Chapter 7

7

POLICE DEPARTMENT

CITY OF NEW YORK

Filed April 17, 1992

Incident: At 1715 hours on 17 April 1992, I, Officer Jacob Haley #739, was dispatched to Times Square-42nd Street subway station. Mark Edelstein (DOB 8-7-1954) reported middle-aged white male approx. 5’9 struck him in eye with closed fist in dispute over seat on Brooklyn-bound Q train. He states man shouted anti-semitic slur at him before assault. Suspect absent from scene. Victim states another passenger, mid-twenties Asian female approx. 5’7, forced attacker off train at 49th Street Station. Passenger also absent from scene.

August’s phone chimes at six on a Thursday morning with a text from Jane.

She rolls onto her side, elbow digging into her air mattress, which has halfway deflated during the night—she needs to get a real bed. Three texts from her mom. One missed call and voicemail from Billy’s. A red bubble announcing seventeen unread messages in her school email. One notification from her bank: her account is at $23.02.

Normally, any two of those overlapping would send her into an hour-long anxiety-fueled tear of aggressive productivity until everything was squared away, even if she had to lie and cheat to do it.

Her mom’s texts say: Hey, wanted to check in on that file I sent you. and Are you screening my calls, turd? and Miss you always but especially when I have a new file shipment. You were always so much better at sorting these.

She’ll deal with it. She will. Just … tomorrow.

She opens Jane’s text.

Hey August, got a new one: a restaurant on Mott where I got dumplings. I may have gotten in a fight with a cook there. Can’t place the year. Any ideas? Thanks, Jane Su

Jane has not yet figured out she doesn’t have to include a greeting and a sign-off, and August hasn’t had the heart to correct her.

P.S. I’m still thinking about that joke you made the other day about JFK. Hilarious. You’re a genius.

August has decided, in what she believes is a show of extreme maturity and dedication to helping Jane, to pretend the kiss was completely unimportant. Did it get the information they needed? Yes. Did she lie awake that night thinking about it for three and a half hours? Yes. Did it mean anything? No. So, no, she’s not sitting around, picturing Jane dropping her jacket on August’s bedroom floor and pushing her down onto the bed, breaking the bed, putting the bed back together—God, not the stupid bed-assembly fantasy again.

No, that would be extremely impractical. And August thinks, as she spends seven of her last dollars on a container of to-go dumplings for Jane, that she’s very practical, and everything is under complete control.

“My hero,” Jane swoons when August boards the Q and hands the bag over.

She’s looking particularly bright today, soaking in the sun that pours through the windows. She told August last week how thankful she is to at least be stuck on a train that spends a lot of its route above ground, and it shows. Her skin glows a golden brown that reminds August of humid summer afternoons in the Bywater—which, August realizes, is something they’ve both felt. What are the odds?

“Anything coming back to you?” August asks, climbing into the seat next to her. She perches her sneakers on the edge, tucking her knees up to her chest.

“Gimme a second,” Jane says, chewing thoughtfully. “God, these are good.”

“Can I–?” August stomach growls to finish the sentence.

“Yeah, here,” Jane says, holding a dumpling up on the end of a plastic fork and opening her mouth, indicating August do the same. She does, and Jane shoves the entire overstuffed dumpling in and laughs as August struggles to chew, reaching over to wipe sauce off her chin. “You gotta eat it all in one.”

“You’re so mean to me,” August says when she manages to swallow.

“I’m showing you how to eat dumplings the right way!” Jane says. “I’m being so nice!”

August laughs, and— God. She has to stop picturing what they look like to every other commuter: a couple laughing over takeout, ribbing each other on the ride to Manhattan. There’s a couple down the car, a man and woman, wrapped around each other like they’re trying to fuse by osmosis, and August hates that part of her wants to be them. It’d be so easy to slide her hand into Jane’s.

Instead, she pulls a notebook from her bag and a pencil from her hair, where it’s been holding a frizzy, half-assed updo in place all morning.

“Let me know if anything comes to you,” August says, shaking her hair out. It falls down her shoulders, her back, everywhere. Jane watches her try to contend with it with a bemused expression.

“What?” Jane says vaguely.

“Like, if you remember anything.”

“Oh,” she says, blinking. “Yeah.… It was this tiny place on Mott, my favorite dumplings in the city—I went there once or twice a week, at least. I think I was in Chinatown a lot, even though I lived in Brooklyn. It was easy to just take the Q to Canal.”

“Okay,” August says, taking a note.

“But I fucked up. I slept with a cook’s ex-girlfriend, and she found out and let me have it next time I came in, and I couldn’t go back after that. But, shit, it was worth it.”

The detective side of August contemplates a follow-up question, but the side of her that wants to live to see tomorrow decides against it.

“All right,” August says, not looking up from her notepad. “A restaurant in Chinatown that serves dumplings. There are only, like … five million of those.”

“Sorry,” Jane says, returning to her to-go box. “You can narrow it down to the ones that were open in the ’70s?”

