One Last Stop, page 17
And she’s got Jane with her, which she fucking loves. It makes everything easier, makes her braver. A Jane in her pocket. Pocket Jane.
She finds herself wedged between Lucie and Winfield, shouting over the music about customers at Billy’s. Then she’s trading jokes with Vera Harry, and she’s laughing so hard she spills her drink down her chin, and Isaiah’s sister calls out, “Not saying shit’s gone off the rails, but I just saw someone mix schnapps with a Capri Sun and someone else is in the bathtub handing out shrooms.”
And then somehow, she’s next to Niko, as he goes on and on about the existential dread of being a young person under climate change, twirling the thread of the conversation around his finger like a magician. It hits her like things do sometimes when you’re buzzed enough to forget the context your brain has built to understand something: Niko is a psychic. She’s friends with a whole psychic, and she believes him.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” August says to him once the group dissolves, hearing her voice come out sloppy.
“Should I go?” Jane says from her pocket.
“Noooo,” August says to her phone.
Niko eyes her over his drink. “Ask away.”
“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.”
“Really?” August thinks distantly about her gradual stumble into knowing she was bisexual, the years of confusing crushes she tried to rationalize away. She can’t imagine always knowing something huge about herself and never questioning it.
“Yeah. I knew I was a boy and I knew my sister was a girl and I knew that the people who lived in our house before us had gotten a divorce because the wife was having an affair, and that was it,” he explains. “I don’t even remember coming out to my parents or telling them I could see things they couldn’t. It was just always … what it was.”
“And your family, they’re—?”
“Catholic?” Niko says. “Yeah, they are. Kinda. More when I was a kid. The whole psychic thing—my mom always called it my gift from God. So they believed me about being a boy. Our church wasn’t so chill about it when I wanted to transition though. My mom kinda got into it with the priest, so none of the Riveras have been to mass in a while. Not that my abuelo knows that.”
“That’s cool,” Jane’s voice says.
“Very cool,” August agrees. Suddenly she knows where Niko gets his confidence from. She pulls on his arm. “Come on.”
“Where?”
“You have to be on my team for Rolly Bangs.”
The battered office chair appears out of nowhere, and Wes tapes off the floor of the hallway while Myla stands on a table and shouts the rules. An assortment of protective gear manifests on the kitchen counter: two bicycle helmets, Myla’s welding goggles, some ski gear that must belong to Wes, one lonely kneepad. August posts a sheet of paper on the wall and gets Isaiah to help her devise a tournament bracket—two drunk brains make one smart brain—and it’s on, the kitchen cleared and cheering crowds gathered on either side of the apartment as the games start.
August puts on a helmet, and when Niko flings her chair toward the hallway and she goes flying and screaming through the air, Jane warm in her pocket and no care for whether she breaks something, the only thought in her head is that she’s twenty-three years old. 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?
As it turns out, letting herself have fun is fun.
“Where does that disembodied voice keep coming from?” says Isaiah between rounds, sidling up beside August. He’s wearing a fur muff as a helmet.
“That’s August’s girlfriend,” Wes supplies, slurring slightly. “She’s a ghost.”
“Oh my God, I knew this place was haunted,” Isaiah says. “Wait, the one from the séance? She’s—?”
Someone else leans into the conversation. “Séance?”
“Ghost?” Sara Tonin chimes in from atop the refrigerator.
“Is she hot?” Isaiah’s sister asks.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” August says, waving them off. She points to the phone sticking out of her front pocket. “And she’s not a ghost, she’s just on speaker.”
“Boo,” says Jane’s voice.
“She’s always wearing the exact same thing,” Wes says as he hauls the office chair back, one of the wheels listing pathetically. “That’s ghost behavior if you ask me.”
“If I’m ever a ghost, I hope I get a choice in what I’m cursed to wear for the rest of eternity,” Isaiah says. “Like, do you think it’s just whatever you’re wearing when you die? Or is there an afterlife greatest hits mood board where you get to assemble your own ghost drag?”
“If I get to pick, I want to be wearing, like…” Myla thinks about it for a long second. Her drink sloshes down her arm. “One of those jumpsuits from the end of Mamma Mia. I go to haunt people but it always turns into a musical number. That’s the energy I want to bring to the hereafter.”
“Brocade suit, open jacket, no shirt,” Niko says confidently.
“Wes,” Myla shouts at him as he climbs into the rolling chair, “what would your ghost wear?”
He straps on a pair of ski goggles. “A slanket covered in shrimp chip crumbs.”
“Very Tiny Tim,” Isaiah notes.
“Shut up and throw me across the room, you big bitch.”
Isaiah obliges, and the tournament continues, but he comes back three rounds later, smiling a broad smile, the gap between his two front teeth unfairly charming.
He points at August’s phone. “What’s her name?”
“Jane,” August says.
“Jane,” Isaiah repeats, leaning into August’s boobs to shout at the phone. “Jane! Why aren’t you here at my party?”
“Because she’s a blip in reality from the 1970s bound to the Q and she can’t leave,” Niko supplies.
