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“A bold suggestion.”
“Yep. She reminds me of this Polish lady in my building who makes the worst pierogies ever.” August laughs, and Jane pulls a face like she’s tasting them all over again. “I mean it! Oh man, they’re so bad! But she’s nice so I eat them anyway.”
“Well, I think she’s a seamstress.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Magnifying glasses sticking out of her purse,” August points out. “Way too young to need those unless she does fine detail work. And look, the bottom of her right shoe is more worn off than the left. Sewing machine pedal.”
“Holy shit,” Jane says, sounding genuinely impressed. “Okay. A seamstress and a pierogi smuggler.”
“Every woman a universe.”
She hums under her breath, letting a comfortable lull swell between them, until she turns to August and says, “What about me?”
August blinks at her. “What about you?”
“Come on, what’s your guess? If you have one for them, you must have one for me.”
And of course August has a mental file on her. August has spent weeks ticking off a list of clues about Jane, trying to parse the buttons on her jacket and the patches on her backpack to figure out how she’d kiss August if she got her alone. But Jane doesn’t need to know that part.
“Um,” August says. “You—you have a super regular commute—every morning, every afternoon, but you’re not a student, because you don’t get off with me at the BC stop. Almost the same outfit every day, so you know exactly who you are and what you’re about, and you don’t work anywhere formal. Past of working in food service. And everyone you meet seems to love you, so—um, so. You work the breakfast-to-lunch shift at a restaurant off this line, and you’re good at it. You make good tips because people like you. And you’re probably only doing it to fund some kind of passion project, which is what you really want to do.”
Jane looks at her like she’s assessing everything about August too. August can’t tell if that’s good or bad. She just knows Jane’s cheekbones look really nice from this angle.
“Hm. That’s a good guess.”
August raises her eyebrows. “Close?”
“You got the job part wrong.”
“Then what do you do?”
She sucks her teeth, shaking her head. “Uh-uh. Where’s the fun in that? You gotta guess.”
“That’s not fair! You’re being mysterious on purpose.”
“I’m mysterious by nature, August.”
August rolls her eyes. “Fuck off.”
“It’s the truth!” She chuckles, nudging her elbow into August’s side. “You gotta put in a little more work to crack this egg, baby.”
Baby. It’s just the way Jane talks—she probably calls everyone baby—but it still goes down like sweet tea.
“Fine,” August says. “Give me some more clues.”
Jane thinks, and says, “All right, how ’bout this?”
She scoots down one seat, unzips her backpack, and upends it in the space between them.
On top of her scarf and cassette player and orange headphones are a dozen cassette tapes, a paperback with the cover torn off, and a battered hardback. Two packs of gum, one almost empty, from a brand August doesn’t recognize. A few Band-Aids, a Swiss army knife, a GREETINGS FROM CALIFORNIA postcard, a jar of Tiger Balm, a set of keys, a lighter, a tube of Lip Smackers chapstick August hasn’t seen since she was a kid, three notebooks, five pencils, a sharpener. She must keep her phone in her jacket, because it’s not in the mix.
“They’re kind of just whatever I’ve found,” Jane says as August starts picking through the cassettes. “They can be hard to come across, so I take what I can get, mostly. Sometimes if I sweet-talk someone who has a lot, I get lucky and find something I want.”
They’re from different eras—first editions from the ’70s, a mixed bag of ’80s and ’90s. There’s a Diana Ross, a Michael Bolton, a Jackson Five, a New York Dolls. Each one well-loved, kept safe from scuffs and cracks. It looks like she treats them like the most valuable things she owns. Since most have to be out of production, August imagines that might be true.
“Why cassettes?”
