One last stop, p.1
One Last Stop, page 1
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For queer communities past, present, and future
And for Lee & Essie, whose love cannot possibly fit on a dedication page
1
Taped to a trash can inside the Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen at the corner of Parkside and Flatbush Avenues.
SEEKING YOUNG SINGLE ROOMMATE FOR 3BR APARTMENT UPSTAIRS, 6TH FLOOR. $700/MO. MUST BE QUEER & TRANS FRIENDLY. MUST NOT BE AFRAID OF FIRE OR DOGS. NO LIBRAS, WE ALREADY HAVE ONE. CALL NIKO.
“Can I touch you?”
That’s the first thing the guy with the tattoos says when August settles onto the rubbed-off center cushion of the brown leather couch—a flaking hand-me-down number that’s been a recurring character the past four and a half years of college. The type you crash on, bury under textbooks, or sit on while sipping flat Coke and speaking to no one at a party. The quintessential early twenties trash couch.
Most of the furniture is as trash as the trash couch, mismatched and thrifted and hauled in off the street. But when Tattoo Boy—Niko, the flyer said his name was Niko—sits across from her, it’s in a startlingly high-end Eames chair.
The place is like that: a mix of familiar and very much not familiar. Small and cramped, offensive shades of green and yellow on the walls. Plants dangling off almost every surface, spindly arms reaching across shelves, a faint smell of soil. The windows are the same painted-shut frames of old apartments in New Orleans, but these are half covered with pages of drawings, afternoon light filtering through, muted and waxy.
There’s a five-foot-tall sculpture of Judy Garland made from bicycle parts and marshmallow Peeps in the corner. It’s not recognizable as Judy, except for the sign that says: HELLO MY NAME IS JUDY GARLAND.
Niko looks at August, hand held out, blurry in the steam from his tea. He’s got this black-on-black greaser thing going on, a dark undercut against light brown skin and a confident jaw, a single crystal dangling from one ear. Tattoos spill down both his arms and lick up his throat from beneath his buttoned-up collar. His voice is a little croaky, like the back end of a cold, and he’s got a toothpick in one corner of his mouth.
Okay, Danny Zuko, calm down.
“Sorry, uh.” August stares, stuck on his question. “What?”
“Not in a weird way,” he says. The tattoo on the back of his hand is a Ouija planchette. His knuckles say FULL MOON. Good lord. “Just want to get your vibe. Sometimes physical contact helps.”
“What, are you a—?”
“A psychic, yeah,” he says matter-of-factly. The toothpick rolls down the white line of his teeth when he grins, wide and disarming. “Or that’s one word for it. Clairvoyant, gifted, spiritist, whatever.”
Jesus. Of course. There was no way a $700-a-month room in Brooklyn was going to come without a catch, and the catch is marshmallow Judy Garland and this refurbished Springsteen who’s probably about to tell her she’s got her aura on inside out and backward like Dollar Tree pantyhose.
But she’s got nowhere to go, and there’s a Popeyes on the first floor of the building. August Landry does not trust people, but she trusts fried chicken.
She lets Niko touch her hand.
“Cool,” he says tonelessly, like he’s stuck his head out the window to check the weather. He taps two fingers on the back of her knuckles and sits back. “Oh. Oh wow, okay. That’s interesting.”
August blinks. “What?”
He takes the toothpick out of his mouth and sets it on the steamer trunk between them, next to a bowl of gumballs. He’s got a constipated look on his face.
“You like lilies?” he says. “Yeah, I’ll get some lilies for your move-in day. 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?”
“No, frog bones. Really tiny. Hard to pick up. Gotta use tweezers.” He must notice the look on August’s face. “Oh, she’s a sculptor. It’s for a piece. It’s her room you’re taking. Don’t worry, I’ll sage it.”
“Uh, I wasn’t worried about … frog ghosts?” Should she be worried about frog ghosts? Maybe this Myla person is a ritualistic frog murderer.
