August manages to smile blearily at Lucie as she dumps eggs out of the frying pan and onto a plate before throwing a handful of forks down.

“Family style,” she says, and man. Everything is a disaster, but August does love her.

“Thank you,” August says. “Don’t you have a morning shift?”

Lucie pulls a face. She’s wearing one of August’s T-shirts. “Billy is reducing my hours. Told me yesterday.”

“What? He can’t do that; you’re basically the only person keeping that place together.”

“Yes,” she says with a grim nod. “Most expensive person on the payroll.”

“Wait,” says Myla’s voice, muffled by the floor. She drags her head up and squints. “What’s going on with Billy’s?”

August sighs. “The landlord is doubling the rent at the end of the year, so it’s probably gonna shut down and become a Cheesecake Factory or something.”

With what looks like a Herculean effort, Myla pulls herself up onto her knees and says, “That is unacceptable.”

“Billy needs another hundred grand to buy the unit, and he can’t get the loan.”

“Okay, so.” She does an alarming closed-mouth burp, shakes it off, and presses on. “Let’s get the money.”

“We’re all broke,” Lucie says. “Why you think we work in food service?”

“Right,” Myla counters. “But we can find it.”

August tries to think, but it’s hard when her brain feels like a garbage bag full of wet socks and the socks are wet because they’re soaked in grain alcohol. Myla and Niko were right about Christmas in July—it’s the type of night you’ll never forget, if you can remember it. There must have been way more than the fire code max capacity in there—

Oh.

“Wait,” August says. “What if we did … a charity drag show.”

Myla perks up slightly. “Like, donate the tips?”

“No, what if we charged a cover? Sold drink tickets? We could use your pull at Delilah’s and get them to let us use the space, and we donate everything we make that night to saving Billy’s.”

“Winfield would perform,” Lucie offers.

“Isaiah too,” Wes chimes in.

“Oh, we could do a whole breakfast food theme!” Myla says. “Winfield and Isaiah can get their friends on the lineup.”

“I could probably get Slinky’s to donate some liquor,” Niko adds.

The five of them exchange unsteady eye contact, buzzing with possibility.

Lucie deigns to give them a smile. “I like this idea.”

 

* * *

 

The first week of July brings the transformation of apartment 6F into the Save Billy’s campaign headquarters.

Niko brings a whiteboard home from the pawn shop by Miss Ivy’s, and Myla starts making double portions of stir-fry, and they spend late nights circled up in the living room: Lucie and Winfield, Myla and Niko, Wes, Isaiah, the odd handful of servers, and August. Lucie’s the de facto leader, burdened with the combination of hating extracurricular activities and large groups of friendly people while also loving Billy’s and knowing Billy’s-related logistics. She’s taken to wearing a silver whistle around her neck like a sullen camp counselor just to keep them in line while she’s reading spreadsheets aloud.

“How soon are we doing this?” Niko asks, shoveling an enormous piece of tofu into his mouth. “Not to be a buzzkill, but Mercury is in retrograde for another week, which is … not optimal.”

“That’s okay,” August tells him. She glances at Lucie, who is poring over permit requirements on the kitchen floor. “We’re gonna need more time to set this up anyway. Plus, we have to advertise it, drum up publicity—that’s at least a month, right?”

Lucie nods. “Probably.”

August turns to the whiteboard and makes a note. They’ll plan on mid-August. Two weeks before the Q shuts down.

“So, what you’re telling me is, you’re gonna rally a bunch of queers to save Billy’s with pancakes and a drag show?” Jane says when August catches her up. She’s sun-warmed in the window of the train. August is trying not to think, In love, in love, I’m in terrible dumbass love.

“Yeah,” August says, “basically.”

“That’s so fucking hot,” Jane says, and she grabs August by the chin and kisses her hard and brilliant, an openmouthed exhale, shotgunning summer sunshine.

Terrible dumbass love, August thinks.

It comes together piece by piece. Isaiah and Winfield are down to headline, and after asking around, they get three more Brooklyn queens on board. Myla sweet-talks the manager of Delilah’s into donating the space, Isaiah calculates the costs, and Wes even convinces some of the artists at his shop to set up a booth for flash tattoos in exchange for donations. It helps that so many of them have an in with so many tiny Brooklyn businesses—no one wants to see Billy’s turned into an overpriced gourmet juice bar when they could be next.

It takes thirty minutes on the phone for Winfield to strong-arm Billy into accepting charity, and when he caves, he passes it off to August and tells her she’s in charge of figuring out food. Cut to: Jerry and August swearing up a storm, trying to average out the number of pancakes they need per person and how much it’ll cost. They get there, though.

All along, it hums under the surface—that feeling August felt when she stepped inside Delilah’s, when Miss Ivy calls her by name, when they paraded down to the Q behind Isaiah in his top hat, when the guy at the bodega doesn’t card her, when Jane looks at her like she could be part of her mental photo album of the city. That feeling that she lives here, like, really lives here. Her shadow’s passed through a thousand busted-up crosswalks and under a million creaking rows of scaffolding. She’s been here, and here, and here.

New York takes from her, sometimes. But she takes too. She takes its muggy air in fistfuls, and she packs it into the cracks in her heart.

And now, she’s gonna give it something. They’re gonna give it something.

 

* * *

 

It’s the end of the first week, a late night sitting around a pizza talking about flyers, when August’s phone rings.

She slides it out from under the box: her mom.

“Helloooo,” she answers.

A short pause—August sits up straight. Something’s up. Her mother never allows even half a second of silence.

“Hey, August, honey,” she says. “Are you alone?”

August climbs to her feet, shrugging at Myla’s concerned look. “Um, not right now. Hang on.” She crosses to her room and shuts the door behind her. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she says. “It’s your grandmother.”

August hisses out a long breath. Her grandmother? The old broad probably called her a test-tube science project baby again or decided to bankroll another Republican congressional campaign. That, she can deal with.

“Oh. What’s going on?”

“Well, she had a stroke last night, and she … she didn’t make it.”

August sits down heavily on the edge of her bed.