swings the door open, and there’s his bedroom, exactly how Isaiah described it: nice and neat and stylish, light woods, stone gray linens, his own artwork matted and framed on the walls. He’s got the taste of someone who grew up with the finest things, and August thinks about the trust fund Myla mentioned. He pops open an ornate wooden cigar box on his nightstand and retrieves a heavy silver lighter and a joint.
August can see the benefits to Wes’s slight build when he easily hops through the open window and onto the fire escape. She’s wider in the hips and not half as graceful; by the time she meets him, she’s out of breath and he’s perched mid-roof against one of the air-conditioning units, lighting up without breaking a sweat.
August nudges next to him and turns to face the street, looking out over the lights of Brooklyn. It’s not quiet, but it’s that smooth, constant flow of noise she’s grown used to. She likes to imagine if she listened closely enough, she could hear the Q rattling down the block, carrying Jane into the night.
She has to talk to Jane. She knows she has to.
Wes passes the joint over, and she takes it, thankful for any reason to stop thinking.
“What part of New York were you born in?” she asks him.
Wes exhales a stream of smoke. “I’m from Rhode Island.”
August pauses with the joint halfway to her mouth. “Oh, I just assumed because you’re such a—”
“Dick?”
She turns her head, squinting at him. It’s gray and dim up here, shot through with orange and yellow and red from the street below. The freckles on his nose blur together.
“I was gonna say a New York purist.”
The first hit burns on the way down, catching high in her chest. She’s only done this once before—passed to her at a party, desperately trying to act like she knew what to do—but she repeats what Wes did and holds the smoke for a few long seconds before letting it out through her nose. It all seems smooth until she spends the next twenty seconds coughing into her elbow.
“I moved here when I was eighteen,” Wes says once August is done, mercifully not commenting on her inability to handle her smoke. “And my parents basically pruned me off the family tree a year later once they realized I wasn’t going back to architecture school. But at least I still had this shitty, smelly, overpriced, nightmare city.”
He says the last part with a smile.
“Yeah,” August says. “Myla and Niko kind of … alluded.”
Wes sucks on the joint, the cherry flaring. “Yeah.”
“My, um … my mom. Her parents were super rich. Lots of expectations. And they, uh, basically acted like she didn’t exist either. But my mom is pretty fucked up too.”
“How so?” Wes asks, flicking ash before passing the joint back.
August manages to hold the second hit longer. She feels it in her face, spreading across her skin, starting to soften her edges. “She told me my whole life that her family didn’t want anything to do with me, so I never really had a family. And a couple of weeks ago, I found out that was all a lie, and now they’re all dead, so.”
She doesn’t mention the son they forgot or the letters they intercepted. By now, she knows she wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with her mom’s family, even if she had known they cared about her. But she’s Suzette Landry’s daughter, which means she’s bad at letting shit go.
“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.”