“Niko, stop telling people about frog ghosts,” says a voice down the hall. A pretty Black girl with a friendly, round face and eyelashes for miles is leaning out of a doorway, a pair of goggles shoved up into her dark curls. She smiles when she sees August. “Hi, I’m Myla.”
“August.”
“We found our girl,” Niko says. “She likes lilies.”
August hates when people like him do things like that. Lucky guesses. She does like lilies. She can pull up a whole Wikipedia page in her head: lilium candidum. Grows two to six feet tall. Studied diligently from the window of her mom’s two-bedroom apartment.
There’s no way Niko should know—no way he does. Just like she does with palm readers under beach umbrellas back home in Jackson Square, she holds her breath and brushes straight past.
“So that’s it?” she says. “I got the room? You, uh, you didn’t even ask me any questions.”
He leans his head on his hand. “What time were you born?”
“I … don’t know?” Remembering the flyer, she adds, “I think I’m a Virgo, if that helps.”
“Oh, yeah, definitely a Virgo.”
She manages to keep her face impartial. “Are you … a professional psychic? Like people pay you?”
“He’s part-time,” Myla says. She floats into the room, graceful for someone with a blowtorch in one hand, and drops into the chair next to his. The wad of pink bubblegum she’s chewing explains the bowl of gumballs. “And part-time very terrible bartender.”
“I’m not that bad.”
“Sure you’re not,” she says, planting a kiss on his cheek. She stage-whispers to August, “He thought a paloma was a kind of tumor.”
While they’re bickering about Niko’s bartending skills, August sneaks a gumball out of the bowl and drops it to test a theory about the floor. As suspected, it rolls off through the kitchen and into the hallway.
She clears her throat. “So y’all are—?”
“Together, yeah,” Myla says. “Four years. It was nice to have our own rooms, but none of us are doing so hot financially, so I’m moving into his.”
“And the third roommate is?”
“Wes. That’s his room at the end of the hall,” she says. “He’s mostly nocturnal.”
“Those are his,” Niko says, pointing at the drawings in the windows. “He’s a tattoo artist.”
“Okay,” August says. “So it’s $2,800 total? $700 each?”
“Yep.”
“And the flyer said something about … fire?”
Myla gives her blowtorch a friendly squeeze. “Controlled fire.”
“And dogs?”
“Wes has one,” Niko puts in. “A little poodle named Noodles.”
“Noodles the poodle?”
“He’s on Wes’s sleep schedule, though. So, a ghost in the night.”
“Anything else I should know?”
Myla and Niko exchange a look.
“Like three times a day the fridge makes this noise like a skeleton trying to eat a bag of quarters, but we’re pretty sure it’s fine,” Niko says.
“One of the laminate tiles in the kitchen isn’t really stuck down anymore, so we all just kind of kick it around the room,” Myla adds.
“The guy across the hall is a drag queen, and sometimes he practices his numbers in the middle of the night, so if you hear Patti LaBelle, that’s why.”
“The hot water takes twenty minutes to get going, but ten if you’re nice.”
“It’s not haunted, but it’s like, not not haunted.”
Myla smacks her gum. “That’s it.”
August swallows. “Okay.”
She weighs her options, watching Niko slip his fingers into the pocket of Myla’s paint-stained overalls, and wonders what Niko saw when he touched the back of her hand, or thought he saw. Pretended to see.
And does she want to live with a couple? A couple that is one half fake psychic who looks like he fronts an Arctic Monkeys cover band and one half firestarter with a room full of dead frogs? No.
But Brooklyn College’s spring semester starts in a week, and she can’t deal with trying to find a place and a job once classes pick up.
Turns out, for a girl who carries a knife because she’d rather be anything but unprepared, August did not plan her move to New York very well.
“Okay?” Myla says. “Okay what?”
“Okay,” August repeats. “I’m in.”
