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August thinks of Billy’s. Jane deserves to know. But she’s smiling, and August doesn’t want her to stop smiling, so she decides not to tell her. Not today.
Maybe it’s selfish, or maybe it’s for Jane. It’s getting harder to tell which is which.
Instead, she folds herself into the seat beside her and hands over a sandwich wrapped twice in aluminum foil so the yolk and syrup and sauce can’t leak out.
“A Su Special,” August says.
“God,” Jane groans. “I’m so jealous you get to have these all the time.”
August nudges an elbow into her ribs. “Did you kiss any girls who worked at Billy’s?”
Jane rips off a bit of foil, eyes sparkling.
“You know what?” she says. “I sure did.”
“I’m sorry, what are you saying?”
The BC offices are small, crammed up against the side of a lecture hall. A woman files her nails at reception. The sludgy rain half-heartedly tests the limits of the old windows, looking the way August’s insides feel: sloshy and apprehensive of what’s happening.
The counselor keeps clacking away on her keyboard.
Stop two on August’s apology tour: figuring out if she’s screwed for this semester. She’s not, it turns out, since she was able to make up the two midterms she missed. She expected to have to grovel, fake a dead relative or something, anything but this: a printed-out transcript on the desk in front of her, almost every little box of requirements checked off.
“I’m surprised you didn’t know,” she says. “Your GPA is great. Slipping a little lately, obviously, but now that you’re back on track, you’ll be fine. More than fine. Most students who perform this well—especially ones who have been enrolled for as many years as you have—” At this, she glances over her cat-eye glasses at August. “Well, you’re usually the ones banging down my damn door all semester asking when you can complete your degree.”
“So my degree is… complete?”
“Almost,” the counselor says. “You’ve got your capstone and a couple of electives left. But you can finish those in the fall.” She finishes typing and turns toward August. “Pull it together for this next month, and you can graduate after one more semester.”
August blinks at her a few times.
“Graduate, like… be done. With college.”
She eyes August dubiously. “Most people are happier to hear this.”
Ten minutes later, August is standing outside under a shabby overhang, watching her transcript slowly wilt in the humidity.
She’s been deliberately not doing the math on her credits, caught in anxiety limbo between another student loan and the inevitable push off the ledge into adulthood. This is the ledge, she guesses. And the push. She feels like a cartoon character in midair, looking down to see the desert floor and a jacuzzi full of TNT five hundred feet below her.
What the fuck is she supposed to do?
She could call her mom, but her mother has only lived in one place, only ever wanted one thing. It’s easy to know who you are when you chose once and never changed your mind.
There’s this feeling August has had everywhere she’s ever lived, like she’s not really there. Like it’s all happening in a dream. She walks down the street, and it’s like she’s floating a few inches off the pavement, never rooted down. She touches things, a canister of sugar at a coffee shop, or the post of a street sign warm from the afternoon sun, and it feels like she hasn’t touched anything at all, like it’s all a place she lives in concept. She’s just out here, shoes untied, hair a mess, no idea where she’s going, scraping her knees and not bleeding.
So maybe that’s why, instead of calling her mom, or crawling home to some blunt truth from Myla or cryptic encouragement from Niko, she finds herself stepping onto the Q. At least here she knows where she is. Time, place, person.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” Jane says. She shimmies her shoulders, jabbing a finger gun in August’s direction. She scored a baseball cap from a seventh grader last week, and she’s wearing it backward today. August pencils in thirty minutes between homework and public records to scream about it. “Get it?”
“You’re hilarious.”
Jane pulls a face. “Okay, but really. What’s up with you?”
“I found out I, uh.” She thinks of her transcript, inevitable, soggy, and folded up in the pocket of her raincoat. “I can graduate next semester, if I want.”
“Oh, hey, that’s great!” she says. “You’ve been in school forever!”
“Yeah, exactly,” August says. “Forever. As in, it’s the only thing I know how to do.”
