Chapter 14

14

new york > brooklyn > community > missed connections

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Posted October 12, 2004

Woman with red Converse on the Q (Brooklyn)

Apologies if this isn’t the right place for this, but I’m not sure where else to post. Not looking for a romantic connection. I was riding the Q with my son on Wednesday evening when a short-haired mid-twenties woman approached us and offered my son a pin from her jacket. It was a 70s-era gay pride pin, clearly a well-loved antique. My son is 15 and hasn’t had the easiest time at school since coming out earlier this year. Her act of kindness made his whole week. If you’re her, or you think you might know her, please let me know. I’d love to thank her.

In the end, it takes exactly one phone call for Gabe to agree to meet Myla for coffee.

“What can I say?” Myla says, pulling on an extremely flimsy top. “I’m the one who got away.”

“I’m going with you,” August tells her. She slings her bag over her shoulder, double-checking the pocketknife and mace. “This could be a ploy to get you alone so he can exact a bloody revenge.”

“Okay, Dateline, reel it in,” Myla says, shaking her hair out. “Love the instinctive mistrust of cis straight white men, but Gabe is harmless. He’s just boring. Like, really boring, but thinks he’s really interesting.”

“How did he get a job at Delilah’s?”

“He’s from one of those New York families, so his dad’s the landlord. He’s very straight.”

“And you dated him because…?”

“Look,” Myla says, “we all make mistakes when we’re young. Mine just happens to be six-foot-three and look exactly like Leonardo DiCaprio.”

“Revenant or Inception?”

“You really got me fucked up if you think I’d settle for anything less than Romeo + Juliet.”

“Damn, okay, I guess I get it.” August shrugs. “But I’m still going with you.”

Gabe lives in Manhattan, so they take the Q over the river, Jane wedged between them as they catch her up the latest status of the plan.

“I have to say, I’m impressed,” she says, throwing her arm over August’s shoulders. “This is definitely the most organized crime I’ve ever been involved in.”

“When are you going to tell me about all the other crimes?” August says.

“I have told you. They were mostly vandalism. Squatting. Disrupting the peace. The occasional breaking and entering. Maybe some light petty theft. One incident of arson, but I was wearing a mask, so nobody could prove it was me.”

“Those are some of the sexiest crimes,” August points out. “For people who are into crimes. Very Bender from The Breakfast Club.”

“That’s—” Myla starts.

“I know,” Jane says. “August told me about The Breakfast Club.”

Myla nods, mollified.

August forces Myla to let her go into the coffee shop a minute ahead to maintain cover, so she’s perched at the bar with an iced coffee when Myla enters. She tries to case out which of the twenty-something guys with black coffees and dogeared moleskines could be Gabe, until one with floppy hair and a pointy chin waves Myla over. He’s got a flannel tied around his waist and a faded Pickle Rick button on his messenger bag. August cannot imagine what he and Myla ever had in common. He looks almost pathetically happy to see her.

August sits back and sips her coffee and swipes through the substation homework she gave herself this week. She’s narrowed down which substation they need access to, so now it’s just about making sure they can get into the control room. Myla will take care of the rest.

Myla and Gabe wrap up after an hour, and she hugs him goodbye and throws him a call me! gesture before easing out the door. August hangs back for a minute, watching him stare after her. He looks like he might cry.

“Yikes,” August says under her breath as she heads for the door.

She meets Myla down the block, where she’s thumbing through her phone.

“That looked like it went unexpectedly well.”

Myla smiles. “Turns out he blocked me on social media because he ‘couldn’t stand to see how I’m doing’ without him. Which, I mean, fair. A bitch is doing spectacularly.” She holds up her phone. “He already texted me.”

“What did he say about the event?”

“Oh, this is the best part. Get this: he got the job because his uncle is one of the managers, so he doesn’t think he’ll have any trouble getting them to agree to let us use the space. Good old-fashioned nepotism to the rescue.”

“Holy shit,” August says. She thinks about Niko pulling the ace of swords from his tarot deck, about all the jade he’s been hiding around the apartment lately. Maybe it’s luck, but August can’t help but feel like someone has his thumb on the scale. “So now what?”