* * *
In the end, August was always going to say yes to this apartment, because she grew up in one smaller and uglier and filled with even weirder things.
“It looks nice!” her mom says over FaceTime, propped on the windowsill.
“You’re only saying that because this one has wood floors and not that nightmare carpet from the Idlewild place.”
“That place wasn’t so bad!” she says, buried in a box of files. Her buggy glasses slide down her nose, and she pushes them up with the business end of a highlighter, leaving a yellow streak. “It gave us nine great years. And carpet can hide a multitude of sins.”
August rolls her eyes, pushing a box across the room. The Idlewild apartment was a two-bedroom shithole half an hour outside of New Orleans, the kind of suburban built-in-the-’70s dump that doesn’t even have the charm or character of being in the city.
She can still picture the carpet in the tiny gaps of the obstacle course of towering piles of old magazines and teetering file boxes. Double Dare 2000: Single Mom Edition. It was an unforgivable shade of grimy beige, just like the walls, in the spaces that weren’t plastered with maps and bulletin boards and ripped-out phonebook pages, and—
Yeah, this place isn’t so bad.
“Did you talk to Detective Primeaux today?” August asks. It’s the first Friday of the month, so she knows the answer.
“Yeah, nothing new,” she says. “He doesn’t even try to act like he’s gonna open the case back up anymore. Goddamn shame.”
August pushes another box into a different corner, this one near the radiator puffing warmth into the January freeze. Closer to the windowsill, she can see her mom better, their shared mousy-brown hair frizzing into her face. Under it, the same round face and big green bush baby eyes as August’s, the same angular hands as she thumbs through papers. Her mom looks exhausted. She always looks exhausted.
“Well,” August says. “He’s a shit.”
“He’s a shit,” her mom agrees, nodding gravely. “How ’bout the new roommates?”
“Fine. I mean, kind of weird. One of them claims to be a psychic. But I don’t think they’re, like, serial killers.”
She hums, only half-listening. “Remember the rules. Number one—”
“Us versus everyone.”
“And number two—”
“If they’re gonna kill you, get their DNA under your fingernails.”
“Thatta girl,” she says. “Listen, I gotta go, I just opened this shipment of public records, and it’s gonna take me all weekend. Be safe, okay? And call me tomorrow.”
The moment they hang up, the room is unbearably quiet.
If August’s life were a movie, the soundtrack would be the low sounds of her mom, the clickity-clacking of her keyboard, or quiet mumbling as she searches for a document. Even when August quit helping with the case, when she moved out and mostly heard it over the phone, it was constant. A couple of thousand miles away, it’s like someone finally cut the score.
There’s a lot they have in common—maxed-out library cards, perpetual singlehood, affinity for Crystal Hot Sauce, encyclopedic knowledge of NOPD missing persons protocol. But the big difference between August and her mother? Suzette Landry hoards like nuclear winter is coming, and August very intentionally owns almost nothing.
She has five boxes. Five entire cardboard boxes to show for her life at twenty-three. Living like she’s on the run from the fucking FBI. Normal stuff.
She slides the last one into an empty corner, so they’re not cluttered together.
At the bottom of her purse, past her wallet and notepads and spare phone battery, is her pocketknife. The handle’s shaped like a fish, with a faded pink sticker in the shape of a heart, stuck on when she was seven—around the time she learned how to use it. Once she’s slashed the boxes open, her things settle into neat little stacks.
By the radiator: two pairs of boots, three pairs of socks. Six shirts, two sweaters, three pairs of jeans, two skirts. One pair of white Vans—those are special, a reward she bought herself last year, buzzed off adrenaline and mozzarella sticks from the Applebee’s where she came out to her mom.
By the wall with the crack down the middle: the one physical book she owns—a vintage crime novel—beside her tablet containing her hundreds of other books. Maybe thousands. She’s not sure. It stresses her out to think about having that many of anything.
