That’s a heist.”

“Look, do you have any other ideas? Because if not, I think we should give this a try. And if we do it right, we can raise a shitload of money for Billy’s at the same time.”

August listens to the murmur of tables and the scrape of forks and maybe, if she strains, Lucie cursing out the cash register. She does love this place. And Jane loves it too.

“Okay,” August says. “We can try.”

---

It’s Jane’s idea, actually, that puts one of the last crucial pieces in place.

“I’m pretty sure,” August says, “that if you can walk between cars, you can walk on the tracks. So, on the night of the party, when Myla does the surge, you should be able to touch the third rail. But I don’t know how to prove it before then. The Q’s always running, so there’s not really a time to test it. We could jump out, but there’s no way to make sure we’d be off the tracks safely before the next train.”

Jane thinks and says, “What about the R/W?”

August frowns. “What about it?”

“Look,” Jane says, jabbing her finger at the subway map posted by the doors. “Right here, at Canal Street, they split off from the Q.” She traces the yellow line down to the bottom tip of Manhattan and across the river, to where it meets up with the blue and orange lines at Jay Street. “Those are the only two trains that run on this track.”

“You’re right,” August says.

“I’ve only met Wes three times,” Jane says, “but every single time, he’s bitched about how the R wasn’t running that day. So if the R isn’t running, we could have time to sneak out the back of the train at Canal and follow the R tracks toward city hall, and maybe, maybe it’d be close enough to the Q that I could walk on them. Maybe we could even see how far I can go.”

August thinks—she’s not sure, exactly, that it’ll work, but Jane’s also become a lot more solidly here lately. Tangibly rooted in reality. Maybe she couldn’t have done it months ago, but it’s possible the line will afford her a little more slack now.

“Okay,” August says. “We just have to hope the MTA fucks up soon.”

The MTA, reliably, fucks up soon. Three days later, Wes texts her bitterly from his evening commute: As requested, here is your notification that the R is out of service.

Hell yes!!!August texts back.

My night is fucked, Wes responds, but go off I guess.

She meets Jane on the Q’s very last car, and when it stops at Canal, they slide the door open as quietly as they can.

“Okay,” August says, “just, you know, a general reminder that the third rail carries 625 volts that will absolutely kill a person and should have killed you before. So, you know. Uh.” She glances down at the rails and wonders how Jane Su can get her to flirt with death so often. “Be careful.”

“Sure,” Jane says, and she jumps off the back of the train, and—

Like that first day when they tried every stop, she’s gone.

August finds her six cars up, and they weave their way to the back and try again.

“This is annoying,” Jane says when she reappears behind August like an exasperated Bloody Mary.

“We have to keep trying,” August tells her. “It’s—”

Before August can finish her sentence, Jane brushes past her and jumps off the platform—aiming straight for the third rail.

“Jane, don’t—!”

She lands firmly on her feet, both sneakers planted on the third rail, and she grins. No shock. Not a single singed hair. August gapes.

“I knew it!” Jane crows. “I’m part of the electricity! It can’t hurt me!”

“You—” The train’s brakes disengage, and August has to hold her breath and jump, throwing herself hard in the opposite direction of Jane. She lands in the packed dirt to the side of the tracks, ripping one knee of her jeans, and rolls to look at Jane’s smug expression. “You could have died!”

“I’m pretty confident I can’t,” Jane says, like it’s nothing. “At least, not that way.” She paces down the rail, one foot in front of the other, headed toward the fork in the tracks. “Come on! Next train’s coming soon!”

“Un-fucking-believable,” August mumbles, but she dusts herself off and follows.

When they reach the relative safety of the tunnel toward City Hall, the light from the station starts to shrink, and they’re lit only by blue and yellow lights lining the tunnel. It’s strange to walk alongside Jane without stopping, but when Jane shouts happily into the echoing dark, it’s infectious. She starts to run, and August runs after her, hair flying and the hard floor of the tracks under her shoes. It feels like she could run forever if it’s with Jane.