“He’s gonna talk to his uncle and call me tomorrow. I’m gonna head to Billy’s and talk to Lucie about moving things to the new venue.”

“Cool, I’ll come with you.”

Myla puts a hand out. “Nope. You have something else you need to take care of.”

“What?”

“You need to figure out how to talk to Jane,” she says, pointing toward the Q stop down the street. “Because if we pull this off and it works, you might never see her again, and Niko says you have a lot of things left to say to each other.”

August looks at her, the summer sunset gleaming off her sunglasses and sparkling against the Manhattan sidewalk. The city moves around them like they’re pebbles in a creek bed.

“It’s—we’re gonna be fine,” August says. “She knows how I feel about her. And—and if it’s gonna end like this, there’s nothing either of us can do. There’s no point ruining whatever time we have left by being sad about it.”

Myla sighs. “Sometimes the point is to be sad, August. Sometimes you just have to feel it because it deserves to be felt.”

She leaves her on the corner, staring at the sharp tops of buildings heavy with pink and orange light.

How does she talk to Jane? Where does she even start? How does she explain that she used to be afraid to love anyone because there’s a well at the center of her chest and she doesn’t know where the bottom is? How does she tell Jane that she boarded it up years ago, and that this thing—not even love, but the hope for it—has pried up nails that have nothing to do with love at all?

She’s standing on a New York sidewalk, nearly twenty-four years old, and she’s found herself back at the first version of August, the one who hoped for things. Who wanted things. Who cried to Peter Gabriel and believed in psychics. And it all started when she met Jane.

She met Jane, and now she wants a home, one she’s made for herself, one nobody can take away because it lives in her like a funny little glass terrarium filled with growing plants and shiny rocks and tiny lopsided statues, warm with penthouse views of Myla’s paint-stained hands and Niko’s sly smile and Wes’s freckly nose. She wants somewhere to belong, things that hold the shape of her body even when she’s not touching them, a place and a purpose and a happy, familiar routine. She wants to be happy. To be well.

She wants to feel it all without being afraid it’ll fuck her up.

She wants Jane. She loves Jane.

And she doesn’t know how to tell Jane any of that.

---

It’s a week later when Gabe comes through—they secure the Control Center as a venue, and Lucie passes out personalized to-do lists like juice boxes at a little league soccer game.

“These are legit,” August says, looking hers over. “We should hang out more.”

“No, thank you,” Lucie says.

She and Niko are assigned to meet with the manager of Slinky’s to arrange the liquor, and after a back-room conversation that involves Niko promising the man a free psychic reading and his mom’s empanadillas, they return to the apartment with booze donations checked off the list.

“Have you talked to Jane yet?” Niko asks as they ascend the stairs. He doesn’t specify what they need to talk about. They both know.

“Why are you even asking me if you already know?” August counters.

Niko eyes her mildly. “Sometimes things that are supposed to happen still need to be nudged along.”

“Niko Rivera, fate’s enforcer since 1995,” August says with an eye roll.

“I like that,” Niko says. “Makes it sound like I carry a nail bat.”

As they reach the front door, it flies open, and Wes comes marching out with both arms full of bright yellow flyers.

“Whoa, where are you going?” Niko asks.

“Lucie put flyers on my to-do list,” Wes says. “Winfield just dropped them off.”

“SAVE PANCAKE BILLY’S HOUSE OF PANCAKES PANCAKEPALOOZA DRAG & ART EXTRAGANZA,” August reads out loud. “Good lord, did we let Billy name it? Nobody in his family knows how to edit.”

Wes shrugs, heading for the stairs. “All I know is I’m supposed to post them around the neighborhood.”

“Running away isn’t going to help!” Niko calls after him.

August raises an eyebrow. “Running away from what?”

As if on cue, Isaiah rounds the last corner of the stairs. He and Wes freeze, separated by ten steps.

Niko idly pulls a toothpick from his vest pocket and puts it in his mouth. “From that.”

There are a few seconds of tense silence before Wes takes his flyers and his shell-shocked expression and darts down the stairs. August can hear his sneakers echoing at double-time all the way down.

Isaiah rolls his eyes. Niko and August exchange a look.

“I’ll go,” August says.