In the corner that smells of sage and maybe, faintly, a hundred frogs she’s been assured died of natural causes: one framed photo of an old washateria on Chartres, one Bic lighter, and an accompanying candle. She folds her knife up, sets it down, and places a sign that says PERSONAL EFFECTS over it in her head.
She’s shaking out her air mattress when she hears someone unsticking the front door from the jamb, a violent skittering following like somebody’s bowled an enormous furry spider down the hallway. It crashes into a wall, and then what can only be described as a soot sprite from Spirited Away comes shooting into August’s room.
“Noodles!” calls Niko, and then he’s in the doorway. There’s a leash hanging from his hand and an apologetic expression from his angular features.
“I thought you said he was a ghost in the night,” August says. Noodles is snuffling through her socks, tail a blur, until he realizes there’s a new person and launches himself at her.
“He is,” Niko says with a wince. “I mean, kind of. Sometimes, I feel bad and take him to work with me at the shop during the day. I guess we didn’t mention his, uh—” Noodles takes this moment to place both paws on August’s shoulders and try to force his tongue into her mouth. “Personality.”
Myla appears behind Niko, a skateboard under one arm. “Oh, you met Noodles!”
“Oh yeah,” August says. “Intimately.”
“You need help with the rest of your stuff?”
She blinks. “This is it.”
“That’s … that’s it?” Myla says. “That’s everything?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t, uh.” Myla’s giving her this look, like she’s realizing she didn’t actually know anything about August before agreeing to let her store her veggies alongside theirs in the crisper. It’s a look August gives herself in the mirror a lot. “You don’t have any furniture.”
“I’m kind of a minimalist,” August tells her. If she tried, August could get her five boxes down to four. Maybe something to do over the weekend.
“Oh, I wish I could be more like you. Niko’s gonna start throwing my yarn out the window while I’m sleeping.” Myla smiles, reassured that August is not, in fact, in the Witness Protection Program. “Anyway, we’re gonna go get dinner pancakes. You in?”
August would rather let Niko throw her out the window than split shortstacks with people she barely knows.
“I can’t really afford to eat out,” she says. “I don’t have a job yet.”
“I got you. Call it a welcome home dinner,” Myla says.
“Oh,” August says. That’s … generous. A warning light flashes somewhere in August’s brain. Her mental field guide to making friends is a two-page pamphlet that just says: DON’T.
“Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes,” Myla says. “It’s a Flatbush institution.”
“Open since 1976,” Niko chimes in.
August arches a brow. “Forty-four years and nobody wanted to take another run at that name?”
“It’s part of the charm,” Myla says. “It’s like, our place. You’re from the South, right? You’ll like it. Very unpretentious.”
They hover there, staring at one another. A pancake standoff.
August wants to stay in the safety of her crappy bedroom with the comfortable misery of a Pop-Tarts dinner and a silent truce with her brain. But she looks at Niko and realizes, even if he was faking it when he touched her, he saw something in her. And that’s more than anyone’s done in a long time.
Ugh.
“Okay,” she says, clambering to her feet, and Myla’s smile bursts across her face like starlight.
Ten minutes later, August is tucked into a corner booth of Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes, where every waiter seems to know Niko and Myla by name. The server is a man with a beard, a broad smile, and a faded name tag that says WINFIELD pinned to his red Pancake Billy’s T-shirt. He doesn’t even ask Niko or Myla’s order—just sets down a mug of coffee and a pink lemonade.
She can see what they meant about Pancake Billy’s legendary status. It has a particular type of New Yorkness to it, something she’s seen in an Edward Hopper painting or the diner from Seinfeld, but with a lot more seasoning. It’s a corner unit, big windows facing the street on both sides, dinged-up Formica tables and red vinyl seats slowly being rotated out of the busiest sections as they crack. There’s a soda shop bar down the length of one wall, old photos and Mets front pages from floor to ceiling.