“Sure, assuming they’re still operating, and have employment records going back that far, I could maybe get a name for that employee and maybe track her down and maybe she’ll know something.” August puts her pencil down, looks at Jane finally—who is staring at her with cheeks stuffed full of dumpling and a startled expression—and prays she survives this. “Or, we could get you to remember this girl’s name.”

“How’ll we do that?” Jane says through a mouthful of pork and dough.

August looks at her puffy cheeks and swoopy hair and blows right through every piece of mental caution tape to say, “Kiss me.”

Jane chokes.

“You—” Jane coughs, forcing it down. “You want me to kiss you again?”

“Here’s the thing,” August says. She’s calm. She’s totally calm, just doing casework. It doesn’t mean anything. “It’s April. The Q shuts down in September. We’re running out of time. And the other day—when we kissed—that worked. It brought back something big. So, I think—”

“You think if you kiss me, it’ll bring this girl back like it brought back Jenny?”

“Yeah. So. Let’s…” August thinks back to what they said last time. “Do it for research.”

“Okay,” Jane says, expression unreadable. “For research.”

She bundles her takeout back into its bag, and August stands and throws her hair over her shoulder. She can do this. Start with what you know and work from there. August knows this can work.

“So,” August says, “tell me what to do.”

A beat. Jane looks up at her, brow furrowed. Then her face smooths out, and a smile plays at the corner of her mouth, the one with the dimple.

“Okay,” she says, and she spreads her legs apart a few inches, gesturing loosely for August to sit. “Get down here.”

Shit. August supposes she did ask for it.

August settles herself on one of Jane’s thighs and tucks her legs between them, her feet skimming the floor between Jane’s sneakers. If she’s being honest, she’s imagined more than once, more than a few times, what Jane’s thighs feel like. They’re strong and firm, sturdier than they look, but August doesn’t have a chance to feel anything about it before Jane’s fingertips are nudging her chin up to look at her.

“Is this okay?” Jane asks. Her hand squeezes the curve of August’s hip, holding her in place.

August looks at her, letting her gaze drop to Jane’s lips. That’s the whole point of this. It’s mechanics. “Yeah. Is this how you remember it?”

“Kind of,” she says. And, “Pull my hair.”

For a few ringing seconds, August imagines herself melting onto the floor of the train like the ghosts of a million spilled subway slushies and dropped ice cream cones.

Completely under control.

She pushes her fingers into Jane’s short hair, scraping her nails across the scalp before she closes them on a fistful and tugs.

“Like that?”

Jane releases a short breath. “Harder.”

August does as she’s told, and Jane makes another sound, one deep in her throat, which August assumes is a good sign.

“Now…” Jane says. She’s looking at August’s mouth, eyes dark as the pit at a punk show. “When I kiss you, bite.”

And before August can ask what she means, Jane closes the space between them.

The kiss is … different this time. Hotter, somehow, even though it’s not real. It’s not real, August recites in her head as she tries to pretend there’s absolutely anything academic about the way her mouth drops open at the press of Jane’s lips, anything scientifically impartial about the way she pulls harder at Jane’s hair and sinks into it, letting Jane drink her in.

Jane’s words come back to her, syrupy sweet and slow, bite, and so she sucks Jane’s bottom lip between hers and digs her teeth in. She hears her sharp inhale, feels Jane’s hand tighten in the fabric of her shirt, and thinks of it as progress. Results. She moves the way she imagines the girl Jane remembers would have moved, tries to give her the memory with her mouth—bites harder, tugs at her lip, runs her tongue over it.

It lasts only a minute or two, but it feels like a year lost in Jane’s hair and Jane’s lips and Jane’s past, Jane’s hands fisting in her curls, Jane’s thigh warm and steady under her, Jane for hours, Jane for days. It pulls like an undertow, and the case is up on the surface, and August is trying to stay there too.

When they break apart, August’s glasses are crooked and smudged, and an old woman is staring disapprovingly at them from across the aisle.

“You got a problem?” Jane says, arm slinging protectively across August’s shoulders.

The woman says nothing and returns to her newspaper.

“Mingxia,” Jane says, turning to August. “That was her name. Mingxia. I took her back to my place in Prospect Heights on … Underhill Avenue. It was a brownstone. I had the second floor. That was the first place I lived in New York.”

August writes down the street name and the playground across the street and the nearest intersection and spends an afternoon pulling ownership records on every brownstone on the block, calling landlords until she finds the son of one who remembers a Chinese American woman renting the second floor when he was a kid.

The kiss reveals: Jane moved to New York in February 1975.

And so, it becomes another thing they do. The food and the songs and the old articles and, now, the kisses.

There are certain crucial bits of information they still don’t have—like Jane’s childhood, or her infuriatingly elusive birth certificate, or the event that got Jane stuck in the first place—but there’s no way to predict what memory might cause a chain reaction leading to something important.