She finds Wes on the street outside of the building, cussing out a stapler as he tries to affix a flyer to a telephone pole.

“Uh-oh,” August says, drawing up to him. “Did that stapler try to get emotionally intimate with you?”

Wes glares. “You’re hilarious.”

August reaches over and pries half the flyers out of Wes’s hands. “Will you at least let me help you?”

“Fine,” he grumbles.

They set off down the block, Wes attacking electrical poles and signposts while August wedges flyers into mail slots and between the bars of windows. Winfield must have dropped off something close to five hundred, because as they work their way through Flatbush, they barely make a dent in the stacks.

After an hour, Wes turns to her and says, “I need a smoke.”

August shrugs. “Go ahead.”

“No,” he says, rolling up his leftover flyers and shoving them into the back pocket of his jeans. “I need a smoke.”

Back in their apartment, Wes leads her to the door to his bedroom and says, “If you tell Niko or Myla I let you in here, I will deny it, and I will wait months until you’re no longer expecting my retribution and give all your stuff to that guy on the second floor whose apartment smells like onions.”

August nudges Noodles away from where he’s nipping at her heels. “Noted.”

Wes swings the door open, and there’s his bedroom, exactly how Isaiah described it: nice and neat and stylish, light woods, stone gray linens, his own artwork matted and framed on the walls. He’s got the taste of someone who grew up with the finest things, and August thinks about the trust fund Myla mentioned. He pops open an ornate wooden cigar box on his nightstand and retrieves a heavy silver lighter and a joint.

August can see the benefits to Wes’s slight build when he easily hops through the open window and onto the fire escape. She’s wider in the hips and not half as graceful; by the time she meets him, she’s out of breath and he’s perched mid-roof against one of the air-conditioning units, lighting up without breaking a sweat.

August nudges next to him and turns to face the street, looking out over the lights of Brooklyn. It’s not quiet, but it’s that smooth, constant flow of noise she’s grown used to. She likes to imagine if she listened closely enough, she could hear the Q rattling down the block, carrying Jane into the night.

She has to talk to Jane. She knows she has to.

Wes passes the joint over, and she takes it, thankful for any reason to stop thinking.

“What part of New York were you born in?” she asks him.

Wes exhales a stream of smoke. “I’m from Rhode Island.”

August pauses with the joint halfway to her mouth. “Oh, I just assumed because you’re such a—”

“Dick?”

She turns her head, squinting at him. It’s gray and dim up here, shot through with orange and yellow and red from the street below. The freckles on his nose blur together.

“I was gonna say a New York purist.”

The first hit burns on the way down, catching high in her chest. She’s only done this once before—passed to her at a party, desperately trying to act like she knew what to do—but she repeats what Wes did and holds the smoke for a few long seconds before letting it out through her nose. It all seems smooth until she spends the next twenty seconds coughing into her elbow.

“I moved here when I was eighteen,” Wes says once August is done, mercifully not commenting on her inability to handle her smoke. “And my parents basically pruned me off the family tree a year later once they realized I wasn’t going back to architecture school. But at least I still had this shitty, smelly, overpriced, nightmare city.”

He says the last part with a smile.

“Yeah,” August says. “Myla and Niko kind of … alluded.”

Wes sucks on the joint, the cherry flaring. “Yeah.”

“My, um … my mom. Her parents were super rich. Lots of expectations. And they, uh, basically acted like she didn’t exist either. But my mom is pretty fucked up too.”

“How so?” Wes asks, flicking ash before passing the joint back.

August manages to hold the second hit longer. She feels it in her face, spreading across her skin, starting to soften her edges. “She told me my whole life that her family didn’t want anything to do with me, so I never really had a family. And a couple of weeks ago, I found out that was all a lie, and now they’re all dead, so.”

She doesn’t mention the son they forgot or the letters they intercepted. By now, she knows she wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with her mom’s family, even if she had known they cared about her. But she’s Suzette Landry’s daughter, which means she’s bad at letting shit go.

“Is that why you haven’t been talking to her?” Wes asks.

August drops her eyes back to him. “How do you know I haven’t been talking to her?”

