She’s been deliberately not doing the math on her credits, caught in anxiety limbo between another student loan and the inevitable push off the ledge into adulthood. This is the ledge, she guesses. And the push. She feels like a cartoon character in midair, looking down to see the desert floor and a jacuzzi full of TNT five hundred feet below her.
What the fuck is she supposed to do?
She could call her mom, but her mother has only lived in one place, only ever wanted one thing. It’s easy to know who you are when you chose once and never changed your mind.
There’s this feeling August has had everywhere she’s ever lived, like she’s not really there. Like it’s all happening in a dream. She walks down the street, and it’s like she’s floating a few inches off the pavement, never rooted down. She touches things, a canister of sugar at a coffee shop, or the post of a street sign warm from the afternoon sun, and it feels like she hasn’t touched anything at all, like it’s all a place she lives in concept. She’s just out here, shoes untied, hair a mess, no idea where she’s going, scraping her knees and not bleeding.
So maybe that’s why, instead of calling her mom, or crawling home to some blunt truth from Myla or cryptic encouragement from Niko, she finds herself stepping onto the Q. At least here she knows where she is. Time, place, person.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” Jane says. She shimmies her shoulders, jabbing a finger gun in August’s direction. She scored a baseball cap from a seventh grader last week, and she’s wearing it backward today. August pencils in thirty minutes between homework and public records to scream about it. “Get it?”
“You’re hilarious.”
Jane pulls a face. “Okay, but really. What’s up with you?”
“I found out I, uh.” She thinks of her transcript, inevitable, soggy, and folded up in the pocket of her raincoat. “I can graduate next semester, if I want.”
“Oh, hey, that’s great!” she says. “You’ve been in school forever!”
“Yeah, exactly,” August says. “Forever. As in, it’s the only thing I know how to do.”
“That’s not true,” Jane says. “You know how to do tons of things.”
“I know logistically how to perform some tasks,” August tells her, squeezing her eyes shut. That dynamite hot tub is starting to sound very appealing. “I don’t know how to have something that I do, every day, like as an adult who does a thing. It’s nuts that we all start out having these vague ideas of what we like to do, hobbies, interests, and then one day everybody has their thing, you know? They used to just be a person and now they’re a—an architect, or a banker, or a lawyer, or—or a serial killer who makes jewelry out of human teeth. Like, things. That they do. That they are. What if there’s not that thing for me, Jane, I mean, what if I’ve never wanted to be anything other than just an August? What if that’s all there is for me? What if Billy’s closes and nobody else will hire me? What if I get out there and end up realizing there’s not a dream for me, or a purpose, or anything—”
“Okay,” Jane says, cutting her off. “Okay, come on.”
When August opens her eyes, Jane’s standing in front of her, hand outstretched.
“Let’s go.”
“Go where?” August says, even as she grabs on. Immediately, she’s pulled toward the back of the car, tripping over her feet. “I’m trying to have a nervous breakdown here.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Jane says. They’re at the emergency exit, and Jane reaches for the door handle.
“Oh my God, what are you doing?”
“I’m gonna show you my favorite thing to do when I feel like I’m gonna lose it down here,” Jane says. “All you gotta do is keep up.”
“Why do I feel like I’m about to take my life into my own hands?”
“Because you should,” Jane says easily. She winks as if she’s sealing August’s fate in an envelope with a kiss. “But I promise you’ll be okay. Do you trust me?”
“What? What kind of question is that?”
“Can you turn that brain of yours off for a second and trust?”
August opens and shuts her mouth.
“I—I guess I can try.”
“Good enough for me,” Jane says, and she wrenches the door open.
There’s barely time to panic about the noise and wind and motion exploding through the open door before Jane’s stepping onto the tiny platform between