under a gazebo. She’d be on the train with Jane except Niko personally packed her a sandwich and insisted she take advantage of her Saturday morning off to “recenter” and “absorb different energies” and “try this havarti I got at the farmer’s market last week, it’s got a lot of character.”
But it only takes a minute to download an FM tuner app, and August thumbs through the dial to the station. A guy with a dry voice is reading a list of programming for the next six hours, so she texts back, Okay, what next?
Just wait, Jane replies. I remembered another song, so I called in and requested it.
The guy on the mic switches gears and says, “And now, a request from a girl in Brooklyn who wants to hear some old-school punk, here’s ‘Lovers’ by the Runaways.”
August leans back on the bench, and the harsh guitar and pounding drums start up. Her phone buzzes.
Today I remembered that I dated a girl in Spanish Harlem who liked to get head to this album! XOXO Jane
August chokes on her sandwich.
It becomes the new ritual: Jane texts August day and night, Hey! Turn on the radio! Love, Jane. And within minutes, there’ll be a song she requested. Thankfully, after the first, they’re almost never songs that she used to eat girls out to.
Sometimes it’s one Jane just remembered and wants to hear. One day it’s “War” by Edwin Starr, and she giddily tells August about a Vietnam protest in ’75 where she broke a finger in a fight with some old racist while the song blasted over the speakers, how a bunch of the guys who hung out on Mott Street passed around a coffee can to collect the money to get it set correctly.
But sometimes, it’s a song that she likes, or wants August to hear, a song from the back of her mind or her menagerie of cassettes. Michael Bolton rasping his way through “Soul Provider” or Jam Master Jay spitting out “You Be Illin’.” It doesn’t matter. 90.9 will play it, and August will listen just to feel that under-the-same-moon feeling of Jane listening to the same thing at the same time as she glides across the Manhattan Bridge.
And suddenly August is as handcuffed to the radio as Jane used to be. It’s extremely fucking inconvenient, honestly. She’s busy worrying about what’s going to happen to Lucie and Winfield and Jerry once Billy’s gets shut down. She has trains to catch and shifts to work and classes to catch up on and, on one particular Sunday, a Craigslist ad to answer across Brooklyn.
“Please, Wes,” August begs. He has the night off, so he’s actually awake before sunset, and he’s using his daylight hours to sketch on the couch and shoot deeply put-upon looks at August across the apartment. For someone so determined to never express emotion, he can be incredibly dramatic.
“I’m sorry, how exactly do you expect us to get a desk and an entire bed home from fucking Gravesend?”
“It’s a writing desk and a twin mattress,” August tells him. “We can do it on the subway.”
“I am not going to be the asshole who takes a mattress on the subway.”
“People take obnoxious things on the subway all the time! I was on the Q last week and someone had an entire recliner! It had cupholders, Wes.”
“Yeah, and that person was an asshole. You haven’t been in New York long enough to earn the right to be an asshole with impunity. You’re still in the tourist zone.”
“I am not a tourist. A rat climbed up my shoe yesterday, and I just let it happen. Could a tourist do that?”
Wes rolls his eyes, sitting up and batting a dangling vine out of his face. “I thought you were into minimalism, anyway.”
“I was,” August says. She takes off her glasses to clean them, hoping the blurry shape of Wes doesn’t recognize it for what it is: not having to see someone’s face when she says something vulnerable. “But that was … before I found somewhere worth putting stuff in.”
Wes is quiet, then sighs, putting his sketchbook down on the trunk.
He grits his teeth. “Isaiah has a car.”
Two hours later, they’re picking their way back to Flatbush, August Tetris’d into the back seat with her rickety new writing desk and a twin-size mattress strapped to the roof of Isaiah’s Volkswagen Golf.
Isaiah is saying something about his day job, about Instagram influencers asking if they can write off handcrafted orchid crowns on their