“It’s pretty easy to notice when the person on the other side of your wall stops having loud phone conversations with their mom every morning at the ass-crack of dawn.”

August winces. “Sorry.”

Wes accepts the joint from her and holds it between his thumb and forefinger. He looks distant, a stray breeze ruffling the ends of his hair.

“Look, nobody’s parents are perfect,” he says finally. “I mean, Niko’s parents let him transition when he was like nine, and they’ve always been super cool about it, but his mom still won’t let him tell his grandpa. And she’s constantly bugging him to move back to Long Island because she wants him to be closer to the family, but he likes it in the city, and they fight about it all the time.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, but at least she’s trying, you know? People like my parents, though, like your mom’s parents—that’s another level. I mean, I wanted to go to art school, and my parents were like, great, you can sketch buildings, and then you can take over the firm one day, and no, we’re not paying for therapy. And when I couldn’t do what they wanted, that was just it. They cut off the money and told me not to come home. They care about how it looks. They care about what they can circle jerk about with their idiot fucking Ivy League friends. But the minute you need something—like, actually need something—they’ll let you know just how much of a disappointment you are for asking.”

August has never thought of it quite that way.

Every day, she watches Wes turn cold and fuck his own life up, and she never says a word, because she knows there’s something big and heavy pinning him down. She’s never given her mom the same understanding. She’s never thought to transpose his hurt onto her mother’s to make better sense of it.

One of his last words sticks in her head, a drag at the bottom of the pool, her brain sloshing around it. Disappointment, he said. August remembers what he said after Isaiah helped them move a mattress.

He doesn’t deserve to be disappointed.

“For what it’s worth, you’ve never disappointed me once since I’ve met you.” August scrunches her nose at him. “In fact, I would say you have exceeded my expectations.”

Wes takes a hit and laughs it back out. “Thank you.”

He stubs out the joint and pulls himself to his feet.

“And … you know. For the record.” Carefully, August rises. “I, uh, I know how it feels to spend a long time alone on purpose, just to avoid the risk of what might happen if I wasn’t. And with Jane … I don’t think I could possibly have found a more doomed first love, but it’s worth it. It’s probably going to break my heart, and it’s still worth it.”

Wes avoids her eyes. “I just … he’s so … he deserves the best. And that’s not me.”

“You don’t get to decide that for him,” August points out.

Wes looks like he’s working on something to say to that when there’s a sound below. Someone’s opened a top-floor window. They wait it out, and there it is: Donna Summer at a truly inconsiderate volume, pouring out of Isaiah’s apartment.

They hold each other’s gaze for a full second before they dissolve into laughter, staggering into each other’s sides. Donna wails on about someone leaving a cake out in the rain, and Wes reaches into his back pocket and walks over to the edge of the roof and throws a hundred flyers into the night, raining down past the fire escape, the windows, the salty-warm smell of Popeyes, tumbling down the sidewalk and floating away on the breeze, wrapping around traffic lights, carried off toward the open tracks of the Q.

---

It’s the afternoon before the fundraiser, the last day before they try to send Jane home, when August finally fulfills Niko’s prophecy and climbs onto the Q.

She chooses a stop farther down than her usual one, Kings Highway near Gravesend, because there’ll be fewer people on the train closer to the end of the line. This far down, the track is mostly elevated, running through residential neighborhoods at eye level with third-story windows. The sun is bright today, but the train is cool when she steps on.

Jane’s sitting reliably at the end of the car, headphones on, eyes closed.

August stays near the door, watching her. This might be the last time she gets to see Jane in the sunset.

There’s a kick in her heart—one she knows Jane feels sometimes too—that says she should run. Spare herself the heartbreak and step off this train and switch cities, switch schools, switch lives until she finds somewhere else she could maybe be happy again.

But it’s too late. She could live another fifty years, love and leave a hundred cities, press her fingerprints into a thousand turnstiles and plane tickets, and Jane would still be there at the bottom of her heart. This girl in Brooklyn she just can’t shake.

The train pulls out of the station, and August pushes against its momentum to walk toward Jane’s seat.

She opens her eyes when August sits next to her.

“Hey,” she says, sliding her headphones off to rest around her neck.

