The first few weeks are rocky. Jane’s happy in the way that Jane is often happy—unflappable, gregarious, laughing loud into the night—until suddenly she isn’t. She’s thankful to be there, but there are moments that startle her out of gratitude. Like when she thinks of someone she wants to tell about a horrible pun she makes over dinner and realizes that person is back in 1977, or when she lingers over the picture of Augie that August has added to the fridge. Almost every night, she lies half-naked in bed, running her fingers over the tattoos on her side, again and again.

“I should have died that night, and I didn’t,” Jane says one morning, leaning against August’s windowsill, looking down at the street. She says this a lot at first, like a meditation. “Either way, I was never going to see them again. At least this way, I get to live.”

She’s lucky, she says. She got to come back up from underground. She knew a lot of people who never got the chance.

Days go by, and inch by inch, she settles into her new life. And every day, it gets easier.

Though she loves stealing clothes from them all, Jane consents to a trip to H&M for a wardrobe of her own. In return, she convinces August to stop being so uptight about how many things she owns and get a damn bookshelf, which they start to slowly fill: books, photos, Jane’s cassette collection, August’s notebooks. Myla takes Jane to her favorite record store and starts helping her catch up on contemporary music. She really likes Mitski and Andre 3000.

She dedicates herself to learning everything about life in the twenty-first century and develops fixations on the most random modern inventions. Self-checkout stations at grocery stores freak her out, as do vape pens and almost any kind of social media, but she’s fascinated by the Chromecast and Taco Bell beefy five-layer burritos. She spends a whole week mainlining The O.C. on Netflix while August is at work and emerges with a soft spot for Ryan Atwood and a lot of questions about early 2000s fashion. She buys a dozen flavors of instant noodles at H-Mart and eats them in front of August’s laptop, talking back to mukbangs on YouTube.

They go to brunch with Niko and Myla, dinner with Wes and Isaiah. They spend weeks trying all the foods August never got a chance to bring her on the train—sticky pork ribs, steaming bowls of queso, massive boxes of pizza. Myla’s parents find out her roommate has a Chinese girlfriend and mail her a box of homemade almond cookies, and soon Jane’s on the phone with Myla’s mom every Sunday afternoon, helping her practice her Cantonese. August buys out a whole shelf of strawberry milkshake Pop-Tarts at Target, and they spend the rest of the day dancing around their bedroom in their underwear, shoving pink frosting and sprinkles into their mouths and spreading sugary kisses everywhere.

As soon as Jane gets a MetroCard, she starts spending long days just wandering around Chinatown, occupying a table at a dumpling shop on Mulberry or waiting in line to order bao at Fay Da, observing the old men playing cards in Columbus Park. Sometimes August goes with her and lets herself be led down Mott, but most of the time Jane goes alone. She always comes home late with her pockets full of sponge cake wrappers and plastic grocery bags heavy with oranges.

Jane becomes part of the apartment seamlessly, as if she’s never not been there. She’s the new reigning champ of Rolly Bangs, a fixture at Annie Depressant’s gigs. She and Niko spend hours discussing gender (Myla wants them to start a podcast, which leads to August explaining podcasts to Jane, and Jane becoming addicted to Call Your Girlfriend) and share jeans all the time. One night, August overhears them talking about how far strap-on technology has come since the ’70s and takes herself right back to bed. Five days of shipping and handling later, she wakes up deliciously sore and buys Niko a vegan donut as a thank-you.

Wes brings home a tattoo kit from work, and Jane lets him ink her on the living room couch, squeezing the blood out of August’s hand. He does two bridges in fine black lines on the inside of her arms, just above the creases of her elbows: the Manhattan Bridge on her left, and on her right, below the anchor, the Golden Gate.

It helps, they discover, for Jane to do things that make her feel connected to her old life. She cooks congee for breakfast like her dad used to, hangs out at Myla’s antique shop offering opinions on ’60s-era furniture, joins up with demonstrations, brings August with her to volunteer at HIV clinics. When she finds out that most people August’s age have never even heard of the UpStairs Lounge, she goes on a furious weeklong tear, posting handwritten fliers around the neighborhood until August shows her how to write a Medium post. It goes viral. She keeps writing.

The best nights are when they go dancing. Jane likes music, everything from gigs for half-decent local bands to loud clubs with flashing lights, and August goes along but stringently maintains that she won’t dance. It always lasts about half an hour, and suddenly she’s in the crowd under Jane’s hands, watching her move her hips and stomp her feet and smile up into the haze. She could stay hovering at the bar, but she’d miss this.

Myla pulls some strings she refuses to disclose and matter-of-factly comes home one afternoon with a fake ID for Jane, complete with a photo and a 1995 birthdate. Jane brings it when August takes her to fill out an application at Billy’s, and she starts as a line cook the next week, quickly falling into the rhythm of good-natured barbs and backhanded comments with Lucie and Winfield and the rest of the crew. Jerry gives her a good, long look the first time she steps up to the grill next to him, shakes his head, and gets back to his bacon.

Sometimes, when August walks home from the subway, she looks up at her own bedroom window from the street and thinks about hundreds of thousands of people walking past it. One square inch of a picture too big to see all at once. New York is infinite, but it is made up, in very small part, of the room behind the window with her and Jane’s books crowding the sill.

August scrapes together the leftovers of her last student loan to buy a queen-sized bed, mattress and box spring and all, and Jane looks like she’s in heaven when she flops onto it for the first time, euphoric enough to make August spring for the down comforter too. She’s realizing that she’d give Jane pretty much anything she wants. She finds she doesn’t really mind.

(Jane does finally make August’s dream come true: she assembles the bed. It’s exactly as devastating as August always imagined.)

The first night they sleep in it, August wakes up with Jane spooned up against her back, the broken-in fabric of one of Wes’s oversized T-shirts soft against her skin. She rolls over and burrows her nose into the dip between Jane’s neck and shoulder, breathing her in. She smells sweet, always, somehow, like sugar’s in her veins. Last week, August watched her shout down a guy with a racist sign in Times Square and then snap it in half over her knee. But it’s still true. Jane is spun sugar. A switchblade girl with a cotton-candy heart.

She stirs a little, stretching in the sheets, squinting at August in the early morning light.

“I’m never gonna get sick of this,” she mumbles, reaching out to palm across August’s shoulder, her chest.

August blushes and then blinks in surprise.

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

She leans in, dragging her fingers through the hair fanned out on the pillow. “You have a gray hair.”

“What?”