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She crouches in front of August, bracing her hands on August’s knees, forcing her to look into her eyes.
“None of us know exactly who we are, and guess what? It doesn’t fucking matter. God knows I don’t, but I’ll find my way to it.” She rubs her thumb over August’s kneecap, poking gently into the soft part below her thigh. “Like—okay, I dated this girl who was an artist, right? And she’d do figure drawing, where she’d draw the negative space around a person first, and then fill in the person. And that’s how I’m trying to look at it. Maybe I don’t know what fills it in yet, but I can look at the space around where I sit in the world, what creates that shape, and I can care about what it’s made of, if it’s good, if it hurts anyone, it makes people happy, if it makes me happy. And that can be enough for now.”
Jane’s looking up at her like she means it, like she’s been riding these rails all this time on that hope. She’s a fighter, a runner, a riot girl, and she can’t be any of that down here, so she runs between trains to feel something. If she can be here and live with that and have enough left over for this, she must know what she’s talking about.
“Shit,” August says. “You’re good at this.”
Jane smiles wide. “Look, I was gay in the ’70s. I can handle an emergency.”
“God,” August groans as Jane clambers into her own seat. “I can’t believe I made you talk me down from an existential crisis.”
Jane tilts her head to look at her. She’s got this ability to move between pretty and handsome from moment to moment, a subtle difference in the way she holds her chin or the set of her mouth. Right now, she’s the prettiest girl August has ever seen.
“Shut up,” Jane says. “You’re spending your life riding the subway to help a stranger with no evidence she can be helped, okay? Let me do one thing for you.”
August releases a breath, and she’s surprised at the proximity when it ruffles the ends of Jane’s hair.
Jane keeps looking at her, and August swears she sees something move behind her eyes, like a memory does when she’s thinking about Mingxia or Jenny or one of the other girls, but new, different. Something delicate as a spark, and only for August. It’s the same feeling from the platform: maybe this time, for real.
August isn’t supposed to care. She’s not supposed to want that. But the way her heart kicks up into a fever frequency says that she still goddamn does.
“You’re not a stranger,” August says into the few inches between them.
“No, you’re right,” Jane agrees. “We’re definitely not strangers.” She leans back and stretches her arms over her head, turning her face away from August, and says, “I guess you’re my best friend, huh?”
The train eases into another station, and something clenches in the vicinity of August’s jaw.
Friend.
“Yeah,” August says. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“And you’re gonna get me back to where I’m supposed to be,” Jane goes on, smiling. Smiling at the idea of going back to 1970-something and never seeing August again. “Because you’re a genius.”
The train rattles and groans to a stop.
“Yeah,” August says, and she forces a smile.
“You’ve been doing what for research?” Myla asks. It’s hard to catch the question when she’s got a screwdriver between her teeth, but August gets the gist.
Myla has her own office in the back of Rewind, complete with shelves full of typewriters and old radios and a workstation strewn with parts. She told August she got the job after wandering in halfway through her final semester at Columbia and pulling a pair of pliers out of the owner’s hands to rewire a 1940s record player. She’s a nerd for the oldies, she always says, and it came in handy. She’s clearly good enough at what she does that her boss doesn’t mind her decorating her workstation with a homemade cross-stitch that says BIG DICK ENERGY IS GENDER NEUTRAL.
She’s looking at August through the giant magnifying lens mounted over her station, so her mouth and nose are normal sized, but her eyes are the size of dinner plates. August tries not to laugh.
“Kissing, okay, we’ve been making out—”
“On the train?”
“Don’t think Niko hasn’t told me about the time under the pizza box after Thanksgiving last year.”
“Okay, that was a holiday.”
“Anyway,” August goes on, “as I was saying, remembering kisses and girls that she, you know, felt something for, brings back a lot for her, and the best way to do that is to re-create them.” The grimace Myla pulls is magnified about ten times by the lens, distorted like a disapproving Dalí. “Stop making that face, okay, I know it’s a bad idea.”
“I mean, it’s as if you like to be emotionally tortured,” Myla says, finally sitting back so her facial proportions return to normal. “Wait, is that what it is? Because like, damn, but okay.”
“No, that’s the whole thing,” August says. “I have to stop. I can’t keep doing it. It’s—it’s fucking me up. So that’s why I came here—I have an idea for something that could work instead.”
“And what’s that?”
