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“That could describe a lot of songs,” August says, untucking her phone from her pocket. “Do you remember any of the other lyrics?”
Jane bites her lip and frowns. She sings under her breath, warm and off-key and a little crackly, like the air around her feels. “How I depend on youuu, to give me love how I need it.”
August tries very hard to think only of scientific curiosity as she consults Google. “Oh, okay. When. It’s give me love when I need it. The title of the song is ‘Oh, Girl.’ It’s by a band called the Chi-Lites. Came out in 1972.”
“Yeah! That’s right! I had it on a seven-inch single.” Jane closes her eyes, and August thinks they’re picturing the same thing: Jane, cross-legged on a bedroom floor somewhere, letting the record spin. “God, I wish I could listen to it right now.”
“You can,” August says, swiping through apps. “Hang on.”
It takes her all of three seconds to pull it up, and she unwinds her earbuds from her pocket and hands one to Jane.
The song fades in soulful and longing, strings and harmonica, and the first words come exactly how Jane sang them: Ohhhh giiiiiirl…
“Oh my God,” Jane says, sitting back in her seat. “That’s really it. Shit.”
“Yeah,” August says. “Shit.”
The song plays on for another minute before Jane sits up and says, “I heard this song for the first time on a radio in a semitruck Which is weird, because I definitely don’t think I ever drove semitrucks. But I think I rode in some. There are a few—like, flashes, you know?”
August jots it down. “Hitchhiking, maybe? That was a big thing back then.”
“Oh yeah, it was,” she says. “I bet that’s it. Yeah… yeah, in a truck from California, heading east. But I can’t remember where we were going.”
August sucks on the bud of the pencil eraser, and Jane looks at her. At her mouth, specifically.
She pulls the pencil out of her mouth, self-conscious. “That’s okay, this is a great start. If you remember any other songs, I can help you figure them out.”
“So you can… listen to any song you want?” Jane says, eyeing August’s phone. “Whenever you want to?”
August nods. They’ve been through some pretty rudimentary explanations of how smartphones and the internet work, and Jane has picked up a lot from observation, but she still gets all wide-eyed and awed.
“Would you want me to get you a phone like this?” August asks.
Jane thinks about it. “I mean… yes and no? It’s impressive, but there’s something about having to work for it when you want to listen to a song. I used to love my record collection. That was the most money I ever spent in one place, shipping it to a new address whenever I landed in a new city. I wanted to see the world but still have one thing that was mine.”
August’s pencil flies across the paper. “Okay, so you were a drifter. A drifter and a hitchhiker. That’s so…”
“Cool?” Jane suggests, raising an eyebrow. “Daring? Adventurous? Sexy?”
“Unbelievable that you weren’t strangled by one of the dozens of serial killers murdering hitchhikers up and down the West Coast in the ’70s, is what I was gonna say.”
“Well,” Jane says. She kicks one foot up, crossing her ankle over her knee, and peers at August, hands behind her head. “What’s the point of life without a little danger?”
“Not dying,” August suggests. She can feel color flaring inconveniently in her cheeks.
“Yeah, I didn’t die my whole life, and look where it got me,” Jane says.
“Okay. Point.” August shuts her steno. “That was a big memory, though. We got ourselves a lead.”
August gives Jane her burner phone and teaches her how to use it and they experiment, like some kind of amnesiac scavenger hunt. Jane texts her snippets of lyrics or images from movies she snuck into dollar theaters to watch, and August tears through thrift stores for records familiar to Jane’s hands and a vintage Jaws lunchbox. August brings every food she can think of to the Q: sticky buns, challah, slices of pizza, falafel sweating through its paper wrapper, steamed sponge cakes, ice cream melting down her wrist.
“You know, this train used to be called the QB,” Jane remembers casually one day. “I guess it’s just the Q now. Weird.”
Things start coming back slowly, in pieces, one moment at a time. A box of greasy pepperoni split with a friend on a patio in Philly. Walking down the block in her sandals on a hot July afternoon to buy soft green tea cakes with nickels from the couch. A girl she loved briefly who drank three Arnold Palmers a day. A girl she loved briefly who snuck a bottle of wine out of her family’s Seudat Purim because they were both too poor to buy one. A girl she loved briefly who worked at a movie theater.
There are, August notices, a lot of girls that Jane loved briefly. There’s a secret set of tally marks in the back of one of her notebooks. It’s up to seven. (She’s completely fine with it.)
They go through Jane’s backpack for clues—the notebooks, mostly filled with journal entries and recipes in messy shorthand, the postcard from California, which has a phone number that’s disconnected. August takes pictures of Jane’s buttons and pins so she can research them and discovers Jane was something of a radical in the ’70s, which opens up a whole new line of research.