The kisses are strictly for evidence gathering. August knows this. August is absolutely, 100 percent clear on this. She’s kissing Jane, but Jane is kissing Jenny, Molly, April, Niama, Maria, Beth, Mary Frances, Mingxia. It’s not about her and Jane, at all.

“Kiss me slow,” Jane says, grinning on a Tuesday afternoon, her sleeves rolled up enticingly, and it’s still not about them.

They kiss under the dappled sunlight of the Brighton Beach Station, strawberry ice cream on their tongues, and Jane remembers summer 1974, a month crashing with an old friend named Simone who’d moved to Virginia Beach, whose cat absolutely refused to leave them alone in bed. They kiss with August’s earbuds split between them playing Patti Smith, and Jane remembers autumn 1975, a bass player named Alice who left lipstick stains on her neck in the bathroom of CBGB. They kiss at midnight in a dark tunnel, and Jane remembers New Year’s Eve 1977, and Mina, who tattooed the vermilion bird on her shoulder.

August learns all this, but she also learns that Jane likes to be kissed every kind of way: like a secret, like a fistfight, like candy, like a house fire. She learns Jane can make her sigh and forget her own name until it all blurs together, past and present, the two of them on Manhattan balconies and in damp New Orleans barrooms and the candy aisle of a convenience store in Los Angeles. Jane’s kissed a girl in every corner of the country, and pretty soon, August feels like she has too.

For research.

It’s not like kissing is all August does—the time she spends thinking about the kisses and chasing down leads from the kisses when she’s not actually having the kisses notwithstanding. It’s been three weeks since she worked a single shift. She does have to pay rent, eventually, and so to stave off absolute bankruptcy, she finally calls Billy’s and, with some coughing and begging, convinces Lucie to put her on the schedule.

“Sweet Jesus, she lives,” Winfield says, pretending to faint dramatically over the counter when August returns to the bar.

“You literally saw me last week.” August brushes past him to clock in.

“Was that you?” Winfield asks, gathering himself back up and beginning to change the coffee filter. “Or was that some girl who looked like you but has not been bedridden for weeks like you told Lucie you were?”

“I was feeling better that day,” August says. She turns to see Winfield’s skeptical look. “What? Did you want me to get Billy’s shut down for giving mono to all the customers in tables fifteen through twenty-two?”

“Mm-hmm. Okay. Well. Speaking of. You missed the big news last week.”

“Is Jerry’s old ass finally retiring?”

“No, but he might have to now.”

August whips her head around. “What? Why?”

Winfield turns wordlessly, humming a few notes of a funeral dirge as he heads toward the kitchen and Lucie fills his place behind the bar.

She looks … rough. One of her typically flawless acrylics is broken, and her hair is falling out of its scraped-back ponytail. She shoots August a fleeting glare before setting a small jar down on the counter.

“If you’re not sick, I don’t care,” she says. She jabs a finger toward the jar. “If you are, take this. Three spoonfuls. You’ll feel better.”

August eyes the jar. “Is that—?”

“Onion and honey. Old recipe. Just take it.”

Even from three feet down the bar, it smells lethal, but August is not in a position to talk back to Lucie, so she tucks the jar into her apron and asks, “What’s going on? What’d I miss?”

Lucie sniffs, picking up a rag and descending upon a spot of syrup on the counter, and says, “Billy’s is closing.”

August, who was in the process of sliding a handful of straws into her pocket, misses and scatters them all over the floor.

“What? When? Why?”

“So many questions for someone who does not come to work,” Lucie tuts.

“I—”

“Landlord is doubling rent at the end of the year,” she says. She’s still scrubbing away at the counter like she doesn’t care, but her eyeliner is smudged and there’s a slight shake in her hands. She’s not taking this well. August feels like a dick for missing it. “Billy can’t afford it. We close in December.”

“That’s—Billy’s can’t close.” The idea of Billy’s boarded up—or worse, gone the way of so many po’boy joints and corner stores August frequented growing up in New Orleans, made over into IHOPs and overpriced boutique gyms—is sacrilege. Not here, not a place that has been open since 1976, not somewhere Jane loved too. “What if he—has he asked if the landlord will sell it to him?”

“Yeah,” Winfield says, popping up in the kitchen window, “but unless you got a hundred grand to make up the loan the bank won’t give Billy, this shit is about to become an organic juice bar in six to eight months.”

“So that’s it?” August asks. “It’s just over?”

“That is how gentrification works, yeah.” Winfield shoves a massive plate of pancakes into the window. “Lucie, these are yours. August, table sixteen looks ready to pop off, you better get in there.”

When August clocks out eight hours later, she finds herself back on the Q, looking at Jane, who’s curled up reading a book. She traded the old Watership a couple of weeks ago to some fan of first editions and is now reading a battered Judy Blume. She loves it earnestly. For a punk who knows how to fight, she seems to love everything earnestly.

“Hey, Coffee Girl,” Jane says when she sees her. “Anything new today?”

August thinks of Billy’s. Jane deserves to know. But she’s smiling, and August doesn’t want her to stop smiling, so she decides not to tell her. Not today.