But Jane’s footsteps stutter abruptly to a halt.

“Oh,” she says.

August turns back to her, out of breath. “What?”

“I can’t—I don’t think I can go any farther. It’s—it feels weird. Wrong.” She touches a hand to the center of her chest, like she’s having existential heartburn. “Oh, yikes. Yeah, this is it. This is as far as I can go.”

She sits on the third rail.

“Still cool though, right?”

August nods. “Yeah, and, this is only, like, a taste. An appetizer. An amuse-bouche of freedom. We’re gonna get you the real deal.”

“I know. I believe you,” Jane says, looking at August like she means it.

August sinks down across from her, sitting gingerly on a track. She’s read that the other two rails are very lightly electrified, only enough to carry signals, so she figures she’s okay. “We can sit here for a while, if you want.”

“Yeah,” Jane says, pulling her knees up. She stretches her arms out like she’s trying to touch as much open air as she can, even in the stuffy confines of the tunnel. “Yeah, this is nice.”

“I have—” August feels around the bottom of her bag. “Um, one orange, if you want to split it.”

“Oh, yeah, please.”

August tosses it over, and she catches it smoothly.

More and more lately, August has stopped studying Jane. She’s stopped looking for clues in every expression or offhand comment, and it feels good to just see her. To listen to the sound of her low voice talking about nothing, to watch her fingers effortlessly work the orange rind, to soak in her company. August feels like one of the little packets of cream she always dumps into Jane’s coffee, steeping in sugar and warmth.

Jane piles bits of orange peel on her knee and splits the segments into halves. When August reaches out to take one, her fingertips brush the back of Jane’s hand, and she yelps and jumps backward from a short, sharp shock.

“Whoa,” Jane says. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” August says, shaking out her hand. “You’re, like, conductive.”

Jane holds her fingers up in front of her face, going slightly cross-eyed to examine them. “Cool.” She glances up to see August watching her. “What?”

“You’re…” August attempts. “I just like everything about you.” She waves her hands at the smile that appears on Jane’s face. “Stop! It’s gross! What I said is gross!”

“Everything about me?” Jane teases.

“No, definitely not that shit-eating grin. Categorically hate that.”

“Oh, I think you like that the best.”

“Shut up,” August says. The darkness, she hopes, hides the blushing.

Jane laughs, popping a bit of orange into her mouth. “It is crazy, though, when you think about it.” She licks a drop of juice off her bottom lip. “You kind of know everything there is to know about me.”

August scoffs. “There’s no way that’s true.”

“It is! And I used to be so mysterious and sexy.”

“I mean, you’re literally sitting on the third rail conducting electricity right now, so, still mysterious. Now, sexy … hmm. I don’t know about that.”

Jane rolls her eyes. “Oh, fuck off.”

August laughs and dodges the orange peel Jane throws at her. “Tell me something I don’t know about you, then,” she says. “Surprise me.”

“Okay,” Jane says, “but you have to do one too.”

“You already know more about me than most people.”

“That’s a testament to you living like you’re under deep cover and can’t compromise your civilian identity, not how much you’ve told me.”

“Fine,” August relents. Jane taps her nose, and August scowls—she’s a pushover for Jane. They both know it. “You go first.”

“Okay … hmm … oh, I’ve made friends with a subway rat.”

“You’ve what?”

“Look, it gets really boring down here!” Jane says defensively. “But there’s this one white rat that hangs out on the Q sometimes. She’s so big and so fat and so round, like a gigantic steamed bun. I named her Bao.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I love her. Sometimes I give her snacks.”

“You’re a nightmare.”

“Judge all you want, but I’m the only one who’ll be spared in the inevitable Great Rat Uprising. Your turn.”

August thinks, and says, “I’ve cheated on one test my entire life. Junior year of high school. I’d been up all night going through public records with my mom, and I ran out of time to study, so I picked the lock on my teacher’s room before school, found out what the essay question was, and memorized an entire page from the book by fifth period so I could answer it.”

