Even if she’s sworn off solving mysteries, August needs to know Jane’s story. She has to know how someone like this exists.

After the Jackson 5, the teens take over with a Bluetooth speaker from a backpack. The adults shout down Post Malone when they attempt it, but they find a compromise in Beyoncé and crank the volume up on “Countdown.”

Jane’s laughing so hard, tears get caught in the crinkled corners of her eyes, and she peels her jacket off and throws it down atop her pile of cassettes.

“Hey,” she says, turning to August, and then she has August by the hand. “Dance with me.”

August freezes. “Oh, uh, no, I can’t dance.”

“Can’t or don’t?”

“Both? It’s, like, better for the world if I don’t dance.”

“Come on,” she says, “you’re from New Orleans. People got rhythm there.”

“Yes, none of which was absorbed by me.”

The music keeps grooving, Beyoncé wailing through a key change in “Love On Top.” People keep shouting and laughing and gyrating in the aisle, and there’s Jane’s hand on the small of August’s back, pulling her closer until they’re almost chest to chest.

“Coffee Girl, don’t break my heart,” Jane says.

So, August dances.

And something happens when she starts dancing.

Jane’s face lights up—really lights up, like Rockefeller Center’s Christmas tree, Frenchmen Street at two in the morning, full-scale sunshine. She lifts August’s hand above their heads; August does a clumsy spin. It should be embarrassing. But Jane looks at her like she’s never been more delighted in her entire life, and August can’t do anything but laugh.

It’s like slow motion. Like somebody came into August’s room and threw all her textbooks out the window and said, learn this instead. Jane pulls her back in, fingers brushing through her hair, just behind her ear, and for a second, Jane is the whole point of being in the city in the first place.

August is opening her mouth to say something when the fluorescents come back on. The train shudders back into tentative motion to a round of cheers, and Jane sways with it, away from August. She looks flushed and thoroughly pleased with herself.

August checks her phone—nearly noon. Classes are a bust. The seedy little bar where Niko works is squirreled away a few blocks from here. It should be opening soon.

She looks at Jane, a step away but still close, and she thinks about the way Jane’s hand trailed through her hair, her gasp of laughter in August’s ear. Just because Jane didn’t come to Billy’s doesn’t mean it’s hopeless.

“I don’t know about you,” August says, “but I could use a drink. There’s a pretty cool dive bar right by my stop, if, uh, you’re not doing anything?”

And Jane … stares at her, like she’s trying to work out if August really asked what she thinks she did.

“Oh,” she says finally. August can hear the wince in her tone before she even says the next part. “I don’t think I can.”

“Oh, I—”

“I mean, that sounds nice, but I can’t.”

“No, it’s totally okay, I was, um—I didn’t mean—uh. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m sorry,” Jane says. She looks like she means it.

August is saved by the creak of the brakes as they pull into a station. Before Jane can say anything else, she’s gone.

4

 

   new york > brooklyn > community > missed connections

 

* * *

 

Posted November 3, 2007

Cute girl on Q train between Church Av & King’s Highway (Brooklyn)

Hi, if you’re reading this. We were both on the Q headed toward Manhattan. I was across from you. You were wearing a leather jacket and red hi-top Converse and listening to something on your headphones. I was wearing a red skirt and reading a paperback copy of Sputnik Sweetheart. Last night, November 2nd, around 8:30 p.m. You smiled at me, I dropped my book, and you laughed, but not in a mean way. I got off at King’s Highway. Please, please read this. I can’t stop thinking about you.

August can never take the Q again.

She can’t believe she asked Jane out. Jane. Jane of the effortless smiles and subway dance parties, who is probably a fucking poet or, like, a motorcycle mechanic. She probably went home that night and sat at a bar with her equally hot motorcycle poet friends and talked about how funny it was that this weird girl on her train asked her out, and then went to bed with her even hotter girlfriend and had nice, satisfying, un-clumsy sex with someone who isn’t a depressed twenty-three-year-old virgin. They’ll get up in the morning and make their cool and sexy sex-haver toast and drink their well-adjusted coffee and move on with their lives, and eventually, after enough weeks of August avoiding the Q, Jane will forget all about her.

August’s professor pulls up another PowerPoint slide, and August pulls up Google Maps and starts planning her new commute.

Great. Fine. She’ll never see Jane again. Or ask anyone out for the rest of her life. She was on a solid streak of belligerent solitude. She can pick it back up.

Cool.

Today’s lecture is on correlational research, and August is taking notes. She is. Measuring two variables to find the statistical relationship between them without any influence from other variables. Got it.

Like the correlation between August’s ability to focus on this lecture and the amount of athletic, mutually gratifying sex Jane is having with her hypothetical super hot and probably French girlfriend, like, right now. Not taking into consideration the extraneous variables of August’s empty stomach, her aching lower back from doubles at work, or her phone buzzing in her pocket as Myla and Wes argue in the group chat over tonight’s stir-fry. She’s pushed through those to take notes before. None were half as distracting as Jane.

It’s annoying, because Jane is just a person on a train. Simply a very beautiful woman with a nice-smelling leather jacket and a way of becoming the absolute shimmering focal point of every space she occupies. Only marginally the reason August hasn’t altered her commute once all semester.

It’s chill. August is, as she has been her entire life, very deeply chill.

She gives up and checks her phone.

august my lil bb i know you hate broc but we’re doing broc i’m sorry, Myla’s texted.

I don’t mind broccoli, August sends back.

I’m the one who hates broccoli, Wes sends with a pouty emoji.

ooo in that case i’m not sorry:), Myla replies.

This should be enough, she thinks. August has, however dubiously, stumbled into this tangle of people that want her to be a part of them. She’s lived for a long-ass time on less love than this. She’s been alone in every way. Now she’s only alone in some ways.

She texts back, Fun fact: broccoli is an excellent source of vitamin C. No scurvy for this bitch.

Within seconds, Myla has sent back AYYYYYYY and changed the name of the chat to SCURVY FLIRTY & THRIVING.

When August opens the door that night, Wes is sitting on the kitchen counter with an ice pack on his face, blood spattered down his chin.

“Jesus,” August says, dropping her bag next to Myla’s skateboard by the door, “what’d y’all do this time?”