AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he says. The crystals around his neck bounce against his chest as he walks. “Yeah, I’m gonna do the seitan.”
“Then what is she?”
“She’s alive,” he says. “But… also not? I don’t think she’s dead. She’s sort of… in between. Not here, not on the other side. She feels really… distant, like not totally rooted here and now. Except when she touched you, then she felt super here. Which is interesting.”
“Is—is there any other way to test this?”
“Not that I know of,” Niko says. “Sorry, babe, it’s not really an exact science. Ooh. Maybe I should do the shrimp instead.”
Right. Not an exact science. This is why August has never consulted a psychic before. Her mom always said, you can’t start with guesses. The first thing she learned from her: start with what you absolutely know.
She knows… Jane was in 1976, and Jane is here. Always here, on the Q, so maybe…
The first time August met Jane, she fell in love with her for a few minutes, and then stepped off the train. That’s the way it happens on the subway—you lock eyes with someone, you imagine a life from one stop to the next, and you go back to your day as if the person you loved in between doesn’t exist anywhere but on that train. As if they never could be anywhere else.
Maybe, with Jane on the Q, it’s actually true.
Maybe the Q is the answer.
Maybe the Q is where August should start.
She glances over to the opposite platform, and she can just make out the arrival board. Brooklyn-bound Q, incoming in two minutes.
“Oh,” August says. It’s punched out of her, involuntary. “Oh, fuck, why didn’t I think of it before?”
“I know,” Niko says, “shrimp, right?”
“No, I—” She spins around, lunging for the stairs, shouting over her shoulder. “Go get your taco, I’ll meet you at home, I—I have an idea!”
She loses sight of Niko as she throws herself downstairs, skittering into a trash can and sending a pizza box flying. There’s one way she can prove totally, definitively, that Jane is more than she seems. That this isn’t in her head.
August knows this route. She memorized it before she started taking it, determined to understand. It’s a two-minute ride between Canal and Prince, and Jane left in the opposite direction. There’s no physical way Jane can be on the next train to pull up, even if she ran for it. She should still be on her way through Manhattan. If she’s on this train, then August knows.
One minute.
August is alone. It’s nearly four in the morning.
The rush of the train comes, headlights spilling onto the toes of her sneakers.
The brakes grind, and August pictures the night fifty feet above, the universe watching as she tries to piece together one tiny corner of its mystery. She stares down at her shoes, at the yellow paint and chewed-up gum on the concrete, and tries to think about nothing but the place where her feet touch the ground, the absolute certainty of it. That’s real.
She feels unbelievably small. She feels like this is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in her entire life.
She lets the train cruise past until it coasts to a stop. It doesn’t matter if she chases down a particular car. The outcome will be the same.
August steps through the doors.
And there she is.
Jane looks exactly the same—jacket slouched, backpack at her side, one shoe coming untied. But the train is different. The last one was newer, with long, smooth blue benches and a ticker of stops along the top next to the advertisements. This one is older, the floors dustier, the seats a mixture of faded orange and yellow. It doesn’t make any sense, but here she is. She looks as confused to see August as August is to see her.
“When I said not to be a stranger,” Jane says, “I didn’t think you’d be back quite so soon.”
They’re the only two people in the car. Maybe they’re the only two people alive.
Maybe one of them isn’t alive at all.
This is it, then. Jane did the impossible. She is, whatever she is, impossible.