“God, you fucking nerd.” Jane snorts. “That’s not even cheating. That’s … being unfairly prepared.”

“Excuse me, I thought it was very edgy at the time. Your turn.”

“My mom started going gray at, like, twenty-five,” she says, “and I’m pretty sure it’s gonna happen to me too. Or at least it would have if I weren’t, you know.” She does a vague hand gesture to express the whole ineffability of being. August shoots a finger gun back.

“In fourth grade, I memorized the entire periodic table and all of the presidents and vice presidents in chronological order, and I still remember it all.”

“I saw The Exorcist opening weekend and didn’t sleep for four days.”

“I hate pickles.”

“I snore.”

“I can’t sleep if it’s too quiet.”

Jane pauses, and says, “Sometimes I wonder if I fell out of time because I never really belonged where I started and the universe is trying to tell me something.”

It’s offhand, casual, and August watches her pull off another orange segment and eat it unceremoniously, but she knows Jane. It’s not easy for her to say things like that.

She figures she can give something back.

“When I was a kid, after Katrina—you remember how I told you about the hurricane?” Jane nods. August goes on, “There was this year I got moved around to different schools until my old school reopened and we could go home. And my anxiety got … bad. Like, really bad. So, I convinced myself that, because the statistical likelihood of something happening in real life exactly the way I imagined it was so low, if I imagined the worst possible things in vivid detail, I could mathematically reduce the odds of them happening. I convinced myself that my brain had power over the probability projections of the universe. I’d lie awake at night thinking about all the worst stuff that could happen like it was my job, and I don’t know if I ever really broke the habit.”

Jane listens silently, nodding. One of the things August loves most about her is that she doesn’t go chasing after unspoken words when August is done talking. She can let a silence settle, let a truth breathe.

Then she opens her mouth and says, “Sometimes I like to have my ass slapped during sex.”

August squawks out a laugh, caught off guard. “What? You’ve never asked me to do that.”

“Angel, there are a lot of things I’d like to do with you that can’t be done on a train.”

August swallows. “Point.”

Jane raises her eyebrows. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Aren’t you gonna write that down in your little sex notebook?”

“My—” August’s face is instantly hot. “You weren’t supposed to know about that!”

“You’re not that discreet, August. One time I swear you whipped it out before I even got my pants buttoned.”

August moans in dismay. She knows exactly what entry Jane is talking about. Page three, section M, subheading four: overstimulation.

“I have to die now,” August says into her hands.

“No, it’s cute! You’re such a nerd. It’s endearing!” Jane laughs, always so amused about making August suffer. It’s despicable. “Your turn.”

“No way, you already exposed a thing I didn’t think you knew about me,” August says. “I’m feeling very vulnerable.”

“Oh my God, you’re impossible.”

“I’m not going.”

“Then we’re at an impasse. Unless you wanna come over here and kiss me.”

August lifts her face out of her hands. “And get electrocuted? I’m pretty sure if I kissed you right now, it would literally kill me.”

“That’s how it always feels, isn’t it?”

“Oh my God,” August groans, even though her heart does something humiliating at the words. “Shut up and eat your orange.”

Jane sticks her tongue out but does as she’s told, finishing off her half and licking her fingertips when she’s done.

“I missed oranges,” she says. “Really good ones, though. You gotta start grocery shopping in Chinatown.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, back home, my mom would take me to all the markets every Sunday morning and let me pick out the fruit because I always had this sixth sense with sweet stuff. Best oranges you could find. We used to get so many, I’d have to carry some home in my pockets.”

August smiles to herself as she pictures a tiny Jane, chubby cheeks and untied shoes, toddling through a fruit stand with her pockets full of produce. She imagines Jane’s mom as a young woman with her hair tied up and shot through with premature gray, haggling with a butcher in Cantonese. San Francisco, Chinatown, the place that made Jane.