Maybe it’s selfish, or maybe it’s for Jane. It’s getting harder to tell which is which.

Instead, she folds herself into the seat beside her and hands over a sandwich wrapped twice in aluminum foil so the yolk and syrup and sauce can’t leak out.

“A Su Special,” August says.

“God,” Jane groans. “I’m so jealous you get to have these all the time.”

August nudges an elbow into her ribs. “Did you kiss any girls who worked at Billy’s?”

Jane rips off a bit of foil, eyes sparkling.

“You know what?” she says. “I sure did.”

---

“I’m sorry, what are you saying?”

The BC offices are small, crammed up against the side of a lecture hall. A woman files her nails at reception. The sludgy rain half-heartedly tests the limits of the old windows, looking the way August’s insides feel: sloshy and apprehensive of what’s happening.

The counselor keeps clacking away on her keyboard.

Stop two on August’s apology tour: figuring out if she’s screwed for this semester. She’s not, it turns out, since she was able to make up the two midterms she missed. She expected to have to grovel, fake a dead relative or something, anything but this: a printed-out transcript on the desk in front of her, almost every little box of requirements checked off.

“I’m surprised you didn’t know,” she says. “Your GPA is great. Slipping a little lately, obviously, but now that you’re back on track, you’ll be fine. More than fine. Most students who perform this well—especially ones who have been enrolled for as many years as you have—” At this, she glances over her cat-eye glasses at August. “Well, you’re usually the ones banging down my damn door all semester asking when you can complete your degree.”

“So my degree is … complete?”

“Almost,” the counselor says. “You’ve got your capstone and a couple of electives left. But you can finish those in the fall.” She finishes typing and turns toward August. “Pull it together for this next month, and you can graduate after one more semester.”

August blinks at her a few times.

“Graduate, like … be done. With college.”

She eyes August dubiously. “Most people are happier to hear this.”

Ten minutes later, August is standing outside under a shabby overhang, watching her transcript slowly wilt in the humidity.

She’s been deliberately not doing the math on her credits, caught in anxiety limbo between another student loan and the inevitable push off the ledge into adulthood. This is the ledge, she guesses. And the push. She feels like a cartoon character in midair, looking down to see the desert floor and a jacuzzi full of TNT five hundred feet below her.

What the fuck is she supposed to do?

She could call her mom, but her mother has only lived in one place, only ever wanted one thing. It’s easy to know who you are when you chose once and never changed your mind.

There’s this feeling August has had everywhere she’s ever lived, like she’s not really there. Like it’s all happening in a dream. She walks down the street, and it’s like she’s floating a few inches off the pavement, never rooted down. She touches things, a canister of sugar at a coffee shop, or the post of a street sign warm from the afternoon sun, and it feels like she hasn’t touched anything at all, like it’s all a place she lives in concept. She’s just out here, shoes untied, hair a mess, no idea where she’s going, scraping her knees and not bleeding.

So maybe that’s why, instead of calling her mom, or crawling home to some blunt truth from Myla or cryptic encouragement from Niko, she finds herself stepping onto the Q. At least here she knows where she is. Time, place, person.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” Jane says. She shimmies her shoulders, jabbing a finger gun in August’s direction. She scored a baseball cap from a seventh grader last week, and she’s wearing it backward today. August pencils in thirty minutes between homework and public records to scream about it. “Get it?”

“You’re hilarious.”

Jane pulls a face. “Okay, but really. What’s up with you?”

“I found out I, uh.” She thinks of her transcript, inevitable, soggy, and folded up in the pocket of her raincoat. “I can graduate next semester, if I want.”

“Oh, hey, that’s great!” she says. “You’ve been in school forever!”

“Yeah, exactly,” August says. “Forever. As in, it’s the only thing I know how to do.”

“That’s not true,” Jane says. “You know how to do tons of things.”

“I know logistically how to perform some tasks,” August tells her, squeezing her eyes shut. That dynamite hot tub is starting to sound very appealing. “I don’t know how to have something that I do, every day, like as an adult who does a thing. It’s nuts that we all start out having these vague ideas of what we like to do, hobbies, interests, and then one day everybody has their thing, you know? They used to just be a person and now they’re a—an architect, or a banker, or a lawyer, or—or a serial killer who makes jewelry out of human teeth. Like, things. That they do. That they are. What if there’s not that thing for me, Jane, I mean, what if I’ve never wanted to be anything other than just an August? What if that’s all there is for me? What if Billy’s closes and nobody else will hire me? What if I get out there and end up realizing there’s not a dream for me, or a purpose, or anything—”

“Okay,” Jane says, cutting her off. “Okay, come on.”

When August opens her eyes, Jane’s standing in front of her, hand outstretched.

“Let’s go.”

“Go where?” August says, even as she grabs on. Immediately, she’s pulled toward the back of the car, tripping over her feet. “I’m trying to have a nervous breakdown here.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Jane says. They’re at the emergency exit, and Jane reaches for the door handle.

