Manhattan Bridge on her left, and on her right, below the anchor, the Golden Gate.
It helps, they discover, for Jane to do things that make her feel connected to her old life. She cooks congee for breakfast like her dad used to, hangs out at Myla’s antique shop offering opinions on ’60s-era furniture, joins up with demonstrations, brings August with her to volunteer at HIV clinics. When she finds out that most people August’s age have never even heard of the UpStairs Lounge, she goes on a furious weeklong tear, posting handwritten fliers around the neighborhood until August shows her how to write a Medium post. It goes viral. She keeps writing.
The best nights are when they go dancing. Jane likes music, everything from gigs for half-decent local bands to loud clubs with flashing lights, and August goes along but stringently maintains that she won’t dance. It always lasts about half an hour, and suddenly she’s in the crowd under Jane’s hands, watching her move her hips and stomp her feet and smile up into the haze. She could stay hovering at the bar, but she’d miss this.
Myla pulls some strings she refuses to disclose and matter-of-factly comes home one afternoon with a fake ID for Jane, complete with a photo and a 1995 birthdate. Jane brings it when August takes her to fill out an application at Billy’s, and she starts as a line cook the next week, quickly falling into the rhythm of good-natured barbs and backhanded comments with Lucie and Winfield and the rest of the crew. Jerry gives her a good, long look the first time she steps up to the grill next to him, shakes his head, and gets back to his bacon.
Sometimes, when August walks home from the subway, she looks up at her own bedroom window from the street and thinks about hundreds of thousands of people walking past it. One square inch of a picture too big to see all at once. New York is infinite, but it is made up, in very small part, of the room behind the window with her and Jane’s books crowding the sill.
August scrapes together the leftovers of her last student loan to buy a queen-sized bed, mattress and box spring and all, and Jane looks like she’s in heaven when she flops onto it for the first time, euphoric enough to make August spring for the down comforter too. She’s realizing that she’d give Jane pretty much anything she wants. She finds she doesn’t really mind.
(Jane does finally make August’s dream come true: she assembles the bed. It’s exactly as devastating as August always imagined.)
The first night they sleep in it, August wakes up with Jane spooned up against her back, the broken-in fabric of one of Wes’s oversized T-shirts soft against her skin. She rolls over and burrows her nose into the dip between Jane’s neck and shoulder, breathing her in. She smells sweet, always, somehow, like sugar’s in her veins. Last week, August watched her shout down a guy with a racist sign in Times Square and then snap it in half over her knee. But it’s still true. Jane is spun sugar. A switchblade girl with a cotton-candy heart.
She stirs a little, stretching in the sheets, squinting at August in the early morning light.
“I’m never gonna get sick of this,” she mumbles, reaching out to palm across August’s shoulder, her chest.
August blushes and then blinks in surprise.
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
She leans in, dragging her fingers through the hair fanned out on the pillow. “You have a gray hair.”
“What?”
“Yeah, you have a gray hair! Didn’t you say your mom’s started super early?”
She’s wide awake suddenly, sitting up and throwing off the covers. “Oh, I wanna see!”
August follows her out to the bathroom, the tail of Jane’s T-shirt swinging around her bare thighs. There’s a bruise on the inside of one, rose petal soft. August left it there.
“It’s behind your right ear,” August says, watching Jane lean into the mirror to examine her reflection. “Yeah, look, right there.”
“Oh my God,” she says. “Oh my God. There it is. I didn’t have this before.”
And it’s that, more than anything—more than the new bed, more than the Pop-Tarts, more than all the times Jane has made her sigh into the pillow. It’s a gray hair that makes it feel real, finally. Jane’s here. She’s staying. She’s going to live beside August as long as they want, getting gray hairs and laugh lines, adopting a dog, becoming boring