“What’s the first thing you’ll do,” August asks, “when you get back to ’77?”

“I don’t know,” Jane says. “Try to catch that bus to California, I guess.”

“You should. I bet California misses you.”

Jane nods. “Yeah.”

“You know,” August says, “if this works, by now you’ll be almost seventy.”

Jane pulls a face. “Oh my God, that’s so weird.”

“Oh yeah.” August gazes up at the tunnel ceiling. “I bet you have a house, and it’s filled with souvenirs from all over the world because you spent your thirties backpacking through Europe and Asia. Windchimes everywhere. Nothing matches.”

“The furniture is nice and sturdy, but I never take care of the yard,” Jane puts in. “It’s a jungle. You can’t even see the front door.”

“The homeowners’ association hates you.”

Jane chuckles. “Good.”

August lets a quiet moment go by before adding, carefully, “I bet you’re married.”

In the low light, she can see Jane’s smile dip downward, a corner of her mouth tugging. “I don’t know.”

“I hope you are,” August says. “Maybe some girl finally came along at the right time, and you married her.”

Jane shrugs, pursing her lips. The dimple pops out on one side.

“She’s gonna have to live with the fact that I’ll always wish she were someone else.”

“Come on,” August says. “That’s not fair. She’s a nice lady.”

Jane looks up and rolls her eyes, but her mouth relaxes. She rests her hands on the rail and cranes her head back.

“What if I stay?” she says. “What’s the first thing you’ll do?”

There are a thousand things August could say, a thousand things she wants to do. Sleep next to her. Buy her lunch at the jerk chicken joint across the street. Brighton Beach. Prospect Park. Kiss her with the door shut.

But she says simply, “Take you home with me.”

Before Jane can respond, a flashlight beam cuts through the darkness at the city hall end of the tunnel. Jane’s head whips around.

“Hey! Who’s in there?” a gruff voice shouts. “Get the fuck out of the tunnel!”

“Fuckin’ pigs,” Jane says, jumping up and scattering orange peel everywhere. “Run!”

They run back through the tunnel toward Canal Street, Jane stumbling in the rush but never losing her balance on the third rail, and at some point near the fork, they start laughing. Loud, breathless, incredulous, hysterical laughter, filling up the tracks and pulling at August’s lungs as she struggles toward their line. When they reach the Q, there’s a train just pulling out of the station, and Jane takes a running jump and grabs the handle on the back of the last car.

“Come on!” she yells, turning back for August’s hand. August grabs on and lets Jane’s strong grip pull her up.

“Is this our thing?” Jane shouts over the rattle of the train as it carries them toward Brooklyn. “Kissing between subway cars?”

“You haven’t kissed me yet!” August points out.

“Oh, right,” Jane says. She brushes August’s windswept hair out of her face, and when their lips meet, she tastes like oranges and lightning.

---

August stays on the train late into the night, until the cars start to clear out and the timetable stretches longer and longer. She waits for the magic hour, and from the way Jane drags her hand along her waist, she’s waiting too.

There’s no convenient darkness this time, no perfectly timed stall, but there’s an empty car and the Manhattan Bridge and Jane pressing into her, hips moving and short breaths and kiss-slick lips. It should feel dirty, to be with Jane like this, here, but what’s crazy is, she finally understands it all. Love. The whole shape of it. What it means to touch someone like this and want to have a life with them at the same time.

Deliriously, the image of Jane with her house and her plants and her windchimes swims into view, and August is there too, wearing the shape of her body into an old bed. Jane slots between her legs and she thinks, fifty years. Jane bites down on her throat and she thinks of framed photos and stained recipe cards. Jane tightens against her fingertips and she thinks, home. Her eyes shut for Jane’s mouth and a good night’s sleep just the same.

I love you,she thinks. I love you. Please stay. I don’t know what I’ll do if you leave.

She thinks it, but she doesn’t say it. That wouldn’t be fair to either of them.