“Oh my God, what are you doing?”

“I’m gonna show you my favorite thing to do when I feel like I’m gonna lose it down here,” Jane says. “All you gotta do is keep up.”

“Why do I feel like I’m about to take my life into my own hands?”

“Because you should,” Jane says easily. She winks as if she’s sealing August’s fate in an envelope with a kiss. “But I promise you’ll be okay. Do you trust me?”

“What? What kind of question is that?”

“Can you turn that brain of yours off for a second and trust?”

August opens and shuts her mouth.

“I—I guess I can try.”

“Good enough for me,” Jane says, and she wrenches the door open.

There’s barely time to panic about the noise and wind and motion exploding through the open door before Jane’s stepping onto the tiny platform between trains, pulling August with her by one sweaty hand.

It’s chaos—the darkness of the tunnel, the blue and yellow flashes of train lights and flickering wall fixtures, the deafening rattle of the tracks flying past, dirt and concrete rushing out from underneath them. August makes the absolutely terrible mistake of looking down and feels like she’s going to throw up.

“Oh my God, what the fuck,” she says, but she can’t hear her own voice.

The tracks are right there. One wrong step and a few inches of air between staying alive and being scraped off the rails. This is the worst possible idea anyone could ever have, and it’s what Jane does for fun.

“It makes you feel alive, right?” Jane shouts, and before August can yank them both back into the car, Jane steps across the gap to the platform of the next car.

“It makes me feel like I’m gonna die!” August yells back.

“That’s the same thing!”

August is clinging to the car, back pressed against the door, nails scrabbling. Jane grabs the handle of the next door with one hand and reaches out the other to her. “Come on! You can do this!”

“I really can’t!”

“August, you can!”

“I can’t!”

“Don’t look at the tracks!” she yells. “Eyes up, Landry!”

Everything in August’s brain is screaming at her not to, but she drags her eyes up from the rails and to the car in front of her, the tiny platform, Jane standing there with one hand out, the wind whipping her hair around her face.

August realizes, suddenly, it’s the first time she’s ever seen Jane outside of the train.

That’s what makes her do it. Because August doesn’t do this type of thing, but Jane is outside.

“Oh fuck,” August mutters, and she grabs Jane’s hand.

She clears the gap from one car to the next in a breath, a scream caught high in the back of her throat, and then her feet are on metal.

She did it. She made it across.

August crashes into Jane’s chest, and Jane catches her around the waist like she did the day the lights went out, the day August thought she’d blown it for good. Jane laughs, and on a hysterical burst of adrenaline, August laughs too, her raincoat flying around them.

Here they are. Two sets of sneakers on a scrap of metal. Two girls in the middle of a hurricane, tearing down the line. She’s looking up at Jane, and Jane’s looking down at her, and August feels her everywhere, even the places she’s not touching, pressed close as the world roars on.

“See?” she says. But she’s looking at August’s mouth when she says it. “You did it.”

And August thinks, as she tips her chin up, that here, in the space between subway cars, right on the edge of where Jane exists, is where Jane’s finally going to kiss her for real. No pretense. No memories. But because she wants to. Her fingers are spreading on August’s waist, digging into the fabric of her jacket, and—

“Come on,” Jane says, yanking the door open, and they tumble into the next car.

Jane pulls her half-running past unbothered commuters, dodging poles and standing passengers until they reach the next door. They jump from one car to the next, out one door and in another, until it stops being so terrifying to step off, until August barely even hesitates before taking her hand.

“Okay,” Jane says, when they get to their seventh changeover. “You first.”

August turns, eyes wide. That isn’t what she signed up for.

“What?”

“You trusted me, right?” August nods. “Now trust yourself.”

August turns to the next train car. Her brain chooses this moment to remind her that forty-eight people died in subway accidents in 2016. She doesn’t think she can do this without Jane standing there to catch her if she slips, and she’s really not interested in going down in history as a delay on the Q while someone calls the medical examiner.

She trusted Jane, though. She trusted Jane and her time on this train and that cocky grin to get her there safely. Why can’t she do the same for herself? She’s learned this train backward and forward. The Q is home, and August is the girl with the knife picking its stops apart one by one. She doesn’t believe in things. But she can believe in that.

She steps off.

“Hell yeah!” Jane crows from behind when she makes it. She doesn’t wait for August’s hand, hopping across and onto the platform. “That’s my girl!”

Jane slides the door open, and on the other side, August collapses into the nearest seat.

“Holy shit,” August says, panting. “Holy shit, I can’t believe I did that.”

Jane leans on a pole to catch her breath. “You did. And that is what you need to trust in. Because you got what you need. And sometimes, the universe has your back.”

August inhales once, exhales. She looks at Jane, forty-five years away from where she’s supposed to be, and yeah, she guesses in some ways, the universe does have her back.

“So,” Jane says, “let’s take it down to one thing. What scares you the most?”

August thinks about it as her lungs level back out.

“I—” she attempts. “I don’t know who I am.”

