One Last Stop

by Casey McQuiston

Does Thursday work for you? Myla’s gonna need some time to clear her stuff out. She has a lot of bones.” “I—what, like, in her body?”

What could possess someone like August, a suburban girl with a swimming pool of student loan debt and the social skills of a Pringles can, to move to New York with no friends and no plan?

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.

August has lived in a dozen rooms without ever knowing how to make a space into a home, how to expand to fill it like Niko or Myla or even Wes with his drawings in the windows. She doesn’t know, really, what it would take at this point. It’s been twenty-three years of passing through, touching brick after brick, never once feeling a permanent tug.

It’s not English (her first major), or history (her second). It’s kind of psychology (third minor), but mostly it’s the same as everything else for the past four and a half years: another maybe this one, because she’s scraped together just enough course credits and loans, because she’s not sure what to do if she’s not living blue book to blue book until she dies.

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.

“I can’t decide if I’m impressed or horrified.” “My favorite emotional place,” Myla says. “That’s where horny lives.”

The rats are almost definitely unionizing.

She digs through her backpack and pulls out a cassette player to pause her music. A whole cassette player. Subway Girl is … a Brooklyn hipster? Is that a point against her?

“Anyway,” Myla says, turning to open the freezer. “That sucks. I’m your mom now. The rules are, no Tarantino movies and bedtime is never.”

Crazy how August can imagine a whole life for this girl she doesn’t even know, but she can’t begin to picture what her own is supposed to look like.

“Sometimes. But, you know, that feeling? When you wake up in the morning and you have somebody to think about? Somewhere for hope to go? It’s good. Even when it’s bad, it’s good.”

The first is her usual: anxiety meets full-on dread. The part of her that says, trust nobody, even and especially anyone that pushes softly into the chambers of your heart. Do not engage. Carry a knife.

The older she’s gotten, the more she prefers thinking of love as a hobby for other people, like rock climbing or knitting. Fine, enviable even, but she doesn’t feel like investing in the equipment.

Jane laughs too, and there it goes again, desperate and cloying hope in August’s chest. It’s gross. It’s new. August wants to study it under a microscope and also never think about it for the rest of her idiot life.

Jane pulls her back in, fingers brushing through her hair, just behind her ear, and for a second, Jane is the whole point of being in the city in the first place.

who isn’t a depressed twenty-three-year-old virgin. They’ll get up in the morning and make their cool and sexy sex-haver toast and drink their well-adjusted coffee and move on with their lives, and eventually, after enough weeks of August avoiding the Q, Jane will forget all about her.

She’s going to have to say this out loud, isn’t she? Bella Swan, eat your horny little Mormon heart out.

“Wait. Holy shit. She is always wearing the exact same thing.” “You only just noticed she has one outfit?” “I don’t know! It’s ripped jeans and a leather jacket! Every lesbian I’ve ever met has that outfit!” “Huh. Good point,” Niko says thoughtfully.

“Something else might come forward,” he says, lighting another match with total nonchalance as if he has not just suggested some unknown force from the great beyond could Beetlejuice into the room and rub its little demon hands all over them.

August looks at her as the train reverses past Gravesend rooftops, this girl out of time, the same face and body and hair and smile that took August’s life by the shoulders in January and shook. And she can’t believe Jane had the nerve, the audacity, to become the one thing August can’t resist: a mystery.

It wasn’t long afterward that a storm too big for the levees came. 2005. Their apartment in Belle Chasse, the Idlewild place, got eight feet of water. All the files, maps, photos, all the years of handwritten notes, a wet pulp shoveled out the window of a condemned building. August’s mom saved one tupperware tub of files on her brother and not a single one of August’s baby pictures. August lost everything and thought that maybe, if she could become someone who didn’t have anything to lose, she’d never have to feel that way again.

She turned nine in a Red Cross shelter, and something started to sour in her heart, and she couldn’t stop it.

“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.” “Jesus Christ,” August says. And, involuntarily, “How do you think she looks at me?” “Like you’re her Pop-Tart angel. Like you shit sunshine. Like you invented love as a concept.”

If she looked at me the way she looks at you, my IUD would have shot out like a party popper.” “Jesus Christ,” August says. And, involuntarily, “How do you think she looks at me?” “Like you’re her Pop-Tart angel. Like you shit sunshine. Like you invented love as a concept.”

“I’m repressing it!” She yanks a carton of leftover sesame chicken out and pops the top, shoveling it into her mouth cold. “Let me repress it!” “I can see how you would think that is what you’re doing,” he says, sounding genuinely sorry for her.

So, no, she’s not sitting around, picturing Jane dropping her jacket on August’s bedroom floor and pushing her down onto the bed, breaking the bed, putting the bed back together—God, not the stupid bed-assembly fantasy again.

“You think if you kiss me, it’ll bring this girl back like it brought back Jenny?” “Yeah. So. Let’s…” August thinks back to what they said last time. “Do it for research.” “Okay,” Jane says, expression unreadable. “For research.”

What the fuck is she supposed to do? She could call her mom, but her mother has only lived in one place, only ever wanted one thing. It’s easy to know who you are when you chose once and never changed your mind.

