“Jesus,” August says, as Jane downs half of it in one bite like a boa constrictor. “Every New Yorker in a thirty-mile radius just became irate and they don’t know why.”

“Yeah. The guy at the deli always looked so disgusted.”

“Like, at that point, why not eat a donut?”

“Less filling,” she says through a mouthful. And then she grabs August’s hand and says, “Wait. Five sugars!” And that’s how they discover Jane’s incorrigible sweet tooth. She takes her coffee with two creams and five sugars like some kind of maniac. August starts bringing her a chocolate chip bagel with peanut butter and a coffee full of sugar and cream every morning.

She rides the line up and down and back up again. On a Tuesday afternoon, across the East River and over the Manhattan Bridge, alongside all the landmarks she grew up pressing into the corners of envelopes in the shape of postage stamps. On a Saturday morning, down to Coney Island and the arching rafters of the station, jostled by toddlers with floppy hats and sunscreen streaks and resigned parents with beach bags.

“Who goes to the beach in March?” August mumbles as they wait for the train to pull back out of Coney Island, the end of the line. It’s the longest the train is ever stationary. Jane likes to claim you can hear the ocean if you try hard enough.

“Come on, end of winter picnics near the shore?” Jane says, waving her bagel in the air. “I happen to think they’re romantic as hell.”

She glances at August like she expects a response, like there was a joke and August missed the punchline. August pulls a face and keeps eating.

They sit and eat their bagels and talk. That’s all there is to do—August has hit a dead end. Without clues about her family or her life before New York, Jane is the primary source.

Her primary source, and her friend, now.

That’s all. Nothing more than that. That’s all it can be.

August glances at the peanut butter left behind on Jane’s lip.

It’s fine.

* * *

On a Wednesday, Jane’s on her third bite of bagel when she remembers her elementary school.

The city’s vague, but she remembers a tiny classroom, and other kids from her neighborhood sitting in tiny desks and tiny chairs, and a poster of a hot-air balloon on the wall. She remembers the smell of pencil shavings and her first best friend, a girl named Jia who loved peanut butter sandwiches, and the foggy walk between their homes, the smell of wet pavement from shopkeepers hosing down their sidewalks at the end of the night.

Another day, she’s just finished her coffee when her eyes light up, and she tells August about the day she got to New York. She talks about a Greyhound bus, and a friendly old man at the station who explained how to get to Brooklyn, winked, and slid a button into her pocket, the little pink triangle pinned below her shoulder. She tells August about paying cash for her first ever ride on the subway, about climbing up from underground into a gray morning and turning in a slow circle, taking it all in, and then buying her first cup of New York coffee.

“You see the pattern, right?” August says when she’s done writing everything down.

Jane turns the empty cup over in her hands. “What do you mean?”

“It’s sensory stuff,” August says. “You smell coffee, it brings back something associated with the smell. You taste peanut butter, same thing. That’s how we can do this. We just have to experiment.”

Jane’s quiet, studying the board mapping out stops. “What about a song? Could that work too?”

“Probably,” August says. “Actually, knowing you and music, I bet it could help a lot.”

“Okay,” Jane says, sitting up suddenly, attention rapt. The look on her face is one August has come to recognize as readiness to learn something she doesn’t understand: head cocked slightly, one eyebrow ticked up, part confusion, part eagerness. Sometimes Jane exudes the same energy as a golden retriever. “There’s this one song I halfway remember. I don’t know who it was by, but it goes like, ohhhh, giiiiirl…”

“That could describe a lot of songs,” August says, untucking her phone from her pocket. “Do you remember any of the other lyrics?”

Jane bites her lip and frowns. She sings under her breath, warm and off-key and a little crackly, like the air around her feels. “How I depend on youuu, to give me love how I need it.”

August tries very hard to think only of scientific curiosity as she consults Google. “Oh, okay. When. It’s give me love when I need it. The title of the song is ‘Oh, Girl.’ It’s by a band called the Chi-Lites. Came out in 1972.”

“Yeah! That’s right! I had it on a seven-inch single.” Jane closes her eyes, and August thinks they’re picturing the same thing: Jane, cross-legged on a bedroom floor somewhere, letting the record spin. “God, I wish I could listen to it right now.”

“You can,” August says, swiping through apps. “Hang on.”

It takes her all of three seconds to pull it up, and she unwinds her earbuds from her pocket and hands one to Jane.

The song fades in soulful and longing, strings and harmonica, and the first words come exactly how Jane sang them: Ohhhh giiiiiirl …

“Oh my God,” Jane says, sitting back in her seat. “That’s really it. Shit.”

“Yeah,” August says. “Shit.”

The song plays on for another minute before Jane sits up and says, “I heard this song for the first time on a radio in a semitruck Which is weird, because I definitely don’t think I ever drove semitrucks. But I think I rode in some. There are a few—like, flashes, you know?”

August jots it down. “Hitchhiking, maybe? That was a big thing back then.”

“Oh yeah, it was,” she says. “I bet that’s it. Yeah … yeah, in a truck from California, heading east. But I can’t remember where we were going.”

August sucks on the bud of the pencil eraser, and Jane looks at her. At her mouth, specifically.

She pulls the pencil out of her mouth, self-conscious. “That’s okay, this is a great start. If you remember any other songs, I can help you figure them out.”

“So you can … listen to any song you want?” Jane says, eyeing August’s phone. “Whenever you want to?”

August nods. They’ve been through some pretty rudimentary explanations of how smartphones and the internet work, and Jane has picked up a lot from observation, but she still gets all wide-eyed and awed.

“Would you want me to get you a phone like this?” August asks.

Jane thinks about it. “I mean … yes and no? It’s impressive, but there’s something about having to work for it when you want to listen to a song. I used to love my record collection. That was the most money I ever spent in one place, shipping it to a new address whenever I landed in a new city. I wanted to see the world but still have one thing that was mine.”

August’s pencil flies across the paper. “Okay, so you were a drifter. A drifter and a hitchhiker. That’s so…”

“Cool?” Jane suggests, raising an eyebrow. “Daring? Adventurous? Sexy?”

“Unbelievable that you weren’t strangled by one of the dozens of serial killers murdering hitchhikers up and down the West Coast in the ’70s, is what I was gonna say.”