Jane snorts, raising an eyebrow. “Well, that makes fuckin’ two of us.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Stop, okay? For five minutes, let’s pretend everything else doesn’t matter, and I’m me, and you’re you, and we’re sitting on this train, and we’re figuring it out. Can you do that?”

August grits her teeth. “Yeah.”

“Okay,” Jane says. “Now, listen to me.”

She crouches in front of August, bracing her hands on August’s knees, forcing her to look into her eyes.

“None of us know exactly who we are, and guess what? It doesn’t fucking matter. God knows I don’t, but I’ll find my way to it.” She rubs her thumb over August’s kneecap, poking gently into the soft part below her thigh. “Like—okay, I dated this girl who was an artist, right? And she’d do figure drawing, where she’d draw the negative space around a person first, and then fill in the person. And that’s how I’m trying to look at it. Maybe I don’t know what fills it in yet, but I can look at the space around where I sit in the world, what creates that shape, and I can care about what it’s made of, if it’s good, if it hurts anyone, it makes people happy, if it makes me happy. And that can be enough for now.”

Jane’s looking up at her like she means it, like she’s been riding these rails all this time on that hope. She’s a fighter, a runner, a riot girl, and she can’t be any of that down here, so she runs between trains to feel something. If she can be here and live with that and have enough left over for this, she must know what she’s talking about.

“Shit,” August says. “You’re good at this.”

Jane smiles wide. “Look, I was gay in the ’70s. I can handle an emergency.”

“God,” August groans as Jane clambers into her own seat. “I can’t believe I made you talk me down from an existential crisis.”

Jane tilts her head to look at her. She’s got this ability to move between pretty and handsome from moment to moment, a subtle difference in the way she holds her chin or the set of her mouth. Right now, she’s the prettiest girl August has ever seen.

“Shut up,” Jane says. “You’re spending your life riding the subway to help a stranger with no evidence she can be helped, okay? Let me do one thing for you.”

August releases a breath, and she’s surprised at the proximity when it ruffles the ends of Jane’s hair.

Jane keeps looking at her, and August swears she sees something move behind her eyes, like a memory does when she’s thinking about Mingxia or Jenny or one of the other girls, but new, different. Something delicate as a spark, and only for August. It’s the same feeling from the platform: maybe this time, for real.

August isn’t supposed to care. She’s not supposed to want that. But the way her heart kicks up into a fever frequency says that she still goddamn does.

“You’re not a stranger,” August says into the few inches between them.

“No, you’re right,” Jane agrees. “We’re definitely not strangers.” She leans back and stretches her arms over her head, turning her face away from August, and says, “I guess you’re my best friend, huh?”

The train eases into another station, and something clenches in the vicinity of August’s jaw.

Friend.

“Yeah,” August says. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“And you’re gonna get me back to where I’m supposed to be,” Jane goes on, smiling. Smiling at the idea of going back to 1970-something and never seeing August again. “Because you’re a genius.”

The train rattles and groans to a stop.

“Yeah,” August says, and she forces a smile.

---

“You’ve been doing what for research?” Myla asks. It’s hard to catch the question when she’s got a screwdriver between her teeth, but August gets the gist.

Myla has her own office in the back of Rewind, complete with shelves full of typewriters and old radios and a workstation strewn with parts. She told August she got the job after wandering in halfway through her final semester at Columbia and pulling a pair of pliers out of the owner’s hands to rewire a 1940s record player. She’s a nerd for the oldies, she always says, and it came in handy. She’s clearly good enough at what she does that her boss doesn’t mind her decorating her workstation with a homemade cross-stitch that says BIG DICK ENERGY IS GENDER NEUTRAL.

She’s looking at August through the giant magnifying lens mounted over her station, so her mouth and nose are normal sized, but her eyes are the size of dinner plates. August tries not to laugh.

“Kissing, okay, we’ve been making out—”

“On the train?”

“Don’t think Niko hasn’t told me about the time under the pizza box after Thanksgiving last year.”

“Okay, that was a holiday.”

“Anyway,” August goes on, “as I was saying, remembering kisses and girls that she, you know, felt something for, brings back a lot for her, and the best way to do that is to re-create them.” The grimace Myla pulls is magnified about ten times by the lens, distorted like a disapproving Dalí. “Stop making that face, okay, I know it’s a bad idea.”

“I mean, it’s as if you like to be emotionally tortured,” Myla says, finally sitting back so her facial proportions return to normal. “Wait, is that what it is? Because like, damn, but okay.”

“No, that’s the whole thing,” August says. “I have to stop. I can’t keep doing it. It’s—it’s fucking me up. So that’s why I came here—I have an idea for something that could work instead.”

“And what’s that?”

“A radio,” August says. “Another big thing for her is music. She told me she doesn’t want Spotify or anything, but maybe random songs from the radio might help her remember things. I wondered if y’all had any portable radios in stock.”

Myla pushes back from her station, folding her arms and surveying her domain of deconstructed cash registers and jukebox parts like a steampunk Tony Stark in a leather skirt. “We might have something in the back.”