“What he said,” Jane agrees.
Isaiah ignores them and continues to yell at August’s tits. “Jane! The party’s not over yet! You should come!”
“Man, I’d love to,” Jane says, “I haven’t been to a good party in forever. And I’m pretty sure my birthday is coming up.”
“Your birthday?” Isaiah says. “You’re having a party for that, right? I wanna come.”
“Probably not,” Jane tells him. “I’m sort of—well, my friends are kind of unavailable.”
“That’s such bullshit. Oh my God. You can’t have a birthday and not celebrate it.” Isaiah leans back and addresses the party. “Hey! Hey everybody! Since this is my party, I get to decide what kind of party it is, and I am deciding it’s Jane’s birthday party!”
“I don’t know who Jane is, but okay!” someone yells.
“How soon can you get here, Jane?”
“I—”
And maybe Isaiah remembers the séance, and maybe he believes what’s happening here, and maybe he sees the panicked look August and Niko exchange, or maybe he’s just drunk. But his grin spreads impossibly wider, and he says, “Actually. Hang on. Everybody, please transfer your drink to an unmarked container, we’re taking it to the subway!”
Isaiah’s friends are nothing if not game—and, in many cases, crossed—so they flow down the stairs and out onto the street like a dam breaking, drinks in the air, caftans and capes and aprons trailing behind them. August is between Lucie and Sara Tonin, carried by the current toward her usual station.
“Which one is he?” Sara is asking Lucie.
Lucie points at Winfield, who’s throwing his head back to laugh, glitter glinting in his beard, looking like the life of the party. She tamps down a smile and says, “That’s him,” and August laughs and wants so badly to know what it feels like to show off the person who’s yours from across the crowd.
Then they all pile onto the train, August up front, pointing to Jane and telling Isaiah, “That’s her,” and she guesses she does know. Maybe what she really wants is to be the person across the crowd who belongs to someone.
“You brought me a party?” Jane asks as the car fills. Niko has already started blasting “Suavamente.”
“Technically, Isaiah brought you a party,” August points out.
But Jane looks around at the dozens of people on the train, painted nails and shrieks of laughter up and down her quiet night, and it’s August, not Isaiah, she looks at when she grins and says, “Thank you.”
Someone places a plastic crown on Jane’s head, and someone else presses a cup into her hand, and she rides on into the night, beaming and proud as a war hero.
Myla’s bag of candy starts making the rounds again—August can’t be sure, but she thinks someone has slipped in some edibles—and at some point, maybe after Isaiah and the Canadian Franzia enthusiast have a dance-off, August gets an idea. She convinces one of Isaiah’s drag daughters to give her the safety pin stuck through their earlobe, and she returns to Jane with it, grabbing her shoulders to catch her balance.
“Hi again,” Jane says, watching as August sticks the pin through the collar of her leather jacket. “What’s this?”
“Something we do in New Orleans,” August says, pulling a dollar out of her pocket and pinning it to Jane’s chest. “Thought you might remember.”
“Oh … oh yeah!” Jane says. “You pin a dollar to somebody’s shirt on their birthday, and when they go out—”
“—everyone who sees it is supposed to add a dollar,” August finishes, and the light of happy recognition in Jane’s eyes is so bright that August surprises herself with her own volume when she yells to the crowd. “Hey! Hey, new party rule! Pin the cash on the birthday girl! Keep it going, tell your friends!”
By the time the train loops back into Brooklyn, there are people swinging from subway poles and a stack of bills stuck through Jane’s safety pin, and August wants to do things she never wants to do. She wants to talk to people, shout through conversations. She wants to dance. She watches Wes as he slowly, warily lets himself slip against Isaiah’s side, and she turns to Jane and does the same. Niko bobs by with his Polaroid camera and snaps a photo of them, and August doesn’t even want to duck away.
Jane looks at her through a dusting of confetti that’s appeared out of nowhere and smiles, and August can’t control her body. She wants to climb up onto a seat, so she does.
“I like being taller than you,” she says to Jane, chewing on a piece of peanut and sesame brittle from Myla’s bag of candy.
“I don’t know,” Jane ribs her. “I don’t think it suits you.”
August swallows. She wants to do something stupid. She’s twenty-three years old, and she’s allowed to do something stupid. She touches the side of Jane’s neck and says, “Did you ever kiss any girls who were taller than you?”
Jane eyes her. “I don’t think so.”
“Too bad,” August says. She leans down so Jane has to tip her chin up to maintain eye contact, and she finds that she likes that angle quite a lot. “No memories to bring back.”
“Yeah,” Jane says. “It’d just be kissing to kiss.”
August is warm, and Jane is beautiful. Steady and improbable and unlike anyone August’s ever met in her life. “Sure would.”
“Uh-huh.” Jane covers August’s hand with hers, their fingers tangling. “And you’re drunk. I don’t think—”
“I’m not that drunk,” August says. “I’m happy.”
She sways forward, and she lets herself kiss Jane on the mouth.
