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She told August about the big fight she overheard one night, how Augie kissed her forehead fiercely and left with a suitcase, how he wrote her every week and sometimes arranged late-night calls until the letters and calls stopped coming. She told August about a streetcar ride to the police station, an officer saying they couldn’t waste time on runaways, her parents inviting the chief for dinner when he drove her home and then taking her books away as punishment.
It makes sense now that Augie left and never came back, more than it did when it was only petty family arguments. August understands why he never told his sister he was still in the city, why her grandparents preferred to act as if he’d never existed. He was like Jane, just geographically closer.
She doesn’t know how to tell her mom. She doesn’t even know how to speak to her mom right now.
It’s too much to think about, too much to put into a text or a phone call, so she pushes her phone into her pocket and decides she’ll figure out as much as she can before she tells anyone else.
It’s not until the Q pulls up and she sees Jane that it occurs to her this might have finally been too much for Jane too.
Jane’s sitting there, staring straight ahead. There’s a rip in her shirt collar and a fresh cut on her lip. She’s flexing her right hand over and over in her lap.
“What happened?” August says, rushing onto the car and dropping her bag to kneel in front of her. She takes Jane’s face in her hands. “Hey, talk to me.”
Jane shrugs, impassive.
“Some guy called me some shit I’d rather not repeat,” she finally says. “That old racist-homophobic combo. Always a winner.”
“Oh my God, did he hit you? I’ll kill him.”
She laughs darkly, eyes flat. “No, I hit him. The lip is from when someone else pulled me off him.”
August tries to brush her thumb by Jane’s mouth, but she jerks away.
“Jesus,” August hisses. “Did they call the cops?”
“Nah. Me and some guy shoved him off at the next stop, and I doubt his ego could handle calling the cops on a skinny Chinese girl.”
“I meant for you. You’re hurt.”
Jane knocks August’s hands off of her, finally making eye contact. August flinches at the razor’s edge there.
“I don’t fuck with pigs. You know I don’t fuck with pigs.”
August sits back on her heels. There’s something off about Jane, in the air around her. Usually, it’s like August can feel the frequency she vibrates at, like she’s a space heater or a live wire, but it’s still. Eerily still.
“No, of course, that was stupid,” August says slowly. “Hey, are you… okay?”
“What do you fucking think, August?” she snaps.
“I know—it’s, it’s fucked up,” August tells her. She’s thinking about the fire, the things that drove Jane from city to city. “But I promise, most people aren’t like that anymore. If you could go out, you’d see.”
Jane grabs a pole and heaves herself to her feet. Her eyes are slate, flint, stone. The train takes a curve. She doesn’t falter.
“That’s not what it’s about.”
“Then what, Jane?”
“God, you don’t—you don’t get it. You can’t.”
For a second, August feels like she did that night after the séance, when she put her hand on Jane’s wrist and felt the pulse buzzing impossibly fast under her fingers, when she talked to Jane like she was on a ledge. Jane might as well be hanging out the emergency exit.
“Try me.”
“Okay, fine, it’s like—I woke up one day and half the people I ever loved were dead, and the other half had lived a whole life without me, and I never got a chance to see it,” Jane says. “I never got a chance to be at their weddings or their art shows. I never got to see my sisters grow up. I never got to tell my parents why I left. I never got to make it right. I mean, fuck, my friend Frankie had just gotten a new boyfriend who was so annoying, and I was gonna tell him to dump him, and I never even got to do that. Do you see what I mean? Have you ever thought about what this is like for me?”
“Of course I—”
“It’s like I died,” she cuts in. Her voice cracks in the middle. “I died, except I have to feel it. And on top of that, I have to feel everything else I’ve ever felt all over again. I have to get the bad news again every day, I have to deal with the choices I made, and I can’t fix it. I can’t even run from it. It’s miserable, August.”