“And,” August says, following her toward the storage room in the rear of the store, “I saw Jane step outside of the train.”

Myla whips her head around. “She got off the train, and you led with the kissing? God, you are the most useless bisexual I’ve ever met in my entire goddamn life.”

“She wasn’t off the train, she was outside of it,” August clarifies. “She can walk between the cars.”

“So it’s not the train that’s got her trapped, it’s the line,” Myla concludes simply, unlocking the storage room door. “Good to know.”

August leaves fifteen minutes later with a portable radio and a reminder from Myla to pick up batteries, and when she hands it to Jane, she gets to watch her face light up like Christmas came early. Which, she has to admit, is part of why she bought it. The other reason quickly presents itself.

“There’s this thing I’m trying to remember,” Jane says. “From LA. There’s a taco truck, and Coke with lime, and this song by Sly and the Family Stone … and a girl.” She looks at August. And August could—she could get off the train and return with a wedge of lime and a kiss, wants to even, but she thinks about what Jane said about getting out of here, the way she smiled at the thought of leaving.

“Oh, man,” August says. “That, uh—that sounds like a good lead, but I’m—I gotta clock in. I got a double today, you know, need the money so—anyway.” She gathers up her bag, eyeing the board for the next stop. Not even close to work. “Try the radio. See if you can find a funk station. I bet it helps.”

“Oh,” Jane says, spinning the dial, “okay. Yeah, good idea.”

And August dips out of the train with a wave as soon as the doors slide open.

She thinks—she is pretty sure, actually, that she’s figured out a solution to her problem. A radio. That should be fine.

It starts on a Saturday morning when Jane texts, August, Put your radio on 90.9 FM. Thanks, Jane

Obviously, August doesn’t own a radio. And it would never occur to Jane that August doesn’t own a radio. Even if she did, she’s outside for once, sitting by the water in Prospect Park, watching ducks squabble over pizza crusts and stoners pass a joint under a gazebo. She’d be on the train with Jane except Niko personally packed her a sandwich and insisted she take advantage of her Saturday morning off to “recenter” and “absorb different energies” and “try this havarti I got at the farmer’s market last week, it’s got a lot of character.”

But it only takes a minute to download an FM tuner app, and August thumbs through the dial to the station. A guy with a dry voice is reading a list of programming for the next six hours, so she texts back, Okay, what next?

Just wait,Jane replies. I remembered another song, so I called in and requested it.

The guy on the mic switches gears and says, “And now, a request from a girl in Brooklyn who wants to hear some old-school punk, here’s ‘Lovers’ by the Runaways.”

August leans back on the bench, and the harsh guitar and pounding drums start up. Her phone buzzes.

Today I remembered that I dated a girl in Spanish Harlem who liked to get head to this album! XOXO Jane

August chokes on her sandwich.

It becomes the new ritual: Jane texts August day and night, Hey! Turn on the radio! Love, Jane. And within minutes, there’ll be a song she requested. Thankfully, after the first, they’re almost never songs that she used to eat girls out to.

Sometimes it’s one Jane just remembered and wants to hear. One day it’s “War” by Edwin Starr, and she giddily tells August about a Vietnam protest in ’75 where she broke a finger in a fight with some old racist while the song blasted over the speakers, how a bunch of the guys who hung out on Mott Street passed around a coffee can to collect the money to get it set correctly.

But sometimes, it’s a song that she likes, or wants August to hear, a song from the back of her mind or her menagerie of cassettes. Michael Bolton rasping his way through “Soul Provider” or Jam Master Jay spitting out “You Be Illin’.” It doesn’t matter. 90.9 will play it, and August will listen just to feel that under-the-same-moon feeling of Jane listening to the same thing at the same time as she glides across the Manhattan Bridge.

And suddenly August is as handcuffed to the radio as Jane used to be. It’s extremely fucking inconvenient, honestly. She’s busy worrying about what’s going to happen to Lucie and Winfield and Jerry once Billy’s gets shut down. She has trains to catch and shifts to work and classes to catch up on and, on one particular Sunday, a Craigslist ad to answer across Brooklyn.

“Please, Wes,” August begs. He has the night off, so he’s actually awake before sunset, and he’s using his daylight hours to sketch on the couch and shoot deeply put-upon looks at August across the apartment. For someone so determined to never express emotion, he can be incredibly dramatic.

“I’m sorry, how exactly do you expect us to get a desk and an entire bed home from fucking Gravesend?”

“It’s a writing desk and a twin mattress,” August tells him. “We can do it on the subway.”

“I am not going to be the asshole who takes a mattress on the subway.”

“People take obnoxious things on the subway all the time! I was on the Q last week and someone had an entire recliner! It had cupholders, Wes.”

“Yeah, and that person was an asshole. You haven’t been in New York long enough to earn the right to be an asshole with impunity. You’re still in the tourist zone.”

