furtive look around before sliding into the hallway that leads to the bathrooms, where he unlocks a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
Annie gives him a kiss on the cheek as she passes, and August waves awkwardly, buoyed along by the current of Annie’s energy. They take a left and there, behind Popeyes boxes and jugs of soybean oil, is something August never imagined she’d find in this wonderful shithole of a building: an elevator.
“Service elevator,” Annie explains as she jams the button with her thumb. “Nobody uses it anymore, but the busted old bitch works.”
On the ride up, August unties her apron, and Annie starts pulling off all six pairs of her false eyelashes, depositing them in a retainer case alongside her nails. She’s got a confident meticulousness to her chaos, a perfectly contained party with champagne. August can picture her sitting in her apartment in the middle of the night, all the spare shitty bedrooms an accountant’s salary can buy, humming along to Patti LaBelle as she diligently returns each nail and lash to their places in her vanity.
The elevator dings six floors up, and the doors slide open.
“Everybody says New Yorkers are so unfriendly, but you just have to know how to win them over,” Annie says as she steps out. She’s holding her heels, leading the way down the hall on fishnet-covered feet, yet she seems like she could go all night. “Me and that guy go way back, ever since I broke up a fight between some drunk assholes over a chicken tender meal.”
“Over chicken that doesn’t even have the bones?”
Annie hums in agreement. “Right? I haven’t even eaten meat in nine years, but fuck.”
They reach their doors—August’s, 6F, Annie’s, 6E.
“Come to a show sometime,” Annie says. “And if you see me around and I’m a boy, you can call me Isaiah.”
“Isaiah. Okay.” August reaches into her purse and fishes her keys out. “Thank you for the elevator thing.”
“It’s all good,” Annie says. In the soft light of the hallway, August sees the way her face transforms, Annie and Isaiah blurring together. “Tell Wes hi for me. And that he still owes me a slice of pizza and thirty bucks.”
August nods, and then. Well. She’s not sure what makes her ask. Maybe it’s that she’s starting to feel like an extra in an extremely low-budget Love Actually, surrounded by people loving and being loved in all their messy, unpredictable ways, and she doesn’t trust or understand it. Or maybe it’s that she wants to.
“Does it ever, like … I don’t know. Make you lonely? To love somebody who can’t meet you there?”
She regrets it immediately, but Annie laughs.
“Sometimes. But, you know, that feeling? When you wake up in the morning and you have somebody to think about? Somewhere for hope to go? It’s good. Even when it’s bad, it’s good.”
And August—well, August finds herself without a single damn thing to say to that.
* * *
There are two things coiled in August’s chest these days.
The first is her usual: anxiety meets full-on dread. The part of her that says, trust nobody, even and especially anyone that pushes softly into the chambers of your heart. Do not engage. Carry a knife. Don’t stab them, but also, maybe stab them if you have to.
The other, though, is the one that really freaks her out.
It’s hope.
August finished her final semester at U of M last fall in a haze of final exams and half-packed cardboard boxes. Her Craigslist roommate was always at her boyfriend’s, so August spent most days alone, to campus and back in her shitty secondhand Corolla, rolling past Catfish Cabin and people spilling out of juke joints, wondering what everyone else got that she didn’t. Memphis was warm, its humid afternoons and the way its people treated one another. Except August. For two years, August was a cactus in a field of Tennessee irises.
She’d moved to get some space—some healthy space—from her mom and the case and all the New Orleans ghosts she doesn’t believe in. But Memphis wasn’t her place either, so she filed the transfer papers.
She picked New York because she thought it would be every bit as cynical as her, just as comfortable killing time. She thought, honestly, she’d finally land somewhere that felt like her.
And it does, a lot of the time. The gray streets, people with their shoulders braced against the weight of another day, all sharp elbows and tired eyes. August can get into that.