like Brendan Fraser in The Mummy, rakish and windswept with her perfectly swoopy hair. But she doesn’t.
Of course she doesn’t. August refills the ketchup bottles and wonders what demon jumped up inside her and made her invite a hot stranger to tolerate her terrible service on a Saturday morning in a place where she used to work. Just what every public transit flirtation needs: old coworkers and a sweaty idiot dumping syrup on the table. What an extremely sexy proposition. Really out here smashing pussy, Landry.
“It’s fine,” Winfield says once he pries the source of her anxious pacing out of her. He’s only barely paying attention, scribbling on a piece of sheet music tucked into his guest check pad. He has a penchant for handing out cards for his one-man piano and saxophone band to customers. “We get about a hundred hot lesbians through here a week. You’ll find another one.”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” August agrees tightly. It’s fine. It’s no big deal. Only carrying on her proud family tradition of dying alone.
But then Monday comes.
Monday comes, and somehow, in an insane coincidence Niko would call fate, August steps onto her train, and Jane is there.
“Coffee Girl,” Jane says.
“Subway Girl,” August says back.
Jane tips her head back and laughs, and August doesn’t believe in most things, but it’s hard to argue that Jane wasn’t put on the Q to fuck up her whole life.
August sees her again that afternoon, riding home, and they laugh, and she realizes—they have the exact same commute. If she times it right, she can catch a train with Jane every single day.
And so, in her first month in the apartment on the corner of Flatbush and Parkside above the Popeyes, August learns that the Q is a time, a place, and a person.
There’s something about having a stop that’s hers when she spends most days slumping through a long stream of nothing. There was once an August Landry who would dissect this city into something she could understand, who’d scrape away at every scary thing pushing on her bedroom walls and pick apart the streets like veins. She’s been trying to leave that life behind. It’s hard to figure out New York without it.
But there’s a train that comes by around 8:05 at the Parkside Ave. Station, and August has never once missed it since she decided it was hers. And it’s also Jane’s, and Jane is always exactly on time, so August is too.
And so, the Q is a time.
Maybe August hasn’t figured out how she fits into any of the spaces she occupies here yet, but the Q is where she hunches over her bag to eat a sandwich stolen from work. It’s where she catches up on The Atlantic, a subscription she can only afford because she steals sandwiches from work. It smells like pennies and sometimes hot garbage, and it’s always, always there for her, even when it’s late.
And so, the Q is a place.
It sways down the line, and it ticks down the stops. It rattles and hums, and it brings August where she needs to be. And somehow, always, without fail, it brings her too. Subway Girl. Jane.
So maybe, sometimes, August doesn’t get on until she catches a glimpse of black hair and blacker leather through the window. Maybe it’s not just a coincidence.
Monday through Friday, Jane makes friends with every person who passes through. August has seen her offer a stick of gum to a rabbi. She’s watched her kneel on the dirty floor to soften up scrappy schoolgirls with jokes. She’s held her breath while Jane broke up a fight with a few quiet words and a smile. Always a smile. Always one dimple to the side of her mouth. Always the leather jacket, always a pair of broken-in Chuck Taylors, always dark-haired and ruinous and there, morning and afternoon, until the sound of her low voice becomes another comforting note in the white noise of her commute. August has stopped wearing headphones. She wants to hear.
Sometimes, August is the one she hands a stick of gum to. Sometimes Jane breaks off from whichever Chinese uncle she’s charming to help August with her armload of library books. August has never had the nerve to slide into the seat next to her, but sometimes Jane drops down at August’s side and asks what she’s reading or what the gang is up to at Billy’s.
“You—” Jane says one morning, blinking when August steps on the train. She has this expression