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“I like that,” Niko says. “Makes it sound like I carry a nail bat.”
As they reach the front door, it flies open, and Wes comes marching out with both arms full of bright yellow flyers.
“Whoa, where are you going?” Niko asks.
“Lucie put flyers on my to-do list,” Wes says. “Winfield just dropped them off.”
“SAVE PANCAKE BILLY’S HOUSE OF PANCAKES PANCAKEPALOOZA DRAG & ART EXTRAGANZA,” August reads out loud. “Good lord, did we let Billy name it? Nobody in his family knows how to edit.”
Wes shrugs, heading for the stairs. “All I know is I’m supposed to post them around the neighborhood.”
“Running away isn’t going to help!” Niko calls after him.
August raises an eyebrow. “Running away from what?”
As if on cue, Isaiah rounds the last corner of the stairs. He and Wes freeze, separated by ten steps.
Niko idly pulls a toothpick from his vest pocket and puts it in his mouth. “From that.”
There are a few seconds of tense silence before Wes takes his flyers and his shell-shocked expression and darts down the stairs. August can hear his sneakers echoing at double-time all the way down.
Isaiah rolls his eyes. Niko and August exchange a look.
“I’ll go,” August says.
She finds Wes on the street outside of the building, cussing out a stapler as he tries to affix a flyer to a telephone pole.
“Uh-oh,” August says, drawing up to him. “Did that stapler try to get emotionally intimate with you?”
Wes glares. “You’re hilarious.”
August reaches over and pries half the flyers out of Wes’s hands. “Will you at least let me help you?”
“Fine,” he grumbles.
They set off down the block, Wes attacking electrical poles and signposts while August wedges flyers into mail slots and between the bars of windows. Winfield must have dropped off something close to five hundred, because as they work their way through Flatbush, they barely make a dent in the stacks.
After an hour, Wes turns to her and says, “I need a smoke.”
August shrugs. “Go ahead.”
“No,” he says, rolling up his leftover flyers and shoving them into the back pocket of his jeans. “I need a smoke.”
Back in their apartment, Wes leads her to the door to his bedroom and says, “If you tell Niko or Myla I let you in here, I will deny it, and I will wait months until you’re no longer expecting my retribution and give all your stuff to that guy on the second floor whose apartment smells like onions.”
August nudges Noodles away from where he’s nipping at her heels. “Noted.”
Wes swings the door open, and there’s his bedroom, exactly how Isaiah described it: nice and neat and stylish, light woods, stone gray linens, his own artwork matted and framed on the walls. He’s got the taste of someone who grew up with the finest things, and August thinks about the trust fund Myla mentioned. He pops open an ornate wooden cigar box on his nightstand and retrieves a heavy silver lighter and a joint.
August can see the benefits to Wes’s slight build when he easily hops through the open window and onto the fire escape. She’s wider in the hips and not half as graceful; by the time she meets him, she’s out of breath and he’s perched mid-roof against one of the air-conditioning units, lighting up without breaking a sweat.
August nudges next to him and turns to face the street, looking out over the lights of Brooklyn. It’s not quiet, but it’s that smooth, constant flow of noise she’s grown used to. She likes to imagine if she listened closely enough, she could hear the Q rattling down the block, carrying Jane into the night.
She has to talk to Jane. She knows she has to.
Wes passes the joint over, and she takes it, thankful for any reason to stop thinking.
“What part of New York were you born in?” she asks him.
