of the effortless smiles and subway dance parties, who is probably a fucking poet or, like, a motorcycle mechanic. She probably went home that night and sat at a bar with her equally hot motorcycle poet friends and talked about how funny it was that this weird girl on her train asked her out, and then went to bed with her even hotter girlfriend and had nice, satisfying, un-clumsy sex with someone who isn’t a depressed twenty-three-year-old virgin. They’ll get up in the morning and make their cool and sexy sex-haver toast and drink their well-adjusted coffee and move on with their lives, and eventually, after enough weeks of August avoiding the Q, Jane will forget all about her.
August’s professor pulls up another PowerPoint slide, and August pulls up Google Maps and starts planning her new commute.
Great. Fine. She’ll never see Jane again. Or ask anyone out for the rest of her life. She was on a solid streak of belligerent solitude. She can pick it back up.
Cool.
Today’s lecture is on correlational research, and August is taking notes. She is. Measuring two variables to find the statistical relationship between them without any influence from other variables. Got it.
Like the correlation between August’s ability to focus on this lecture and the amount of athletic, mutually gratifying sex Jane is having with her hypothetical super hot and probably French girlfriend, like, right now. Not taking into consideration the extraneous variables of August’s empty stomach, her aching lower back from doubles at work, or her phone buzzing in her pocket as Myla and Wes argue in the group chat over tonight’s stir-fry. She’s pushed through those to take notes before. None were half as distracting as Jane.
It’s annoying, because Jane is just a person on a train. Simply a very beautiful woman with a nice-smelling leather jacket and a way of becoming the absolute shimmering focal point of every space she occupies. Only marginally the reason August hasn’t altered her commute once all semester.
It’s chill. August is, as she has been her entire life, very deeply chill.
She gives up and checks her phone.
august my lil bb i know you hate broc but we’re doing broc i’m sorry, Myla’s texted.
I don’t mind broccoli, August sends back.
I’m the one who hates broccoli, Wes sends with a pouty emoji.
ooo in that case i’m not sorry:), Myla replies.
This should be enough, she thinks. August has, however dubiously, stumbled into this tangle of people that want her to be a part of them. She’s lived for a long-ass time on less love than this. She’s been alone in every way. Now she’s only alone in some ways.
She texts back, Fun fact: broccoli is an excellent source of vitamin C. No scurvy for this bitch.
Within seconds, Myla has sent back AYYYYYYY and changed the name of the chat to SCURVY FLIRTY & THRIVING.
When August opens the door that night, Wes is sitting on the kitchen counter with an ice pack on his face, blood spattered down his chin.
“Jesus,” August says, dropping her bag next to Myla’s skateboard by the door, “what’d y’all do this time?”
“Rolly Bangs,” Wes says miserably. Myla is a few feet down the counter, chopping vegetables, while Niko dumps the remains of a planter into the trash. “They convinced me to do a round before I left for work, and now I have to call in on account of a busted lip and emotional distress because someone pushed the chair too hard.”
“You said you wanted to go for the record,” Myla says impartially.
“I could have lost a tooth,” Wes says.
Myla wipes her hands on her overalls and leans over. “You’re fine.”
“I’ve been maimed.”
“You knew the risks of the game.”
“It’s a game you came up with when you were fried off a pot cookie and Niko’s shady kombucha, not Game of fucking Thrones.”
“This is why you’re supposed to wait for the line judge to get home,” August says. “When y’all kill one another, I’m inheriting the apartment.”
Wes slumps off to the couch with a book, and Myla continues her work on dinner while Niko tends to the plants that weren’t casualties. August spreads her notes on research methods out on the living room floor and tries to catch up on what she missed in class.
“Anyway,” Myla is saying, telling Niko about work. “I told her I don’t care who her dead husband is, we don’t buy used jock straps, not even from members of the 1975 Super Bowl–winning Pittsburgh Steelers, because we sell nice things that aren’t