One Last Stop

by Casey McQuiston

She can’t imagine always knowing something huge about herself and never questioning it.

She’s twenty-three years old, and she’s doing something absolutely stupid, and she’s allowed to do absolutely stupid things whenever she wants, and the rest doesn’t have to matter right now. How had she not realized it sooner?

“And she’s not a ghost, she’s just on speaker.” “Boo,” says Jane’s voice.

I go to haunt people but it always turns into a musical number. That’s the energy I want to bring to the hereafter.”

Everybody, please transfer your drink to an unmarked container, we’re taking it to the subway!”

Niko bobs by with his Polaroid camera and snaps a photo of them, and August doesn’t even want to duck away.

She wants to climb up onto a seat, so she does.

August reaches out blindly and gets a handful of Jane’s jacket, watching her face, holding on to her as she trips backward into memories.

August tightens her grip. The music keeps playing. She thinks of storm surges, of rushes and walls of water, and holds on tighter, feels it coming and plants her feet.

And more than ever, more than when she asked Jane out, more than the first time they kissed, August wishes Jane could leave the goddamn subway.

I was just different, and my dad and I would fight, and my mom would cry, and I felt like shit all the time. I couldn’t make them happy. I thought running away would be better than letting them down.”

Everywhere I went, someone loved me. But everywhere I went, someone hated me.

I wasn’t a builder. I wasn’t a leader. I was a fighter. I cooked people dinner. I took them to the hospital. I stitched them up. But I only stayed long enough to take the good, and I always left when the bad got bad.”

She knew she should call. She wanted to. She never did.

Jane watches another station slide away with a soft expression on her face, freedom unreachable on the other side of a sliding door.

“Yes, thank you. I invite you to eat a dick. Goodbye.” She slams down the phone hard enough that the coffee in the pot behind the counter trembles.

He hops up onto the bar, narrowly avoiding putting his ass in a pecan pie.

God, it sucks. Places like Billy’s, they’re never just places. They’re homes, central points of memories, first loves. To Jane, it’s as much of an anchor as the one on her bicep.

Like, if I make it back, and I stay there … there should be another me out there, right? Back on the right track? All old and wise and shit?”

I miss figuring out scams with my friends. Having a beer. Going to the movies. Dumb, small life things.”

I am, as Isaiah would say, gooped.”

“What’s wrong, little swamp frog?” Myla says, shoving a handful of jelly beans into her mouth.

“I mean,” Myla says, “you have fallen into the homoerotic queer girl friendship. It’s all cute at first, and then you catch feelings, and it’s impossible to tell if the joke flirting is actual flirting and if the platonic cuddling is romantic cuddling, and next thing you know, three years have gone by, and you’re obsessed with her, and you haven’t done anything about it because you’re too terrified to fuck up the friendship by guessing it wrong, so instead you send each other horny plausible deniability love letters until you’re both dead.

“Myla, Jane is our friend,” he says. “You have to stop making jokes about her being dead. It would be cooler if she was, though.”

“Just text her like, ‘Hey Jane, you got a rockin’ bod, would love to consensually smash. XOXO, August.’”

A phantom feeling burns into the back of her throat, like at Isaiah’s party, on the walk to the station: of what it would be like to have someone bite down a smile when they point and say, “Yeah, her. She’s mine.” To live alongside someone, to kiss and be kissed, to be wanted.

She touches the pad of her thumb to a freckle on August’s shoulder and looks at her like she’s something to look at. Like she doesn’t ever want to stop looking.

But to kiss and be kissed. To be wanted. That’s a different thing from love.

Myla told her to say it in an August way. The August way is having a plan.

Finally, a train with a well-maintained, cool blue interior pulls up, and August gathers her bags and stands at the yellow line like a nervous teenager picking up their prom date. (She assumes. She never went to prom.)

Her mouth is quirked up in the corner like she’s really enjoying it, the lines of her loose and languid and overflowing. August’s heart goes unforgivably soft in her chest. That’s her girl.

Jane is, at the moment, blissfully unaware of her surroundings, and August can’t resist. She edges up to her silently, leans close to her ear, and says, “Hey, Subway Girl.” Jane yelps, flails sideways, and punches August in the nose.

“Are you Jason Bourne?” “Don’t sneak up on me like that!” Jane yells back, pulling herself upright. “I don’t know who Jason Bourne is.”

“Hang on. Maybe you are Jason Bourne.”

August thinks, all things considered, for a 3:00 a.m. date on the subway with a girl untethered from reality, it’s going pretty well.

August mentally flips through the plan for tonight—nope, definitely not part of it.

“None of them were you. Not a single one of them was this girl who dropped out of the fucking future to save me with her ridiculous hair and her pretty hands and her big, sexy brain, okay, is that what you want me to say? Because it’s the truth.

She makes a helpless gesture, and August is breathless at the pure frustration in it, the way it looks so broken in, like Jane’s been living with it for months. And her hands are shaking. She’s nervous. August makes her nervous.

So August opens her mouth and says, “It was never just research.” “Of course it fucking wasn’t,” Jane says, and she hauls August in by the sway of her waist and finally, finally kisses her.

“Jane,” August says. “Any way you want to kiss me is the way I wanna be kissed, okay?” A pause. “Oh,”

She studies August’s face, and August can practically see that confidence meter of hers filling up, right to Smug Bastard, where it usually sits. August would roll her eyes if it weren’t so endearing.

Jane Su kisses like she talks—with leisure and indulgent confidence, like she’s got all the time in the world and she knows exactly what she wants to do with it. Like a girl who’s never been unsure of a single thing in her life.

She kisses like she wants you to picture what else she could do given the chance: the swing of her hips if you passed her on the street, every beer bottle she’s ever had her mouth around. Like she wants you to know, down to your guts, the sound her boots make on the concrete floor of a punk show, the split lips and the way her skin smells sweet at the end of the night, all the things she’s capable of. She kisses like she’s making a reputation.

Also, August will die if Jane doesn’t touch her within the next thirty seconds. Which is another logistical consideration.

“I need a yes or no.” “Yes, okay, Jesus.” “They call me Jane, actually,” Jane says, and August rolls her eyes as Jane sinks down to one knee.

She pushes the hem of August’s skirt up and says, “Hold this for me, yeah? I’m busy.” “Absolutely fuck you.” August laughs, and she does as she’s asked.

But she should have known she could only avoid the resident psychic for so long.

“I don’t mean to, it’s just, like … the energy you put out about Jane. It’s burning a new hole in the ozone layer.” “You know, the old hole in the ozone layer closed up.” “I feel that you are deflecting.” “I can send you a National Geographic article about it.”

She wonders if she should be having some kind of mental journey about that.

August is going to dropkick his cactus out the window.