One Last Stop

You can try, she guesses. You can tear yourself apart and rebuild from scratch, bring yourself to every corner of the map, sew a new self from the scraps of a thousand other people and places. You can try to expand to fill a different shape. But at the end of the day, there’s a place at the foot of the bed where your shoes hit the floor, and it’s the same.

It’s always the same.

ou were always crying your eyes out to that Peter Gabriel song.

To the queer reader, thank you for existing. So much of this story is about building a community. I’m so happy to be in community with you. Be defiant. Love yourself hard. Take the energy in these pages and get involved in your direct physical community. Take care of one another. Know that you are wanted and loved and awaited by millions of us.

August’s at sea, she’s clay in the hands of someone who knows how to make a life out of nothing, she’s a girl underneath a girl in a bed they both almost died to get to.

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.

For a punk who knows how to fight, she seems to love everything earnestly.

he’s added August to the fridge.

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.

There are two things coiled in August’s chest these days.

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. Don’t stab them, but also, maybe stab them if you have to.

The other, though, is the one that really freaks her out.

It’s hope.

It’s been twenty-three years of passing through, touching brick after brick, never once feeling a permanent tug.

It feels stupid to say it, but maybe. Maybe it could be this. Maybe a new major. Maybe a new job. Maybe a place that could want her to belong in it.

Maybe a person, she guesses. She can’t imagine who.