the way her socks end up in the general area of the laundry basket when she throws them across August’s bedroom.
The first few weeks are rocky. Jane’s happy in the way that Jane is often happy—unflappable, gregarious, laughing loud into the night—until suddenly she isn’t. She’s thankful to be there, but there are moments that startle her out of gratitude. Like when she thinks of someone she wants to tell about a horrible pun she makes over dinner and realizes that person is back in 1977, or when she lingers over the picture of Augie that August has added to the fridge. Almost every night, she lies half-naked in bed, running her fingers over the tattoos on her side, again and again.
“I should have died that night, and I didn’t,” Jane says one morning, leaning against August’s windowsill, looking down at the street. She says this a lot at first, like a meditation. “Either way, I was never going to see them again. At least this way, I get to live.”
She’s lucky, she says. She got to come back up from underground. She knew a lot of people who never got the chance.
Days go by, and inch by inch, she settles into her new life. And every day, it gets easier.
Though she loves stealing clothes from them all, Jane consents to a trip to H&M for a wardrobe of her own. In return, she convinces August to stop being so uptight about how many things she owns and get a damn bookshelf, which they start to slowly fill: books, photos, Jane’s cassette collection, August’s notebooks. Myla takes Jane to her favorite record store and starts helping her catch up on contemporary music. She really likes Mitski and Andre 3000.
She dedicates herself to learning everything about life in the twenty-first century and develops fixations on the most random modern inventions. Self-checkout stations at grocery stores freak her out, as do vape pens and almost any kind of social media, but she’s fascinated by the Chromecast and Taco Bell beefy five-layer burritos. She spends a whole week mainlining The O.C. on Netflix while August is at work and emerges with a soft spot for Ryan Atwood and a lot of questions about early 2000s fashion. She buys a dozen flavors of instant noodles at H-Mart and eats them in front of August’s laptop, talking back to mukbangs on YouTube.
They go to brunch with Niko and Myla, dinner with Wes and Isaiah. They spend weeks trying all the foods August never got a chance to bring her on the train—sticky pork ribs, steaming bowls of queso, massive boxes of pizza. Myla’s parents find out her roommate has a Chinese girlfriend and mail her a box of homemade almond cookies, and soon Jane’s on the phone with Myla’s mom every Sunday afternoon, helping her practice her Cantonese. August buys out a whole shelf of strawberry milkshake Pop-Tarts at Target, and they spend the rest of the day dancing around their bedroom in their underwear, shoving pink frosting and sprinkles into their mouths and spreading sugary kisses everywhere.
As soon as Jane gets a MetroCard, she starts spending long days just wandering around Chinatown, occupying a table at a dumpling shop on Mulberry or waiting in line to order bao at Fay Da, observing the old men playing cards in Columbus Park. Sometimes August goes with her and lets herself be led down Mott, but most of the time Jane goes alone. She always comes home late with her pockets full of sponge cake wrappers and plastic grocery bags heavy with oranges.
Jane becomes part of the apartment seamlessly, as if she’s never not been there. She’s the new reigning champ of Rolly Bangs, a fixture at Annie Depressant’s gigs. She and Niko spend hours discussing gender (Myla wants them to start a podcast, which leads to August explaining podcasts to Jane, and Jane becoming addicted to Call Your Girlfriend) and share jeans all the time. One night, August overhears them talking about how far strap-on technology has come since the ’70s and takes herself right back to bed. Five days of shipping and handling later, she wakes up deliciously sore and buys Niko a vegan donut as a thank-you.
Wes brings home a tattoo kit from work, and Jane lets him ink her on the living room couch, squeezing the blood out of August’s hand. He does two bridges in fine black lines on the inside of her arms, just above the creases of her elbows: the