“Do you remember when you stole that tape of Say Anything from our neighbors?” she asks.
Despite herself, August laughs. “You were so mad at me.”
“And you made a copy. Seven years old, and you figured out how to pirate a movie. How many times did I catch you watching it in the middle of the night?”
“Like a million.”
“You were always crying your eyes out to that Peter Gabriel song. You got a soft heart, kid. I used to worry that’d get you hurt. But you surprised me. You grew out of it. You’re like me—you don’t need anyone. Remember that.”
“Yeah.” For half an embarrassing second, August’s mind flits back to the subway and the girl with the leather jacket. She swallows. “Yeah, you’re right. It’ll be fine.”
She pulls her phone away from her face to check the time. Shit. Break’s almost over.
She’s lucky she got the job at all, but not lucky enough to be good at it. She was maybe too convincing when Lucie the manager called her fake reference number and got August’s burner phone. The result: straight onto the floor, no training, picking things up as she goes.
“Side of bacon?” the guy at table nineteen asks August when she drops off his plate. He’s one of the regulars Winfield pointed out on her first day—a retired firefighter who’s come in for breakfast every day for the last twenty years. At least he likes Billy’s enough not to care about terrible service.
“Shit, I’m sorry.” August cringes. “Sorry for saying ‘shit.’”
“Forgot this,” says a voice behind her, thick with a Czech accent. Lucie swoops in with a side of bacon out of nowhere and snatches August by the arm toward the kitchen.
“Thank you,” August says, wincing at the nails digging into her elbow. “How’d you know?”
“I know everything,” Lucie says, bright red ponytail bobbing under the grimy lights. She releases August at the bar and returns to her fried egg sandwich and a draft of next week’s schedule. “You should remember that.”
“Sorry,” August says. “You’re a lifesaver. My pork product savior.”
Lucie pulls a face that makes her look like a bird of prey in liquid eyeliner. “You like jokes. I don’t.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t like apologies either.”
August bites down another sorry and turns back to the register, trying to remember how to put in a rush order. She definitely forgot the side of hashbrowns for table seventeen and—
“Jerry!” Lucie shouts through the kitchen window. “Side of hashbrowns, on the fly!”
“Fuck you, Lucie!”
She yells something back in Czech.
“You know I don’t know what that means!”
“Behind,” Winfield warns as he brushes past with a full stack in each hand, blueberry on the left, butter pecan on the right. He inclines his head toward the kitchen, braids swinging, and says, “She called you an ugly cock, Jerry.”
Jerry, the world’s oldest fry cook, bellows out a laugh and throws some hashbrowns on the grill. Lucie, August has discovered, has superhuman eyesight and a habit of checking her employees’ work at the register from across the bar. It’d be annoying, except she’s saved August’s ass twice in five minutes.
“You are always forgetting,” she says, clicking her acrylics against her clipboard. “You eat?”
August thinks back over the last six hours of her shift. Did she spill half a plate of pancakes on herself? Yes. Did she eat any? “Uh … no.”
“That’s why you forget. You don’t eat.” She frowns at August like a disappointed mother, even though she can’t be older than twenty-nine.
“Jerry!” Lucie yells.
“What!”
“Su Special!”
“I already made you one!”
“For August!”
“Who?”
“New girl!”
“Ah,” he says, and he cracks two eggs onto the grill. “Fine.”
August twists the edge of her apron between her fingers, biting back a thank you before Lucie throttles her. “What’s a Su Special?”
“Trust me,” Lucie says impatiently. “Can you work a double Friday?”
The Su Special, it turns out, is an off-menu item—bacon, maple syrup, hot sauce, and a runny fried egg sandwiched between two pieces of Texas toast. And maybe it’s Jerry, his walrus mustache suggesting unknowable wisdom and his Brooklyn accent confirming seven decades of setting his internal clock by the light at Atlantic and Fourth, or Lucie, the first person at this job to remember August’s name and care if she’s living or dying, or because Billy’s is magic—but it’s the best sandwich August has ever eaten.
It’s nearly one in the morning when August clocks out and heads home, streets teeming and alive in muddy orange-brown. She trades a crumpled dollar from her tips for an orange at the bodega