at which the sun hits the round tip of her nose and the lines of her jaw and her full bottom lip.
Then she reaches into her bag and pulls out a silver packet of Pop-Tarts.
“I brought you these,” August says, handing them over. “Since they won’t have the strawberry milkshake ones back where you came from.”
Jane takes them and slides them carefully into the front pocket of her backpack. She looks at August with her head tilted slightly, tracking the expression on her face.
“Tomorrow’s the big day, huh?”
August tries to smile. “Yeah.”
“Everything ready?”
“I think so,” she says. She’s done everything short of making her roommates run actual drills. They’re as prepared as they’re ever going to be. “What about you? Are you ready?”
“I mean, the way I see it, there are three possible outcomes of tomorrow. I go back, I stay, I die.” She shrugs, like it’s nothing. “I have to be okay with any of those.”
“Are you?”
“I don’t know,” Jane tells her. “I don’t want to die. I didn’t want to die when I was supposed to. So, I’m choosing to believe it’ll be one of the first two.”
August nods. “I like that attitude.”
There’s a goodbye here, somewhere. There’s a conclusion underneath the too-casual sprawl of Jane’s legs and their too-quiet voices. But August doesn’t know how to work up to what she has to say. If this was an easy case to solve, she’d find an answer and circle it in red ink and pin it to the wall: there it is, the thing she’s supposed to say to the girl she loves. She figured it out.
Instead, she says, “Is there anything else you want, before tomorrow?”
Jane shifts, dropping one foot onto the floor. The sunset’s making her glow, and it spreads when she smiles softly at August, one crooked tooth up front. August loves that tooth. It feels so stupid and small to love Jane’s crooked tooth when she might be about to lose her forever.
“I just want to say…” Jane starts, and she holds it like water in her mouth until she swallows and goes on: “Thank you, I guess. You didn’t have to help me, but you did.”
August huffs out a laugh. “I just did it because I thought you were hot.”
Jane touches her chin with the back of her knuckles. “There are worse reasons to break the laws of space and time.”
Next stop: Coney Island. The station where Jane’s long ride on the Q started years ago, where they’re going to try to save her. Slowly, the Wonder Wheel slides into view in the distance. They’ve seen it a thousand times from this train, lit up on summer nights, cutting yellow and green lines through the midday sky. August told Jane once about how it stayed when half the park was swept away. She knows how Jane likes stories about surviving.
“Don’t, uh…” Jane says, clearing her throat. “If I go back, after tomorrow. Don’t waste too much more time on me. I mean, don’t get me wrong—wait a respectful amount of time and all. But, you know.” She tucks August’s hair behind her ear, rubbing the side of her thumb once against her cheek. “Just make sure you make them nervous. They shouldn’t underestimate you.”
“Okay,” August says thickly. “I’ll write that down.”
Jane’s looking at her, and she’s looking at Jane, and the sun’s going down, and the goddamn thing is that it’s right there in both of their throats, but they can’t say it. They’ve always been hopeless at saying it.
Instead, August leans forward and kisses Jane on the lips. It’s soft, shaky like the rattle of the train but so much quieter. Their knees bump together, and Jane’s fingertips tangle in the ends of her hair. She feels something warm and wet on her cheek. She doesn’t know if she’s crying, or if Jane is.
Sometimes, when they kiss, it’s like August can see it. Just for a second, she can see a life that’s not here on this train. Not a distant future, not a house. An immediate present unspooling like film: shoes in a pile by the door, a bark of laughter under bar lights, passing a box of cereal over on a Saturday morning. A hand in her back pocket. Jane, walking up the subway steps and into the light.
When they break apart, August tips her head against Jane’s shoulder, pressing her cheek to the leather. It smells like years, like a lightning storm, like engine grease and smoke, like Jane.