One Last Stop

by Casey McQuiston

“Oh my God. Chocolate.” “Jesus,” August says, as Jane downs half of it in one bite like a boa constrictor.

She takes her coffee with two creams and five sugars like some kind of maniac.

The girl in me that likes black coffee agrees with this. The girl in me that likes her coffee sweet does not. They both have thier own moments to shine.

Her primary source, and her friend, now. That’s all. Nothing more than that. That’s all it can be. August glances at the peanut butter left behind on Jane’s lip. It’s fine.

August sucks on the bud of the pencil eraser, and Jane looks at her. At her mouth, specifically.

“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.”

“What’s the point of life without a little danger?” “Not dying,”

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.)

“‘Your friendly smile of acceptance—from the safe position of heterosexuality,’” Jane reads aloud, “‘isn’t enough. As long as you cherish that secret belief that you are a little bit better because you sleep with the opposite sex, you are still asleep in your cradle … and we will be the nightmare that awakens you.’”

In between, when Jane needs a break, August does the thing she’s done her best to avoid most of her life: she talks.

It drops quietly into the space between them: maybe it’s them. Maybe it’s August. Maybe she’s the reason.

Myla bribes August with a bag of Zapp’s from a bodega four blocks over to introduce her to Jane.

The best bribe

August tells Myla, tucking the chips onto her shelf in the pantry. After a moment of consideration, she attaches a Post-it note that says TOUCH THESE AND DIE.

so real

It’s a rainy Friday afternoon, and she’s got a bright yellow rain jacket on like the Morton Salt girl with 4A hair.

“August, I love you very much, and I want you to be happy, and I’m very confident that you and this girl are, like, fated by the universe to fingerblast each other until you both die,” she says.

This is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me, and my life has not been boring.

On the watery platform, Myla launches herself at the train so fast, she nearly shoves August into an old woman tottering out.

Myla nudges ahead, extending a hand to Jane. “Hi, wow, I’m Myla, huge fan. Love your work.”

She really should have pushed her onto the tracks when she had the chance.

“Whoa,” Myla interjects, “you can eat?” “Myla!” “What? It’s a fair question!”

“Maybe your first mistake was drinking out of a flask you found on the subway,” August suggests.

“Myla, I swear to God—”

“Wow, that is fascinating!” Myla says, and August is mortified, but she can’t pretend she’s not taking mental notes to be recorded later.

“Myla,” August says, “can we maybe not treat her like a creature of the week?”

Jane, who has moved on to the second Pop-Tart and is plowing through it like she’s trying to beat a land speed record, squints at August and says, “Are you assembling a task force, Landry?”

“Thank you, Encyclopedia Brown,”

Me core

Myla and Jane both seem visibly put out, but August is one embarrassing non sequitur away from throwing herself out the emergency exit. Those two are a dangerous combination.

“What did you think of her?” Myla hops up on the landing, tugging her miniskirt down. “I mean, honestly? That’s wife material. Like, three kids and a dog material. If she looked at me the way she looks at you, my IUD would have shot out like a party popper.”

“Like you’re her Pop-Tart angel. Like you shit sunshine. Like you invented love as a concept.”

August just found her. It’s too soon to lose her.

At Billy’s, Lucie does not look happy to see August, considering she’s been faking mono for weeks.

“So the train is like … purgatory?” How very Catholic.

“No matter what, we try.”

She can’t do this and have a crush on Jane at the same time.

It’s fine. It’s only that August used to love Say Anything before life intervened to make her hate everything, and Jane is the first person to ever make her feel all John-Cusack-and-Ione-Skye. It’s not a big deal that Jane’s hand is the perfect size to brace against August’s waist, or that when Jane looks at her, she can’t look back because her heart starts doing things so big and loud that the rest of her can barely hold the size and sound. She’ll live.

And, well, August has never truly had her heart broken before, but she’s pretty sure that falling in love with someone only to send them back to the 1970s would, as first heartbreaks go, win the Fuck You Up Olympics.

She can pretend she’s never thought about Jane holding her hand in a cute East Village brownstone with a West Elm sofa and a wine fridge.

Life-ruining descriptions of things Jane can do with her mouth aside, it does present a … possibility. The fastest way to recover Jane’s memories has been to make her smell or hear or touch something from her past.

“Yeah,” August says. It doesn’t matter what the question is.

It happens to be a disastrously good look on her.

Damn hot women

Her jaw goes all jutty and angular, and August wants to give her anything she wants and then change her own name and skip the continent.

You can’t un-kiss the most impossible person you’ve ever met. She’s never going to forget what that tastes like.

But Jane looks hopeful, and August wants to help. And, well. She believes in in-depth, hands-on evidence gathering. That’s all.

For the love of God, Landry. Compartmentalize.

Jane’s other hand finds its way to August’s waist, to the place that feels designed by the profound unfairness of the universe to fit it so exactly.

“Oh my God, you’re fucking magic.”

August thinks, as her feet lift off the ground, that nobody has ever called her magic in her entire life.

August writes it all down and doesn’t think about how Jane kissed her—Jane kissed her—Jane put her hand on August’s face and kissed her, and August knows how her lips feel, and she can’t ever stop knowing, and—

August has decided, in what she believes is a show of extreme maturity and dedication to helping Jane, to pretend the kiss was completely unimportant. Did it get the information they needed? Yes. Did she lie awake that night thinking about it for three and a half hours? Yes. Did it mean anything? No.

God, not the stupid bed-assembly fantasy again.

And August thinks, as she spends seven of her last dollars on a container of to-go dumplings for Jane, that she’s very practical, and everything is under complete control.