snuck into dollar theaters to watch, and August tears through thrift stores for records familiar to Jane’s hands and a vintage Jaws lunchbox. August brings every food she can think of to the Q: sticky buns, challah, slices of pizza, falafel sweating through its paper wrapper, steamed sponge cakes, ice cream melting down her wrist.
“You know, this train used to be called the QB,” Jane remembers casually one day. “I guess it’s just the Q now. Weird.”
Things start coming back slowly, in pieces, one moment at a time. A box of greasy pepperoni split with a friend on a patio in Philly. Walking down the block in her sandals on a hot July afternoon to buy soft green tea cakes with nickels from the couch. A girl she loved briefly who drank three Arnold Palmers a day. A girl she loved briefly who snuck a bottle of wine out of her family’s Seudat Purim because they were both too poor to buy one. A girl she loved briefly who worked at a movie theater.
There are, August notices, a lot of girls that Jane loved briefly. There’s a secret set of tally marks in the back of one of her notebooks. It’s up to seven. (She’s completely fine with it.)
They go through Jane’s backpack for clues—the notebooks, mostly filled with journal entries and recipes in messy shorthand, the postcard from California, which has a phone number that’s disconnected. August takes pictures of Jane’s buttons and pins so she can research them and discovers Jane was something of a radical in the ’70s, which opens up a whole new line of research.
August digs through library archives until she finds copies of pamphlets, zines, flyers, anything that might have been pinned up or pasted or crammed under a door into a seedy bar when Jane was stomping through the streets of New York. She digs up an issue of I Wor Kuen’s newspaper, pages in Chinese and English on Marxism and self-determination and escaping the draft. She finds a flyer for a Redstockings street theater performance about abortion rights. She prints out an entire issue of the Gay Liberation Front’s magazine and brings it to Jane, a bright pink sticky tab marking an essay by Martha Shelley titled “Gay Is Good.”
“‘Your friendly smile of acceptance—from the safe position of heterosexuality,’” Jane reads aloud, “‘isn’t enough. As long as you cherish that secret belief that you are a little bit better because you sleep with the opposite sex, you are still asleep in your cradle … and we will be the nightmare that awakens you.’”
She folds the page down and licks her bottom lip.
“Yeah,” she says, smirking. “Yeah, I remember this one.”
To say that the papers unlock new parts of Jane would be a lie, because they’ve always been there. They don’t reveal anything not already spelled out by the set of her chin and the way she plants her feet in the space she takes up. But they color in the lines, pin down the edges—she thumbs through and remembers protests, riots, curls her hands into fists and talks about what made the muscle memory in her knuckles, hand-painted signs and black eyes and a bandana tied over her mouth and nose.
August takes note after note and finds it almost funny—that all the fighting only conspired to make Jane gentle. Fearsome and flirty and full of bad jokes, an incorrigible sweet tooth and a steel-toe boot as a last resort. That, August is learning, is Jane.
It would be easier, August thinks, if the real Jane weren’t someone August liked so much. In fact, it’d be extremely convenient if Jane was boring or selfish or an asshole. She’d love to do one piece of casework without the whole halfway-in-love-with-her-subject thing getting in the way.
In between, when Jane needs a break, August does the thing she’s done her best to avoid most of her life: she talks.
“I don’t understand,” August says when Jane asks about her mom, “what does that have to do with your memories?”
Jane shrugs, touching the toes of her sneakers together. “I just want to know.”
Jane asks about school, and August tells her about her transfers and extra semesters and her freshman roommate from Texas who loved Takis Fuego, and it reminds Jane of this student she dated when she was twenty and couch-surfing through the Midwest (tally mark number eight). She asks about August’s apartment, and August tells her about Myla’s sculptures and Noodles barrelling through the halls, and it brings