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“No, I’m done. Don’t call me tomorrow. In fact, don’t call me at all. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to talk, but I—I am gonna need you to leave me alone for a while, Mom.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “I’m sorry about your mom. And I’m sorry they treated you like shit. But that didn’t give you the right.”
August hangs up and throws her phone onto the floorboards, flopping back on her bed. She and her mom have fought before—God knows two hardheaded people with a tendency to go icy when threatened in only seven hundred square feet of living space will go at it. But never like this.
She can hear everyone in the living room laughing. She feels as separate from it as she did the day she moved in.
Her whole life, the gnaw of anxiety has made people opaque to her. No matter how well she knows someone, no matter the logical patterns, no matter how many allowances she knows someone might make for her—that bone-deep fear of rejection has always made it impossible for her to see any of it. It frosts over the glass. She never had anyone to begin with, so she let it be unsurprising that nobody would want to have her around.
She slides her hand over the bedspread and her knuckles brush something cool and hard: her pocketknife. It must have slid out when she threw her bag down earlier.
She scoops it up, turns it over in her palm. The fish scales, the sticker on the handle. If she wanted to, she could twirl it between her fingers, flip the blade out, and jimmy a window open. Her mom taught her. She remembers it all. She shouldn’t have had to learn any of it, but she did.
And now she’s using everything she learned to help Jane.
Shit.
You can try, she guesses. You can tear yourself apart and rebuild from scratch, bring yourself to every corner of the map, sew a new self from the scraps of a thousand other people and places. You can try to expand to fill a different shape. But at the end of the day, there’s a place at the foot of the bed where your shoes hit the floor, and it’s the same.
It’s always the same.
The next day, August takes the file her mother mailed her down from the top of the fridge.
She didn’t open it after the first time, didn’t think about it, but she didn’t dump it in the garbage either. She wants it gone, so she crams it into her bag and climbs onto the Q heading toward the post office. It feels heavy in her bag, like a relic of the family religion.
It’s incredible, really, how the sight of Jane sitting there like she always is, picking at the edge of the seat with her Swiss Army knife, unspools the tension in her shoulders.
“Hey, Landry,” Jane says. She smiles when August leans down to kiss her hello. “Save Billy’s yet?”
“Working on it,” August says, sitting beside her. “Have any epiphanies yet?”
“Working on it,” Jane says. She gives August a once-over. “What’s going on? You’re, like… all staticky.”
“Is that a thing you can do?” August asks. “Because of the electricity thing? Like, can you feel other people’s emotional frequencies?”
“Not really,” Jane says, leaning her face on her hand. “But sometimes, lately, yours have started coming through. Not totally clear, but like music from the next room, you know?”
Uh-oh. Can she feel terrible dumbass love radiating off of August?
“I wonder if that means you’re becoming more present,” August says, “like how the wine worked on you even though you couldn’t get drunk before. Maybe that’s progress.”
“Sure as hell hope so,” Jane says. She leans back, hooking one arm over the handrail beside her. “But you didn’t answer my question. What’s going on?”
August hisses out a breath and shrugs. “I got in a fight with my mom. It’s stupid. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
Jane lets out a low whistle. “I got you.” A short lull absorbs the tension before Jane speaks again. “Oh, it’s probably not that helpful, but I did remember something.”
She lifts the hem of her T-shirt, baring the tattoos that span her side from ribs to thigh. August has seen them all, mostly in hurried glimpses or in semidarkness.
“I remembered what these guys mean,” Jane says.
August peers at the inky animals. “Yeah?”
“It’s the zodiac signs for my family.” She touches the tail feathers of the rooster sprawling down her rib cage. “My dad, ’33.” The snout of the dog on her side. “Mom, ’34.” The horns of a goat on her hip. “Betty, ’55.” Disappearing past her waistband and down her thigh, a monkey. “Barbara, ’56.”
“Wow,” August says. “What’s yours?”
She points to her opposite hip, at the serpent winding up from her thigh, separate from the others. “Year of the Snake.”
The art is beautiful, and she can’t imagine Jane got any of them before she ran away. Which means she sat through hours of needles for her family after she left them.
