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“Coffee Girl.”
She smiles. One of her front teeth is crooked at the slightest, most life-ruining angle. August feels every intelligent thought exit her skull.
“Subway Girl,” she manages.
Subway Girl’s smile spreads. “Morning.”
August’s brain tries “hi” and her mouth goes for “morning” and what comes out is, “Horny.”
Maybe it’s not too late to crawl under the seat with the rat poop.
“I mean, sure, sometimes,” Subway Girl replies smoothly, still smiling, and August wonders if there’s enough rat poop in the world for this.
“Sorry, I’m—morning brain. It’s too early.”
“Is it?” Subway Girl asks with what sounds like genuine interest.
She’s wearing the headphones August saw the other day, ’80s-era ones with bright orange foam over the speaker boxes. She digs through her backpack and pulls out a cassette player to pause her music. A whole cassette player. Subway Girl is… a Brooklyn hipster? Is that a point against her?
But when she turns back to August with her tattoos and her slightly crooked front tooth and her undivided attention, August knows: this girl could be hauling a gramophone through the subway every day, and August would still lie down in the middle of Fifth Avenue for her.
“Yeah, um,” August chokes out. “I had a late night.”
Subway Girl’s eyebrows do something inscrutable. “Doing what?”
“Oh, uh, I had a night shift. I wait tables at Pancake Billy’s, and it’s twenty-four hours, so—”
“Pancake Billy’s?” Subway Girl asks. “That’s… on Church, right?”
She rests her elbows on her knees, perching her chin on her hands. Her eyes are so bright, and her knuckles are square and sturdy, like she knows how to knead bread or what the insides of a car look like.
August absolutely, definitely, is not picturing Subway Girl just as delighted and fond across the table on a third date. And she’s certainly not the type of person to sit on a train with someone whose name she doesn’t even know and imagine her assembling an Ikea bed frame. Everything is completely under control.
She clears her throat. “Yeah. You know it?”
Subway Girl bites down on her lip, which is. Fine.
“Oh… oh man, I used to wait tables there too,” she says. “Jerry still in the kitchen?”
August laughs. Lucky again. “Yeah, he’s been there forever. I can’t imagine him ever not being there. Every day when I clock in it’s all—”
“‘Mornin’, buttercup,’” she says in a pitch-perfect imitation of Jerry’s heavy Brooklyn accent. “He’s such a babe, right?”
“A babe, oh my God.”
August cracks up, and Subway Girl snorts, and fuck if that sound isn’t an absolute revelation. The doors open and close at a stop and they’re still laughing, and maybe there’s… maybe there’s something happening here. August has not ruled out the possibility.
“That Su Special, though,” August says.
The spark in Subway Girl’s eyes ignites so brilliantly that August half expects her to jump out of her seat. “Wait, that’s my sandwich! I invented it!”
“What, really?”
“Yeah, that’s my last name! Su!” she explains. “I had Jerry make it special for me so many times, everybody started getting them. I can’t believe he still makes them.”
“He does, and they’re fucking delicious,” August says. “Definitely brought me back from the dead more than once, so, thank you.”
“No problem,” Subway Girl says. She’s got this far-off look in her eyes, like reminiscing about cranky customers sending back shortstacks is the best thing that’s happened to her all week. “God, I miss that place.”
