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“And what are we here for tonight?” Bomb Bumboclaat shouts into the mic. “Billy’s!” the crowd shouts. “Who has held down the corner of Church and Bedford for forty-five years?” “Billy’s!” “Who’s gon’ do it for forty-five more?” “Billy’s!” “And what do we say to landlords?” The crowd inhales as one, through smoke and dry ice and paint fumes, and they bellow out in one resounding voice, middle fingers raised up to the lights, “Fuck you!”
August switches her phone to speaker and slides it upside down into the front pocket of her T-shirt, like she did the night of Isaiah’s party. Only it’s not just Jane in her pocket this time. It’s a whole family.
“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.
“I mean, honestly, it’s mostly this job. Um, yeah, and I got really into intermittent fasting. And vaping. Those are, like, my two main hobbies.” “Those are hobbies?” Wes deadpans.
Times Square is streaking, blazing, burning through August’s glasses. Like most people who live in Brooklyn, she never comes here,
“There was this girl,” she says. “There was this girl. I met her on a train. The first time I saw her, she was covered in coffee and smelled like pancakes, and she was beautiful like a city you always wanted to go to, like how you wait years and years for the right time, and then as soon as you get there, you have to taste everything and touch everything and learn every street by name. I felt like I knew her. She reminded me who I was. She had soft lips and green eyes and a body that wouldn’t quit.” August elbows her, Jane smiles. “Hair like you wouldn’t believe. Stubborn, sharp as a knife.
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This is the city where she got her heart broken. Nothing anchors a person to a place quite like that.
Never being the exact person she was with Jane again. Jane, somewhere else, but the exact person she was with August gone. Those two exact people ceasing to exist, and nobody else in the world even feeling the loss.
It’s more sentiment than she’s handed August since she was a kid. And August loves her, endlessly, unconditionally, even if she likes to play at being August’s friend more than her mom, even if she’s difficult and stubborn and unable to let anything go. August is all three of those too. Her mom gave her that, just like she gave her everything else.
“Sometimes … sometimes you just have to feel it,” August tells her. She looks out over the water as her mom hugs the file to her chest. It’s over. It’s finally over. “Because it deserves to be felt.”
August lies awake for another hour after her mom falls asleep, staring at the moonlight on the wall. If, after all these years, Suzette Landry can let the case go, maybe one day, August can let Jane go too.
A switchblade girl with a cotton-candy heart.
She’s staying. She’s going to live beside August as long as they want, getting gray hairs and laugh lines, adopting a dog, becoming boring old married people who garden on weekends, a house with windchimes and an untamed yard and a pissed-off HOA. They get to have that.
I
you
is
