I’m so sorry I haven’t had a chance to stop by the house. I got the birthday card you sent—thank you so much!!! I loved the picture you drew me. What kind of bird is that?
I’m doing really well! I have a good job and my coworkers are like family. Not as much as you are my family, but it’s nice. Sometimes when my customers talk about their kids, I tell them about you. They all agree you’re the smartest kid they’ve ever heard of. Don’t forget what I told you: don’t listen to Mom and Dad, go to the library and read whatever books you want.
I think you’d really like my roommate. She’s smart and funny, just like you, and she doesn’t take any crap from anyone. Maybe one day I’ll introduce y’all.
I’m so proud of you, Suzie. I’m sorry I can’t be home. I think about you every day, and I miss you so much. When you’re older, I’ll tell you everything, and I hope you’ll understand. Knowing you, I think you will.
All my love,
Augie
There’s a moment, in between.
August wakes up on the trash couch in the living room, surrounded by a swampy fog of burning sage and lavender, ears ringing, whole body sore. Jane’s jacket is draped over her like a blanket.
She can remember the tracks, the look on Jane’s face, something white-hot flashing through her. And then she wakes up.
But there’s a moment in between.
Myla touches her hair gently and says that Wes and Isaiah got to the station first and found her on the platform. At the end of the couch, Wes hugs his knees to his chest. He’s got a black eye—apparently August didn’t want to go without Jane. Apparently, she fought.
They brought her back here, and as soon as Niko and Myla could leave the party, they caught the Q home. It was running again. They didn’t see Jane.
She’s gone. She was gone by the time Wes and Isaiah got to the station.
But there was a moment. Right after August kissed her.
It didn’t hurt, somehow. It was a heat that blazed through her, wrapping around, like standing on wet, hot asphalt on a hundred-degree day and feeling a breeze whip the warmth from the ground around her legs. Her eyes were squeezed shut, but for a moment, before everything went black, she saw something.
She saw a street corner. Boxy brown cars parked along the road. Graffiti on buildings that aren’t there anymore. She saw, for a second, like looking through the slats in the blinds before they flutter shut, Jane’s time. The place where Jane belongs.
And now August is here.
“It worked,” August says, half-hysterical, before she rolls over and throws up on the rug.
* * *
The thing about life without Jane is, it does go on.
There’s rent to pay, shifts to pick up. The dog needs to go outside. The MetroCard needs to be refilled. School starts, and August has to register for graduation and get fitted for a cap and gown. The Q shuts down for maintenance. They count the money they managed to raise—sixty grand. Forty away from saving Billy’s, but they’re working on it.
The city moves, trudges on, lights up and shouts and spits steam up through the grates the same as always. August lives here. That finally feels real all the time, even when nothing else does. This is the city where she got her heart broken. Nothing anchors a person to a place quite like that.
The first week, she keeps the radio on. She convinces Lucie to let her put it on at Billy’s, plays it in her headphones on her commute, takes the boom box home when she packs up the office and plays it in her room. Jane’s not going to call in, but sometimes August swears she can feel her on the other side, humming at the same frequency. The station has added enough of their songs to the rotation over the past year that sometimes she’ll hear one, Michael Bolton or Natalie Cole, and it’s a comfort to know Jane was there. It all really happened. Here are the things she left behind: songs and a name scratched into a train and a jacket that August keeps over the chair at her desk but never wears.
On Saturday morning, the DJ’s voice comes over the speakers as she’s folding laundry in her room.
“All right, listeners,” he says, “I’ve got something special for you this morning. Normally we don’t take requests in advance, but this particular