One Last Stop

“Well. It’s their home, not hers. Those are their childhood photos on the fridge, their smells of paint and soot and lavender threaded through the patchy rugs, their pancake dinner routine, all of it settled years before August even got to New York. But it’s nice to look at. A comforting still life to be enjoyed from across the room.”

August sees her Flatbush apartment as a means to an end. She has no expectation of taking part in routines within the apartment or socializing with her roommates regularly. However, Myla and Niko quickly see to this: They welcome her with open arms, and, by the novel’s end, a picture of her Uncle Augie on the fridge shows how August has become part of the home.

“August has lived in a dozen rooms without ever knowing how to make a space into a home, how to expand to fill it like Niko or Myla or even Wes with his drawings in the windows. She doesn’t know, really, what it would take at this point. It’s been twenty-three years of passing through touching brick after brick, never once feeling a permanent tug.”

August is lonely when she moves to New York. She has purposely kept others at arm’s length, and she periodically refers back to Hurricane Katrina, in which all her belongings were destroyed, even her baby photos. She owns little, but slowly, she begins to find a home in her place with Niko, Mila, and Wes. By the novel’s end, she feels firmly settled there.

“‘Yeah. You ever notice that it’s kind of—’

‘Magic,’ Subway Girl finishes. ‘It’s magic.’

August bites her lip. She doesn’t do magic. But the first time they met, August thought she’d do anything this girl said, and alarmingly, that doesn’t seem to be changing.”

Magic is a motif within One Last Stop, as August goes from being unwilling to believe in magic to accepting not only the major revelation of Jane being out of time but even Niko’s psychic gifts. August eventually accepts that she has her own magic as well.

“And so, in her first month in the apartment on the corner of Flatbush and Parkside above the Popeyes, August learns that the Q is a time, a place, and a person”

The Q is a key to this novel. It’s where August meets Jane, and it’s a large part of the mystery that drives the novel. It’s also essential in helping August settle into life in New York. The Q represents time because she takes the 8:05am train from the same station every day, feeling like she has a routine. Eventually, she realizes that her bond with Jane is what ensures that Jane is always on her train.

“There’s something about Jane that’s […] unknowable. A shiny, locked file drawer, the kind August once learned to crack. Irresistible.”

August tries to push down the side of her that excels at investigation, thinking that it must remain a part of her past because it consumed her mother’s life. However, the skills that she needs to help Jane are exactly those. Slowly, she comes to realize how she can use her investigative skills to help others, and by the novel’s end, she values this about herself.

“Some days, when she’s working long hours or locked up in her room for too long, Jane is the only person who’s kind to her all day.”

August gets used to seeing the Q as a place of escape from the stresses of her daily life. It’s a place where she can sit, read, and listen to music in between running from school to work and vice versa. Jane, too, becomes an escape from these stressors, but she also quickly becomes someone August can confide in.

“‘Sometimes. But, you know, that feeling? When you wake up in the morning and you have somebody to think about? Somewhere for hope to go? It’s good. Even when it’s bad, it’s good.’”

Isaiah says this about his feelings for Wes when August asks if it’s lonely to feel for someone who can’t love you back. She doesn’t hope as much as she did when she was a child, feeling closed off from the capability. However, by the novel’s end, she learns to have hope even if she isn’t sure that everything will turn out alright.

“This should be enough, she thinks. August has, however dubiously, stumbled into this tangle of people that want her to be a part of them. She’s lived for a long […] time on less love than this. She’s been alone in every way. Now she’s only alone in some ways.”

August is quickly adopted by her roommates, and she appreciates that she starts to feel some degree of belonging, especially not having felt that anywhere else she’d lived. The destruction of Hurricane Katrina and her mother’s focus on her missing uncle’s case has often interfered with August’s capability to feel at home.

“August looks at her as the train reverses past Gravesend rooftops, this girl out of time, the same face and body and hair and smile that took August’s life by the shoulders in January and shook. And she can’t believe Jane had the nerve, the audacity, to become the one thing August can’t resist: a mystery.”

August has been trying to leave behind her old life, which was consumed with the search for her Uncle Augie. However, Jane quickly presents a challenge to this, as August has to use her investigative skills to help her discover who she is. In turn, Jane assists August in recognizing that she can value these skills without them consuming her life. By the novel’s end, August sees them as an asset.

“All the files, maps, photos, all the years of handwritten notes, a wet pulp shoveled out the window of a condemned building. August’s mom saved one Tupperware tub of files on her brother and not a single one of August’s baby pictures. August lost everything and thought that maybe, if she could become someone who didn’t have anything to lose, she’d never have to feel that way again.”

August feels like her mother isn’t always present as a mother, and she tries to make it clear when she moves to New York that she’s done working on Augie’s case, not realizing that Jane knew Augie and that she can help August solve his case. The case, after all, has caused August to feel like she has nothing since it was the primary focus in her mother’s life. It prevented August from feeling like she had a home and a piece of her past to call her own.

“August thinks, as her feet lift off the ground, that nobody has ever called her magic in her entire life.”

August frequently thinks that she “doesn’t do magic” (35). However, when she helps Jane start recovering her memories, Jane helps August see and value her skills, making her feel like she is magic herself—a crucial revelation for the development of August’s confidence.

“August learns all this, but she also learns that Jane likes to be kissed every kind of way: like a secret, like a fistfight, like candy, like a house fire.”

August is in love with Jane and finds that kissing her “for research” is therefore difficult. However, August gets to know the story behind the kisses Jane shared with women in her past, and Jane later tells August that she’s different from those other women, demonstrating how much she really cares for August.

