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The quintessential early twenties trash couch.
Okay, Danny Zuko, calm down.
Jesus. Of course. There was no way a $700-a-month room in Brooklyn was going to come without a catch, and the catch is marshmallow Judy Garland and this refurbished Springsteen who’s probably about to tell her she’s got her aura on inside out and backward like Dollar Tree pantyhose.
August Landry does not trust people, but she trusts fried chicken.
Should she be worried about frog ghosts? Maybe this Myla person is a ritualistic frog murderer.
“He’s on Wes’s sleep schedule, though. So, a ghost in the night.”
“Like three times a day the fridge makes this noise like a skeleton trying to eat a bag of quarters, but we’re pretty sure it’s fine,” Niko says.
Said every broke adult everywhere
“The guy across the hall is a drag queen, and sometimes he practices his numbers in the middle of the night, so if you hear Patti LaBelle, that’s why.”
“It’s not haunted, but it’s like, not not haunted.”
And does she want to live with a couple? A couple that is one half fake psychic who looks like he fronts an Arctic Monkeys cover band and one half firestarter with a room full of dead frogs? No.
Turns out, for a girl who carries a knife because she’d rather be anything but unprepared, August did not plan her move to New York very well.
“If they’re gonna kill you, get their DNA under your fingernails.”
Five entire cardboard boxes to show for her life at twenty-three. Living like she’s on the run from the fucking FBI. Normal stuff.
One pair of white Vans—those are special, a reward she bought herself last year, buzzed off adrenaline and mozzarella sticks from the Applebee’s where she came out to her mom.
Normalize giving coming out gifts lol
It crashes into a wall, and then what can only be described as a soot sprite from Spirited Away comes shooting into August’s room.
If she tried, August could get her five boxes down to four. Maybe something to do over the weekend.
Myla smiles, reassured that August is not, in fact, in the Witness Protection Program.
But she looks at Niko and realizes, even if he was faking it when he touched her, he saw something in her. And that’s more than anyone’s done in a long time.
Bit of a … well, a mental breakdown.” “He sat on a fire escape in his underwear for fourteen hours, and they had to call the fire department,”
“That little twink contains multitudes,”
Truth is, when you spend your whole life alone, it’s incredibly appealing to move somewhere big enough to get lost in, where being alone looks like a choice.
She gestures dramatically to August like she’s a vowel on Wheel of Fortune.
If she’s the one August has to scam, it looks like she’s more likely to get an acrylic nail to the jugular.
It’s something adjacent to magic. August doesn’t do magic.
She’s a walking wet dream for 3:00 a.m. stoners and long-haul truckers, a pancake-and-sausage combo adrift on the wind.
And, well. August does not cry.
But she didn’t move across the country to let a skinned knee and a coffee-soaked bra kick her ass.
The set of her smirk looks like the beginning of a very long story August would tell over drinks if she had any friends.
The hottest girl August has ever seen just took one look at her and said, “Yikes.”
She can’t believe a tall butch subway angel saw her crying into her coffee tits.
August blinks up at her, standing there looking like the guitarist of an all-girl punk rock band called Time to Give August an Aneurysm.
August doesn’t know how she could possibly do anything but whatever this girl says.
Life in New York is deeply glamorous.
She was maybe too convincing when Lucie the manager called her fake reference number and got August’s burner phone. The result: straight onto the floor, no training, picking things up as she goes.
It’d be annoying, except she’s saved August’s ass twice in five minutes.
Not quite staving off the scurvy, but a start.
It’s not that she’s thought a lot about Subway Girl; it’s just that she’d work five doubles in a row if it meant she got to see Subway Girl again.
The inner monologue of every queer crush ever
She went to Catholic school for most of her life, but that was the first and last time she really believed in something.
Orange: done. Scurvy: at bay, for now.
when the person in the hall looks up and lets out a small yelp.
Me when G appears out of thin air
He looks like he wants to bolt. Relatable.
If she has to get in a cold shower, her soul will vacate the premises.
She shuts off the faucet and resigns herself to another all-day aromatic experience.
“Do you realize you just say words in any random order like they’re supposed to mean something?”
Of course she’s figured out a way to use a building code violation for entertainment.
“I can’t decide if I’m impressed or horrified.” “My favorite emotional place,”
The thing about Myla, August is learning, is that she doesn’t plant a seed of friendship and tend to it with gentle watering and sunlight. She drops into your life, fully formed, and just is. A friend in completion.
There’s no ice to slip on, but Noodles is nearly as determined to make August eat shit on the walk to the station.
August sidesteps Noodles as he stops to sniff the world’s most fascinating takeout container.
Nobody who’s lived in New York for more than a few months understands why a girl would actually like the subway. They don’t get the novelty of walking underground and popping back up across the city, the comfort of knowing that, even if you hit an hour delay or an indecent exposure, you solved the city’s biggest logic puzzle. Belonging in the rush, locking eyes with another horrified passenger when a mariachi band steps on. On the subway, she’s actually a New Yorker.