“You’ve been in school forever!” “Yeah, exactly,” August says. “Forever. As in, it’s the only thing I know how to do.” “That’s not true,” Jane says. “You know how to do tons of things.” “I know logistically how to perform some tasks,” August tells her, squeezing her eyes shut. That dynamite hot tub is starting to sound very appealing. “I don’t know how to have something that I do, every day, like as an adult who does a thing. It’s nuts that we all start out having these vague ideas of what we like to do, hobbies, interests, and then one day everybody has their thing, you know? They used to just be a person and now they’re a—an architect, or a banker, or a lawyer, or—or a serial killer who makes jewelry out of human teeth. Like, things. That they do. That they are. What if there’s not that thing for me, Jane, I mean, what if I’ve never wanted to be anything other than just an August? What if that’s all there is for me? What if Billy’s closes and nobody else will hire me? What if I get out there and end up realizing there’s not a dream for me, or a purpose, or anything—”

“It makes you feel alive, right?” Jane shouts, and before August can yank them both back into the car, Jane steps across the gap to the platform of the next car. “It makes me feel like I’m gonna die!” August yells back. “That’s the same thing!”

“You trusted me, right?” August nods. “Now trust yourself.”

She doesn’t think she can do this without Jane standing there to catch her if she slips, and she’s really not interested in going down in history as a delay on the Q while someone calls the medical examiner.

“Holy shit,” August says, panting. “Holy shit, I can’t believe I did that.” Jane leans on a pole to catch her breath. “You did. And that is what you need to trust in. Because you got what you need. And sometimes, the universe has your back.”

“None of us know exactly who we are, and guess what? It doesn’t fucking matter. God knows I don’t, but I’ll find my way to it.” She rubs her thumb over August’s kneecap, poking gently into the soft part below her thigh. “Like—okay, I dated this girl who was an artist, right? And she’d do figure drawing, where she’d draw the negative space around a person first, and then fill in the person. And that’s how I’m trying to look at it. Maybe I don’t know what fills it in yet, but I can look at the space around where I sit in the world, what creates that shape, and I can care about what it’s made of, if it’s good, if it hurts anyone, it makes people happy, if it makes me happy. And that can be enough for now.”

“She got off the train, and you led with the kissing? God, you are the most useless bisexual I’ve ever met in my entire goddamn life.”

Niko personally packed her a sandwich and insisted she take advantage of her Saturday morning off to “recenter” and “absorb different energies” and “try this havarti I got at the farmer’s market last week, it’s got a lot of character.”

It doesn’t matter. 90.9 will play it, and August will listen just to feel that under-the-same-moon feeling of Jane listening to the same thing at the same time as she glides across the Manhattan Bridge.

There was, she realizes, a major flaw in her plan. She may not be kissing Jane anymore, but this is worse. How is she supposed to know if, when Jane requests “I’ve Got Love On My Mind,” August is supposed to read into the lyrics? Dear Natalie Cole, when you sang the line When you touch me I can’t resist, and you’ve touched me a thousand times, were you thinking about a confused queer with a terrible crush? Dear Freddie Mercury, when you wrote “Love of My Life,” did you mean for it to reach across space and time in a platonic way or a real-deal, break-your-heart, throw-you-up-against-a-wall type of way?

vanished into the crowd. “Oof,” August says, “you’re jealous.” “Wow, holy shit, you figured it out. You’re gonna win a Peabody Award for reporting,” Wes deadpans. “Where’s the keg? I was told there would be a keg.”

“It’s so cute,” Myla says. “You’re so cute.” “I’m not cute,” August says, frowning. “I’m—I’m tough. Like a cactus.”

“Easter brunch!” August yells back. “Look, I know I don’t have the firmest grasp on time, but I’m pretty sure it’s really late for brunch.” “What, are you into rules now?” “Hell no,” Jane says, instantly affronted. “If you care what time brunch happens, you’re a cop.”

It’s one of those nights. Not that August has experienced a night like this—not firsthand, at least. She’s been to parties, but she’s not much of a drinker or a smoker, even less of a dazzling conversationalist. She’s mostly observed them like some kind of house party anthropologist, never understanding how people could fall in and out of connections and conversations, flipping switches of moods and patterns of speech so easily.

“When did you know?” “That I was trans?” August blinks at him. “No. That you were a psychic.” “Oh,” Niko says. He shakes his head, the fang dangling from his ear swinging. “Whenever someone asks me personal questions, it’s always about being trans. That’s, like, so low on the list of the most interesting things about me. But it’s funny because the answer’s the same. I just always knew.”

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?

It never felt like the right choice. But it felt like the only choice.

“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. Except she’s already dead.” She laughs. “That’s wild, bruh.”

“Sorry.” Myla sighs, accepting a teacup. “Just text her like, ‘Hey Jane, you got a rockin’ bod, would love to consensually smash. XOXO, August.’” “Sounds exactly like something I would say.” Myla laughs. “Well, say it in an August way.”

An hour goes by, and Myla falls asleep on the couch while Niko’s cleaning up the tea. August watches him gently tug the bag of jelly beans out of her arms and wonders if he’s going to wake her and move her to their room. It feels strange and private to watch indecision flicker across his face when she’s used to his certain, confident lines, but eventually it softens into something quiet and fond. He pulls a blanket off the back of the couch and spreads it over her, taking special care to tuck it around her shoulders and feet. He brushes her hair off her forehead and ghosts the faintest of unintrusive kisses over it. He switches off the lamp, and when he turns toward their room, August sees the soft melt of his smile, the gentle crease at one side of his mouth, a secret thing. They’ll sleep separately tonight, and somehow this hurts her heart more, the easy tether between them that doesn’t need a constant touch. The assurance that the other person is right there in your orbit, always, waiting to be tugged back in. Niko and Myla could be on opposite sides of an ocean and they’d breathe in sync.