“She trusted Jane, though. She trusted Jane and her time on this train and that cocky grin to get her there safely. Why can’t she do the same for herself? She’s learned this train backward and forward. The Q is home, and August is the girl with the knife picking its stops apart one by one. She doesn’t believe in things. But she can believe in that”

August plays it safe at the beginning of the novel, memorizing the Q’s route. She’d never jump between cars without Jane’s encouragement. She doesn’t believe in hoping for the best. However, Jane brings out this hope in her. Later in the novel, she makes a leap of her own, jumping from the platform to help send Jane back home.

“‘None of us know exactly who we are, and guess what? It doesn’t […] matter. God knows I don’t, but I’ll find my way to it.’” She rubs her thumb over August’s kneecap, poking gently into the soft part below her thigh. “‘Like—okay, I dated this girl who was an artist, right? And she’d do figure drawing, where she’d draw the negative space around a person first, and then fill in the person. And that’s how I’m trying to look at it. Maybe I don’t know what fills it in yet, but I can look at the space around where I sit in the world, what creates that shape, and I can care about what it’s made of, if it’s good, if it hurts anyone, if it makes people happy, if it makes me happy. And that can be enough for now.”

This passage relates directly to the theme of having hope and being okay with whatever happens. August feels lost knowing that she’s going to graduate in the fall, not having imagined what her life would be like once she finished her degree. Jane’s words reassure her that she will find her place in the world and that she should focus on what’s around her. August can do this because she has created a home for herself with Niko, Myla, Wes, Jane, and others that she has brought into her life since moving to New York.

“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.”

August learns what it means to belong throughout One Last Stop. She settles into her apartment and her life with her friends; however, as someone who’s also not particularly experienced in romantic relationships, she wonders what it would be like to be Jane’s girlfriend.

“And it makes sense of Jane too. She ran away because she didn’t think she could make her family happy, and she never went back because she thought she did them a favor. She kept running, because she never quite learned what home was supposed to feel like. That, especially, August can understand.”

Like August, Jane hasn’t had a true home in a long time. She didn’t feel like she belonged at home, but slowly she comes to find that she belongs in the present, even if she simultaneously belongs in the past.

“Sometimes it feels like there are three Augusts—one born hopeful, one who learned how to pick locks, and one who moved to New York alone—all sticking out knife blades and tripping one another to get to the front of the line. But every time the doors open and she spots Jane at the far end of the car, listening to music that shouldn’t even be playing, she knows it doesn’t make a difference. Every possible version of August is completely stupid for this girl, no matter the deadline. She’ll take what she can get and figure out the rest.”

At this point in the novel, August is in transition. She has found a place to call home and has been moved by the hope Jane brings out in her. She’s willing to trust that everything will work out and to have hope that things will turn out alright, which is one of the novel’s major themes.

“She’s right. August knows she’s right. She’s been digging Jane’s life back up, but Jane is the one who has to sit on the train alone and live it all over again.”

Jane belongs to the 1970s, but she slowly begins to belong to both that time and the 2020s. She must grapple with being in the present while also reliving memories of people that she’ll likely never see again. In the end, she stays in the 2020s and keeps doing activities that remind her of the past, making her a person of both times.

“It should feel dirty, to be with Jane like this, here, but what’s crazy is, she finally understands it all. Love. The whole shape of it. What it means to touch someone like this and want to have a life with them at the same time.”

August falls quickly for Jane—both the person that she first encountered who was the only person kind to her each day and the person she came to know once Jane’s memories were restored. She learns what it means to love someone, which she has never done before. In addition, this quote connects to the theme Belonging to and with People, Places, and Times, as August has discovered that she really wants to be with a person who is hers.

“She’s standing on a New York sidewalk, nearly twenty-four years old, and she’s found herself back at the first version of August, the one who hoped for things. Who wanted things. Who cried to Peter Gabriel and believed in psychics. And it all started when she met Jane.”

August’s transformation as a New Yorker helps reveal how August can balance having hope again with setbacks in her life. She had given up on hope, but at this point in her novel, she’s starting to think positively again, even though, at the same time, she isn’t sure what will happen to Jane when they help her get off the Q.

“‘I fell in love with you the day I met you, and then I fell in love with the person you remembered you are. I got to fall in love with you twice. That’s—that’s magic. You’re the first thing I’ve believed in since—since I don’t even remember, okay, you’re—you’re movies and destiny and every stupid, impossible thing, and it’s not because of the […] train, it’s because of you. It’s because you fight and you care and you’re always kind but never easy, and you won’t let anything take that away from you. You’re my […] hero, Jane. I don’t care if you think you’re not one. You are.”

It’s usually August who needs reassurance and hope. However, when the plan to help Jane disconnect from the Q at first seems to be failing, Jane falters. She looks weak, and August must reassure her. Not only does August have hope and the will to believe—a far cry from her thoughts at the beginning of the novel—but she also uses that hope to instill confidence in Jane.

“The city moves, trudges on, lights up and shouts and spits steam up through the grates the same as always. August lives here. That finally feels real all the time, even when nothing else does. This is the city where she got her heart broken. Nothing anchors a person to a place quite like that.”

August finds comfort in the way that New York continues even after it feels like her world is shattered. With Jane gone, her life is both extremely different and very much the same. She continues to go to work and to hang out with her roommates. She learns to be okay even though she’d hoped that Jane would stay.

“August came to New York almost a year ago, alone. She didn’t know a soul. She was supposed to muddle through like she always did, bury herself in the gray. Tonight, under the neon lights of the bar, under Niko’s arm, Myla’s fingers looped through her belt loop, she barely knows that feeling’s name.”

August lived in several cities before arriving in New York, never really knowing what a home felt like. However, she finds a home in her roommates. They help her cope with both her struggles with Jane and with Jane’s disappearance. They push her to be confident, and they comfort her when it’s difficult.