remember, because it comes with the sweet gut punch of knowing and being known. It melts in her mouth like ice cream at the corner store when she was eight. It aches like a brick to the shin.
Jane kisses her and kisses her, and August has completely lost track of what this was even supposed to be about, because she’s kissing Jane back, swiping her thumb into the dip of Jane’s collarbone, and Jane’s tongue is tracing the soft seam of her lips, and August’s mouth is falling open. Jane’s hand drops from the wall to brace against August’s face, tangled up in her wet hair, and she’s everywhere and nowhere—in her mouth, at her waist, against her hips, touching too much for August to pretend this isn’t real to her but not enough to know if it’s real to Jane too.
And then Jane pulls back and says, “Oh, fuck.”
August has to blink five times before her eyes remember how to focus. What the fuck was she doing? Kissing her way to self-destruction, that’s what.
“What?” she asks. Her voice comes out strangled. Jane’s hand is still in her hair.
“New Orleans,” she says. “The Bywater. That’s where I was.”
“What?”
“I lived there,” she says. August is staring at her mouth, dark pink and swollen, and trying desperately to drag her brain in the opposite direction. “I lived in New Orleans. A year, at least. I had an apartment, and a roommate, and—oh, holy shit, I remember.”
“Are you sure?” August asks. “Are you sure you’re not getting it mixed up because I’m from there?”
“No,” Jane says, “no, I remember now.” She moves suddenly, the way she does when she’s feeling something big, and scoops August up in her arms and spins her around. “Oh my God, you’re fucking magic.”
August thinks, as her feet lift off the ground, that nobody has ever called her magic in her entire life.
They slide right back into their normal places: August perched on the edge of a seat with her notebook open to the dryest page she can find, and Jane pacing the aisle reciting everything she can recall. She talks about a burger joint in the Quarter where she worked, about Jenny (tally mark eleven), about a shotgun apartment on the second floor of an old house and a sweet-faced roommate whose name she can’t remember. August writes it all down and doesn’t think about how Jane kissed her—Jane kissed her—Jane put her hand on August’s face and kissed her, and August knows how her lips feel, and she can’t ever stop knowing, and—
“Did you get that?” Jane says, pausing her pacing, apparently completely unaffected. “The snowball place in the Marigny? You look like you spaced out for a second.”
“Oh, yeah,” August says. “Definitely got it.”
When she stumbles back into the apartment that night, Niko takes one look at her and says, “Oh, you fucked up.”
“It’s fine!” August says, shouldering past him toward the fridge.
“You are projecting so many feelings right now, I can’t believe your skin’s still on.”
“I’m repressing it!” She yanks a carton of leftover sesame chicken out and pops the top, shoveling it into her mouth cold. “Let me repress it!”
“I can see how you would think that is what you’re doing,” he says, sounding genuinely sorry for her.
7
POLICE DEPARTMENT
CITY OF NEW YORK
Filed April 17, 1992
Incident: At 1715 hours on 17 April 1992, I, Officer Jacob Haley #739, was dispatched to Times Square-42nd Street subway station. Mark Edelstein (DOB 8-7-1954) reported middle-aged white male approx. 5’9 struck him in eye with closed fist in dispute over seat on Brooklyn-bound Q train. He states man shouted anti-semitic slur at him before assault. Suspect absent from scene. Victim states another passenger, mid-twenties Asian female approx. 5’7, forced attacker off train at 49th Street Station. Passenger also absent from scene.
August’s phone chimes at six on a Thursday morning with a text from Jane.
She rolls onto her side, elbow digging into her air mattress, which has halfway deflated during the night—she needs to get a real bed. Three texts from her mom. One missed call and voicemail from Billy’s. A red bubble announcing seventeen unread messages in her school email. One notification from her bank: her account is at $23.02.
Normally, any two of those overlapping would send her into an hour-long anxiety-fueled tear of aggressive productivity until everything was squared away, even if she had to lie and cheat to do it.
Her mom’s texts say: Hey, wanted to check in on that file I sent you. and Are