laughing in her ear, and she whips her shorts across her bedroom and furiously adds to the list, orgasm denial.
(Jane makes it up to her eventually.)
August guesses it’s predictable that this is how a person like her would handle entry into the mythical ranks of sex-havers—itemized lists, shorthand, the occasional unhelpful diagram. But it’s not her usual compulsive need to organize. It’s the way Jane kisses her like she’s trying to know everything about her, the revelation of what her own body can do, the way Jane’s willing to work for it in five stolen minutes between stops. August wants to give that back to her, and the August way is having a plan of exactly how.
So, she scrapes together tips to buy Jane a new phone, one that can send and receive grainy photos, and she plucks up the courage to take one in her bedroom mirror. She stares at it on her phone, at the hair falling down her shoulders, the lips painted red, the lace, the fading mark on her neck turned up to the light from the window, and she almost can’t believe it’s her. She didn’t know she had it in herself to be this until Jane pulled it out of her. She likes it. She likes it a lot.
She hits send, and Jane texts back a string of swears, and August bites a smile into her pillow and writes, red lipstick.
In between, she picks the lock on the back office of Billy’s and discovers it hasn’t been used since 2008. It’s no more than an ancient filing cabinet of yellowing paystubs and an empty desk, prime real estate for a secondary caseworking outpost. So that’s exactly what she turns it into, deep in the back of the restaurant where nobody notices if she spends her breaks on science fiction storytime. She pins copies of her maps to the walls and thumbs through the files until she finds Jane’s application from 1976. She spends a long minute with that one, running her fingers over the letters, but pins it up too.
She uses Jane’s real name to finally find her birth certificate—May 28, 1953—and since Jane knows she’s twenty-four, they narrow down the timeframe of the event that got her stuck to between summer 1977 and summer 1978.
She makes two copies of a timeline and posts one in her room and the other in the office. Summer 1971: Jane leaves San Francisco. January 1972: Jane moves to New Orleans. 1974: Jane leaves New Orleans. February 1975: Jane moves to New York. Summer 1976: Jane starts working at Billy’s. Everything after: question mark, question mark, question mark.
She scores a boom box from Myla’s shop, a silver ’80s-era Say Anything–style thing. She hides it in the office and tunes it to their station. When she’s too busy for the Q, Jane sends her songs.
August starts sending songs back. It’s a game they play, and August pretends not to look up every lyric of every song and agonize over the meanings. Jane requests “I Want to Be Your Boyfriend,” and August answers with “The Obvious Child.” August calls in “I’m on Fire,” and Jane replies with “Gloria,” and August thumps her head back against the brick wall of the office and tries not to sink through the floor.
“What, exactly,” Wes asks, sitting at the counter with a plate of French toast and watching August doodle a cartoon subway train in the margin of the Sex Notebook, “are you doing?”
“Working,” August says. She ducks automatically as Lucie passes with a tray over her head.
“I meant with Jane,” he says.
“Just having fun,” August says.
“You’ve never just had fun in your life,” Wes points out.
August puts her pen down. “What are you doing with Isaiah?”
Wes shovels an enormous bite into his mouth instead of answering.
* * *
Something keeps bothering her about Jane’s name. Her first one, Biyu. Biyu Su. Su Biyu.
She’s repeated it over and over in her head, run it through every database, stared at the cracks in her ceiling trying to pry it out of the filing cabinets of her brain. Where the hell has she heard that name before?
She flips through her notes, returning to the timeline she’s sketched out.
Why does Biyu Su sound so familiar?
If this weren’t so insane, and if she thought her mom wouldn’t drag her back into the black hole of the Uncle Augie investigation, she’d ask her for help. Suzette Landry may not have found what she’s looking for, but she’s good. She’s solved