August takes a breath to look at her, committing to memory the angle at which the sun hits the round tip of her nose and the lines of her jaw and her full bottom lip.

Then she reaches into her bag and pulls out a silver packet of Pop-Tarts.

“I brought you these,” August says, handing them over. “Since they won’t have the strawberry milkshake ones back where you came from.”

Jane takes them and slides them carefully into the front pocket of her backpack. She looks at August with her head tilted slightly, tracking the expression on her face.

“Tomorrow’s the big day, huh?”

August tries to smile. “Yeah.”

“Everything ready?”

“I think so,” she says. She’s done everything short of making her roommates run actual drills. They’re as prepared as they’re ever going to be. “What about you? Are you ready?”

“I mean, the way I see it, there are three possible outcomes of tomorrow. I go back, I stay, I die.” She shrugs, like it’s nothing. “I have to be okay with any of those.”

“Are you?”

“I don’t know,” Jane tells her. “I don’t want to die. I didn’t want to die when I was supposed to. So, I’m choosing to believe it’ll be one of the first two.”

August nods. “I like that attitude.”

There’s a goodbye here, somewhere. There’s a conclusion underneath the too-casual sprawl of Jane’s legs and their too-quiet voices. But August doesn’t know how to work up to what she has to say. If this was an easy case to solve, she’d find an answer and circle it in red ink and pin it to the wall: there it is, the thing she’s supposed to say to the girl she loves. She figured it out.

Instead, she says, “Is there anything else you want, before tomorrow?”

Jane shifts, dropping one foot onto the floor. The sunset’s making her glow, and it spreads when she smiles softly at August, one crooked tooth up front. August loves that tooth. It feels so stupid and small to love Jane’s crooked tooth when she might be about to lose her forever.

“I just want to say…” Jane starts, and she holds it like water in her mouth until she swallows and goes on: “Thank you, I guess. You didn’t have to help me, but you did.”

August huffs out a laugh. “I just did it because I thought you were hot.”

Jane touches her chin with the back of her knuckles. “There are worse reasons to break the laws of space and time.”

Next stop: Coney Island. The station where Jane’s long ride on the Q started years ago, where they’re going to try to save her. Slowly, the Wonder Wheel slides into view in the distance. They’ve seen it a thousand times from this train, lit up on summer nights, cutting yellow and green lines through the midday sky. August told Jane once about how it stayed when half the park was swept away. She knows how Jane likes stories about surviving.

“Don’t, uh…” Jane says, clearing her throat. “If I go back, after tomorrow. Don’t waste too much more time on me. I mean, don’t get me wrong—wait a respectful amount of time and all. But, you know.” She tucks August’s hair behind her ear, rubbing the side of her thumb once against her cheek. “Just make sure you make them nervous. They shouldn’t underestimate you.”

“Okay,” August says thickly. “I’ll write that down.”

Jane’s looking at her, and she’s looking at Jane, and the sun’s going down, and the goddamn thing is that it’s right there in both of their throats, but they can’t say it. They’ve always been hopeless at saying it.

Instead, August leans forward and kisses Jane on the lips. It’s soft, shaky like the rattle of the train but so much quieter. Their knees bump together, and Jane’s fingertips tangle in the ends of her hair. She feels something warm and wet on her cheek. She doesn’t know if she’s crying, or if Jane is.

Sometimes, when they kiss, it’s like August can see it. Just for a second, she can see a life that’s not here on this train. Not a distant future, not a house. An immediate present unspooling like film: shoes in a pile by the door, a bark of laughter under bar lights, passing a box of cereal over on a Saturday morning. A hand in her back pocket. Jane, walking up the subway steps and into the light.

When they break apart, August tips her head against Jane’s shoulder, pressing her cheek to the leather. It smells like years, like a lightning storm, like engine grease and smoke, like Jane.

There’s so much to say, but all she has is: “I was really lonely before I met you.”

Jane’s silent for a few seconds. August doesn’t look at her, but she knows how the shadows of telephone poles and rooftops slide over the high points of her cheekbones and the soft dips of her mouth. She’s memorized it. She closes her eyes and tries to picture them again, anywhere else.

Jane’s hand wraps around hers.

“So was I.”