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August crosses over to her and sits down as the train sways back into motion, carrying them toward Coney Island. She wonders if Jane has ever, even once, gotten out at the end of the line and sunk her feet into the water.
August turns to her, and Jane’s looking back.
There’s always been a schematic in August’s head of how things are supposed to be. Her whole life, she managed the noise and buzz and creeping dread in her brain by mapping things out, telling herself that if she looked hard enough, she’d find an explanation for everything. But here they are, looking at each other across the steady delineation of things August understands, watching the line blur.
“Can I ask you something?” August says. Her hand fidgets up to her ear, tucking her hair back. “It’s—uh. It might sound weird.”
Jane eyes her. Maybe she thinks August is going to ask her out again. Jane’s beautiful, always improbably beautiful under the subway fluorescents, but a date is the last thing on August’s mind.
“Yeah,” Jane says. “Of course.”
August curls her hands into fists in her lap. “How old are you?”
Jane laughs softly, relief flashing in her eyes. “Easy. Twenty-four.”
Okay. August can work with that.
“Do you…” She takes a breath. “So what year were you born, then?”
And—
It takes only a second, a breath, but something passes over Jane’s face like the headlights of a passing car over a bedroom wall at night, gone as soon as it was there. Jane settles into her usual sly smile. August never considered how much of a deflection that smile was.
“Why’re you asking?”
“Well,” August says carefully. She’s watching Jane, and Jane is watching her, and she can feel this moment opening up like a manhole beneath them, waiting for them to drop. “I’m twenty-three. You should have been born about a year before me.”
Jane stiffens, unreadable. “Right.”
“So,” August says. She braces herself. “So that’s… that’s 1995.”
Jane’s smile flickers out, and August swears a fluorescent light above them dims too.
“What?”
“I was born in 1996, so you should have been born in 1995,” August tells her. “But you weren’t, were you?”
The sleeve of Jane’s jacket has ridden up on one side, and she’s tracing the characters above her elbow, digging her fingertips in so the color flows out of her skin under the ink.
“Okay,” she says, trying on a different smile, her eyes dropping to the floor. “You’re fucking with me. I get it. You’re very cute and funny.”
“Jane, what year were you born?”
“I said I got it, August.”
“Jane—”
“Look,” she says, and when her eyes flash up, it’s there, the thing August glimpsed before—anger, fear. She was half-expecting Jane to laugh it off, like she does her cassette player and her backpack full of years. She doesn’t. “I know something’s… wrong with me. But you don’t have to fuck with me, okay?”
She doesn’t know. How can she not know?
It’s the first time Jane’s let it show, her uncertainty, and the lines of her are filled in a little more. She was this dream girl, too good to be true, but she’s real, finally, as real as August’s sneakers on the subway platform. Lost. That August can understand.
“Jane,” August says carefully. “I’m not fucking with you.”
She pulls out the photo, unfolds it, smooths out the crease down the middle. She shows it to Jane—the washed-out, yellow-tinted booths, the faded neon of the sign above the to-go counter. Jane’s smile, frozen in time.
“That’s you, right?”
