“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?”