pried up nails that have nothing to do with love at all?
She’s standing on a New York sidewalk, nearly twenty-four years old, and she’s found herself back at the first version of August, the one who hoped for things. Who wanted things. Who cried to Peter Gabriel and believed in psychics. And it all started when she met Jane.
She met Jane, and now she wants a home, one she’s made for herself, one nobody can take away because it lives in her like a funny little glass terrarium filled with growing plants and shiny rocks and tiny lopsided statues, warm with penthouse views of Myla’s paint-stained hands and Niko’s sly smile and Wes’s freckly nose. She wants somewhere to belong, things that hold the shape of her body even when she’s not touching them, a place and a purpose and a happy, familiar routine. She wants to be happy. To be well.
She wants to feel it all without being afraid it’ll fuck her up.
She wants Jane. She loves Jane.
And she doesn’t know how to tell Jane any of that.
* * *
It’s a week later when Gabe comes through—they secure the Control Center as a venue, and Lucie passes out personalized to-do lists like juice boxes at a little league soccer game.
“These are legit,” August says, looking hers over. “We should hang out more.”
“No, thank you,” Lucie says.
She and Niko are assigned to meet with the manager of Slinky’s to arrange the liquor, and after a back-room conversation that involves Niko promising the man a free psychic reading and his mom’s empanadillas, they return to the apartment with booze donations checked off the list.
“Have you talked to Jane yet?” Niko asks as they ascend the stairs. He doesn’t specify what they need to talk about. They both know.
“Why are you even asking me if you already know?” August counters.
Niko eyes her mildly. “Sometimes things that are supposed to happen still need to be nudged along.”
“Niko Rivera, fate’s enforcer since 1995,” August says with an eye roll.
“I like that,” Niko says. “Makes it sound like I carry a nail bat.”
As they reach the front door, it flies open, and Wes comes marching out with both arms full of bright yellow flyers.
“Whoa, where are you going?” Niko asks.
“Lucie put flyers on my to-do list,” Wes says. “Winfield just dropped them off.”
“SAVE PANCAKE BILLY’S HOUSE OF PANCAKES PANCAKEPALOOZA DRAG & ART EXTRAGANZA,” August reads out loud. “Good lord, did we let Billy name it? Nobody in his family knows how to edit.”
Wes shrugs, heading for the stairs. “All I know is I’m supposed to post them around the neighborhood.”
“Running away isn’t going to help!” Niko calls after him.
August raises an eyebrow. “Running away from what?”
As if on cue, Isaiah rounds the last corner of the stairs. He and Wes freeze, separated by ten steps.
Niko idly pulls a toothpick from his vest pocket and puts it in his mouth. “From that.”
There are a few seconds of tense silence before Wes takes his flyers and his shell-shocked expression and darts down the stairs. August can hear his sneakers echoing at double-time all the way down.
Isaiah rolls his eyes. Niko and August exchange a look.
“I’ll go,” August says.
She finds Wes on the street outside of the building, cussing out a stapler as he tries to affix a flyer to a telephone pole.
“Uh-oh,” August says, drawing up to him. “Did that stapler try to get emotionally intimate with you?”
Wes glares. “You’re hilarious.”
August reaches over and pries half the flyers out of Wes’s hands. “Will you at least let me help you?”
“Fine,” he grumbles.
They set off down the block, Wes attacking electrical poles and signposts while August wedges flyers into mail slots and between the bars of windows. Winfield must have dropped off something close to five hundred, because as they work their way through Flatbush, they barely make a dent in the stacks.
After an hour, Wes turns to her and says, “I need a smoke.”
August shrugs. “Go ahead.”
“No,” he says, rolling up his leftover flyers and shoving them into the back pocket of his jeans. “I need a smoke.”
Back in their apartment, Wes leads her to the door to his bedroom and says, “If you tell Niko or Myla I let you in here, I will deny it, and I will wait months until you’re no longer expecting my retribution and give all your stuff to that guy on the second floor whose apartment smells like onions.”
August nudges Noodles away from where he’s nipping at her heels. “Noted.”
Wes