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