“I am not a tourist. A rat climbed up my shoe yesterday, and I just let it happen. Could a tourist do that?”

Wes rolls his eyes, sitting up and batting a dangling vine out of his face. “I thought you were into minimalism, anyway.”

“I was,” August says. She takes off her glasses to clean them, hoping the blurry shape of Wes doesn’t recognize it for what it is: not having to see someone’s face when she says something vulnerable. “But that was … before I found somewhere worth putting stuff in.”

Wes is quiet, then sighs, putting his sketchbook down on the trunk.

He grits his teeth. “Isaiah has a car.”

Two hours later, they’re picking their way back to Flatbush, August Tetris’d into the back seat with her rickety new writing desk and a twin-size mattress strapped to the roof of Isaiah’s Volkswagen Golf.

Isaiah is saying something about his day job, about Instagram influencers asking if they can write off handcrafted orchid crowns on their taxes, and Wes is laughing—eyes closed, head thrown back, nose scrunched up laughing. August knows she’s staring. She’s never, not once since she moved in, seen Wes crack more than a sarcastic chuckle.

“You good back there?” Isaiah asks, glancing in the rearview mirror. August whips her phone out, pretending she’s not monitoring their conversation. “You got enough legroom?”

“I’ll survive,” August says. “Thanks again. You saved my life.”

“No problem,” he says. “It’s not as bad as when I did this for Wes. His bed’s a queen. That was a bitch to move.”

“You helped Wes move a bed?”

“I—” Wes starts.

“It’s very tasteful,” Isaiah continues. “Birch headboard, matches his dresser. He may not be a rich kid anymore, but he still got bougie taste.”

“That’s not—”

“You’ve seen the inside of Wes’s bedroom?” August interrupts. “I haven’t even seen the inside of Wes’s bedroom, and I share a wall with him.”

“Yeah, it’s cute! You expect it to look like a hobbit hole, but it’s really nice.”

“A hobbit hole?” Wes hisses. He’s aiming for indignant, but his mouth splits into a begrudging smile.

Oh, man. He is in love.

August’s phone chimes. Jane, telling her to put on the radio again.

“Hey,” she says. “Do you mind if we put the radio on?”

“God, please,” Isaiah says, pulling the AUX cord out of Wes’s phone. “If I have to listen to Bon Iver for another block, I’m gonna drive into a telephone pole.”

Wes grumbles but doesn’t protest when August reaches forward, tuning to 90.9. The song that comes on is one she recognizes—gentle piano, a little theatrical.

“Love of My Life” by Queen.

Oh, no.

There was, she realizes, a major flaw in her plan. She may not be kissing Jane anymore, but this is worse. How is she supposed to know if, when Jane requests “I’ve Got Love On My Mind,” August is supposed to read into the lyrics? Dear Natalie Cole, when you sang the line When you touch me I can’t resist, and you’ve touched me a thousand times, were you thinking about a confused queer with a terrible crush? Dear Freddie Mercury, when you wrote “Love of My Life,” did you mean for it to reach across space and time in a platonic way or a real-deal, break-your-heart, throw-you-up-against-a-wall type of way?

“You sure you got enough room?” Isaiah asks. “You kind of look like you’re dying.”

“I’m fine,” August croaks, sliding her phone back into her pocket. If she absolutely has to have feelings, she can at least do it in private.

They unload Isaiah’s car and carry everything up six flights and into August’s bedroom, and Isaiah blows them both a kiss on his way out. Wes sits next to August on her deflating air mattress, each wiggling their asses to force the air out.

“So…” August says.

“Don’t.”

“I’m just … curious. I don’t get it. You like him. He likes you.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Is it, though? Like, my crush lives on the subway. You have it so much easier.”

Wes grunts, abruptly getting to his feet, and the sudden lack of counterbalance sends August’s ass thumping onto the floor.

“I’d disappoint him,” he says, maintaining stubborn eye contact as he dusts his jeans off. “He doesn’t deserve to be disappointed.”

Wes leaves her on the floor. She guesses she kind of deserved that.

Later, when she’s managed to assemble the cheap bedframe she ordered and tuck the sheets onto her new bed, she opens her texts.

What’s the story behind the song?

Jane texts back a minute later. She addresses and signs it the way she usually does. August is so used to it that her eyes have started skipping right over the introduction and sign off.

I don’t remember much. I listened to it in an apartment I had when I was 20. I used to think it was one of the most romantic songs I ever heard.

Really? The lyrics are kind of depressing.

No, you gotta listen to the bridge. It’s all about loving someone so much you can’t stand the idea of losing them, even if it hurts, that all the hard stuff is worth it if you can get through together.

August pulls it up, lets it spin past the first two verses, into the line: You will remember, when this is blown over …

Okay, she types, thinking of Wes and how determined he is not to let Isaiah hand him his heart, of Myla holding Niko’s hand as he talks to things she can’t see, of her mom and a whole life spent searching, of herself, of Jane, of hours on the train—all the things they put themselves through for love. Okay, I get it.