One Last Stop

by Casey McQuiston

August doesn’t look at her, but she knows how the shadows of telephone poles and rooftops slide over the high points of her cheekbones and the soft dips of her mouth. She’s memorized it. She closes her eyes and tries to picture them again, anywhere else.

“Niko, everything I’m about to say to this guy is a complete and total lie, and I love you and will marry you and adopt a hundred three-eyed ravens or whatever it is your weird ass wants instead of kids,” she mutters.

Um, yeah, and I got really into intermittent fasting. And vaping. Those are, like, my two main hobbies.” “Those are hobbies?” Wes deadpans.

“She has to kill him,” Wes says. “It’s the only way.”

“Ready to commit arson at a loud party? This is what I was born to do.”

Wes stares at Annie for a full five seconds, and says, “Oh Jesus Christ, I’m in love with you.” Annie blinks. “Can you say that without looking like you’re gonna throw up?”

“I’m in absolute fuck-off, life-ruining love with you, and I can’t—I can’t do this and not tell you,” she goes on. Jane’s staring at her with her mouth popped open in soft surprise. “Maybe you already know, maybe it’s obvious and saying it is just gonna make this harder, but—God, I love you.”

“I fell in love with you the day I met you, and then I fell in love with the person you remembered you are. I got to fall in love with you twice. That’s—that’s magic. You’re the first thing I’ve believed in since—since I don’t even remember, okay, you’re—you’re movies and destiny and every stupid, impossible thing, and it’s not because of the fucking train, it’s because of you. It’s because you fight and you care and you’re always kind but never easy, and you won’t let anything take that away from you. You’re my fucking hero, Jane. I don’t care if you think you’re not one. You are.”

“Of course I love you. I could go back and have a whole life and get old and never see you again, and you would still be it. You were—you are the love of my life.”

Her girl. She came back.

“Fuck,” August says, taking her dirty glasses off and plucking her keys out of the gutter. “I pictured this a lot more cinematic.”

“You’re the most important person I’ve ever met,” she says. “And I should have never met you at all.”

Time, Myla explains to them later, isn’t perfect. It’s not a straight line. It’s not neat and tidy. Things get crossed, overlap, splinter. People get lost. It’s not a precise science.

She’s lucky, she says. She got to come back up from underground. She knew a lot of people who never got the chance.

She buys a dozen flavors of instant noodles at H Mart and eats them in front of August’s laptop, talking back to mukbangs on YouTube.

(Jane does finally make August’s dream come true: she assembles the bed. It’s exactly as devastating as August always imagined.)