Chapter 12: August and Jane's Connection Deepens on the Q Train

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

The chapter opens with August standing at the entrance to the Parkside Ave. Station, hesitating over the call button. She's been thinking about her uncle Augie's disappearance. Her mother's stories about him—the wild hair, the hidden whiskey and photographs, the night he kissed her forehead and left with a suitcase—now make a different kind of sense. August realizes Augie was like Jane: someone who left and never came back, someone her grandparents preferred to pretend never existed. She doesn't know how to tell her mother what she's learned.

When the Q pulls up, August finds Jane injured—a rip in her shirt collar, a fresh cut on her lip, her right hand flexing. Jane explains she got into a fight after someone hurled racist and homophobic slurs at her. She hit him; someone else pulled her off. August tries to comfort her, but Jane is distant and volatile.

Jane finally opens up about the weight of her situation. She describes waking up one day to find half the people she loved dead and the other half having lived entire lives without her. She never got to see her sisters grow up, never got to tell her parents why she left, never got to make things right. She tells August it's like she died—except she has to feel it, every day, all over again.

Jane tells August to stop trying, to let it go, to get a new train and stop seeing her. August refuses, insisting their connection is what's keeping Jane anchored in the present. Jane counters that August is the reason she feels this way at all—that looking at August makes her feel realer than she's ever been, but it hurts so badly. August fires back: