“Is that why you haven’t been talking to her?” Wes asks.

August drops her eyes back to him. “How do you know I haven’t been talking to her?”

“It’s pretty easy to notice when the person on the other side of your wall stops having loud phone conversations with their mom every morning at the ass-crack of dawn.”

August winces. “Sorry.”

Wes accepts the joint from her and holds it between his thumb and forefinger. He looks distant, a stray breeze ruffling the ends of his hair.

“Look, nobody’s parents are perfect,” he says finally. “I mean, Niko’s parents let him transition when he was like nine, and they’ve always been super cool about it, but his mom still won’t let him tell his grandpa. And she’s constantly bugging him to move back to Long Island because she wants him to be closer to the family, but he likes it in the city, and they fight about it all the time.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, but at least she’s trying, you know? People like my parents, though, like your mom’s parents—that’s another level. I mean, I wanted to go to art school, and my parents were like, great, you can sketch buildings, and then you can take over the firm one day, and no, we’re not paying for therapy. And when I couldn’t do what they wanted, that was just it. They cut off the money and told me not to come home. They care about how it looks. They care about what they can circle jerk about with their idiot fucking Ivy League friends. But the minute you need something—like, actually need something—they’ll let you know just how much of a disappointment you are for asking.”

August has never thought of it quite that way.

Every day, she watches Wes turn cold and fuck his own life up, and she never says a word, because she knows there’s something big and heavy pinning him down. She’s never given her mom the same understanding. She’s never thought to transpose his hurt onto her mother’s to make better sense of it.

One of his last words sticks in her head, a drag at the bottom of the pool, her brain sloshing around it. Disappointment, he said. August remembers what he said after Isaiah helped them move a mattress.

He doesn’t deserve to be disappointed.

“For what it’s worth, you’ve never disappointed me once since I’ve met you.” August scrunches her nose at him. “In fact, I would say you have exceeded my expectations.”

Wes takes a hit and laughs it back out. “Thank you.”

He stubs out the joint and pulls himself to his feet.

“And … you know. For the record.” Carefully, August rises. “I, uh, I know how it feels to spend a long time alone on purpose, just to avoid the risk of what might happen if I wasn’t. And with Jane … I don’t think I could possibly have found a more doomed first love, but it’s worth it. It’s probably going to break my heart, and it’s still worth it.”

Wes avoids her eyes. “I just … he’s so … he deserves the best. And that’s not me.”

“You don’t get to decide that for him,” August points out.

Wes looks like he’s working on something to say to that when there’s a sound below. Someone’s opened a top-floor window. They wait it out, and there it is: Donna Summer at a truly inconsiderate volume, pouring out of Isaiah’s apartment.

They hold each other’s gaze for a full second before they dissolve into laughter, staggering into each other’s sides. Donna wails on about someone leaving a cake out in the rain, and Wes reaches into his back pocket and walks over to the edge of the roof and throws a hundred flyers into the night, raining down past the fire escape, the windows, the salty-warm smell of Popeyes, tumbling down the sidewalk and floating away on the breeze, wrapping around traffic lights, carried off toward the open tracks of the Q.

 

* * *

 

It’s the afternoon before the fundraiser, the last day before they try to send Jane home, when August finally fulfills Niko’s prophecy and climbs onto the Q.

She chooses a stop farther down than her usual one, Kings Highway near Gravesend, because there’ll be fewer people on the train closer to the end of the line. This far down, the track is mostly elevated, running through residential neighborhoods at eye level with third-story windows. The sun is bright today, but the train is cool when she steps on.

Jane’s sitting reliably at the end of the car, headphones on, eyes closed.

August stays near the door, watching her. This might be the last time she gets to see Jane in the sunset.

There’s a kick in her heart—one she knows Jane feels sometimes too—that says she should run. Spare herself the heartbreak and step off this train and switch cities, switch schools, switch lives until she finds somewhere else she could maybe be happy again.

But it’s too late. She could live another fifty years, love and leave a hundred cities, press her fingerprints into a thousand turnstiles and plane tickets, and Jane would still be there at the bottom of her heart. This girl in Brooklyn she just can’t shake.

The train pulls out of the station, and August pushes against its momentum to walk toward Jane’s seat.

She opens her eyes when August sits next to her.

“Hey,” she says, sliding her headphones off to rest around her neck.

August takes a breath to look at her, committing to memory the angle at which the sun hits the round tip of her nose and the lines of her jaw and her full bottom lip.

Then she reaches into her bag and pulls out a silver packet of Pop-Tarts.

“I brought you these,” August says, handing them over. “Since they won’t have the strawberry milkshake ones back where you came from.”

Jane takes them and slides them carefully into the front pocket of her backpack. She looks at August with her head tilted slightly, tracking the expression on her face.

“Tomorrow’s the big day, huh?”

August tries to smile. “Yeah.”

“Everything ready?”

“I think so,” she says. She’s done everything short of making her roommates run actual drills. They’re as prepared as they’re ever going to be. “What about you? Are you ready?”

“I mean, the way I see it, there are three possible outcomes of tomorrow. I go back, I stay, I die.” She shrugs, like it’s nothing. “I have to be okay with any of those.”

“Are you?”

“I don’t know,” Jane tells her. “I don’t want to die. I didn’t want to die when I was supposed to. So, I’m choosing to believe it’ll be one of the first two.”

August nods. “I like that attitude.”

There’s a goodbye here, somewhere. There’s a conclusion underneath the too-casual sprawl of Jane’s legs and their too-quiet voices. But August doesn’t know how to work up to what she has to say. If this was an easy case to solve, she’d find an answer and circle it in red ink and pin it to the wall: there it is, the thing she’s supposed to say to the girl she loves. She figured it out.

Instead, she says, “Is there anything else you want, before tomorrow?”

Jane shifts, dropping one foot onto the floor. The sunset’s making her glow, and it spreads when she smiles softly at August, one crooked tooth up front. August loves that tooth. It feels so stupid and small to love Jane’s crooked tooth when she might be about to lose her forever.