For half a second, the train and the party and everything else exist on the other side of a pocket of air. They’re underground, underwater, sharing a breath. August brushes her thumb behind Jane’s ear, and Jane’s mouth parts, and—
Jane breaks off abruptly.
“What is that?” she asks.
August blinks at her. “Um. It was supposed to be a kiss.”
“No, that … the—your lips. They taste like peanuts. And … sesame paste? They taste like—”
She touches a hand to her mouth and staggers back, eyes wide, and August’s stomach drops. She’s remembering something. Someone. Another girl who’s not August.
“Oh,” Jane says finally. Someone crashes into her shoulder as they dance by, and she doesn’t even notice. “Oh, it’s—Biyu.”
“Who’s Biyu?”
Jane lowers her hand slowly and says, “I am.”
August’s feet hit the floor.
“I’m Biyu,” Jane goes on. 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. “That’s my name—what my parents named me. Su Biyu. I was the oldest, and my sisters and me, we used to—we used to eat all the fah sung tong before the New Year party was even over, so my dad would hide them on top of the fridge in a sewing tin, but I always knew where it was, and he always knew when I stole some because he’d catch me smelling like—like peanuts.”
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.
“His name, Jane,” she says, suddenly and startlingly sober. “Tell me his name.”
“Biming,” she says. “My mom’s is Margaret. They own a—a restaurant. In Chinatown.”
“Here?”
“No—no. San Francisco. That’s where I’m from. We lived above the restaurant in a little apartment, and the wallpaper in the kitchen was green and gold, and my sisters and I shared a room and we—we had a cat. We had a cat and a pot of flowers by the front door and a picture of my po po next to the phone.”
“Okay,” August says. “What else do you remember?”
“I think…” A smile spreads across her face, awestruck and distant. “I think I remember everything.”
9
The party’s gone. August has been on the train for five hours straight, glitter in her hair, dollar bills on Jane’s collar, riding the line and listening to the flow of Jane’s memories. They watched the sun rise over the East River with the first commuters of the day, recorded a slew of voice notes on August’s phone, waited for Niko to return with an encouraging smile, two coffees, and a stack of blank stenos.
August writes and Jane talks and—wedged between half-asleep rastas and mothers of three—they rebuild a whole life from the beginning. 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.
“Barbara,” Jane says. “I was two when my sister Barbara was born. Betty came the next year. My parents gave me the only Chinese name because I was the oldest, but they didn’t want any trouble for my sisters. They always told me, ‘Biyu, look after the girls.’ And I left them. That’s … fuck. I forgot how that felt. I left them.”
She swallows, and they both wait for her voice to even out before she explains that she left when she was eighteen.
“My—my parents—they wanted me to take over the restaurant. My dad taught me to cook, and I loved it, but I didn’t want to be tied down. I mean, I was sneaking out at night to see girls, and my parents wanted me to care about balancing the books. I—I don’t even think I fully knew I was gay yet? 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.”
Leaving, she says, was the hardest thing she ever did. Her family had been in San Francisco for generations. It never felt like the right choice. But it felt like the only choice.
“Summer ’71, I was eighteen, and this band—some no-name band, total proto-punk trash playing the absolute worst shit—asked my dad if they could play at the restaurant. And he let them. And I fell in love—with the music, the way they dressed, the way they carried themselves. I went upstairs, cut off all my hair, and packed my backpack.”
In the van, they asked her name, and she said, “Biyu.”
“It was LA first,” she goes on. “Three months working for a fishmonger because my uncle back home owned a fish market—that’s this tattoo, right here.” She points to the anchor. Her first one. “I had a friend who’d moved there, so he put me up, then he took a job in Pittsburgh and I left. That was when I started hitching rides wherever people were going and seeing how I liked it. I did Cleveland for a couple of weeks, that was a nightmare. Des Moines, Philly, Houston. And in ’72, I ended up in New Orleans.”
She remembers stray details about every city she passed through. An apartment with bars on the windows. Reciting her parents’ phone number to the rafters of an attic in the Houston Heights, wondering if she should call. Almost breaking her arm at a Vietnam protest in Philadelphia.
New Orleans is blurry, but August thinks that’s because it meant more. For Jane, the most important memories are either razor-sharp Technicolor or pixelated and muted, like they’re too much to hold in her head. She remembers two years, an apartment with a sweet-faced roommate whose name still won’t come, a basket of clothes in the kitchen between their rooms that they’d both pull from.
She remembers meeting other lesbians in grungy bars—she learned to cook burgers and fries in the kitchen of one called Drunk Jane’s. The girls spent her first month watching her across the bar, daring one another to talk to her, until one asked her on a date and confessed they’d been calling her Drunk Jane because no one had the nerve to ask her name. Every lesbian in the neighborhood had a nickname—Birdy, Noochie, T-Bev, Natty Light, a million hilarious names born from a million messy stories. She used to joke they sounded like a band of pirates. She considered herself lucky, really, that the name that stuck on her was Drunk Jane, and that over the months it became one word. Jane.
