Epilogue

Georgie ordered herself a stick-and-poke kit. She had decided her new calling in life was to become a tattoo artist. She gave herself a ring of tiny stars around her ankle, which turned out so well that I almost let her practice on me before Tashya stepped in and made me wait until Georgie wasn’t high.

Spring came so gradually we didn’t notice until we were sweating in our coats. Georgie had started reading a lot of books about climate change, and she talked almost nonstop about how the earth was soon to be uninhabitable, and we were living amid the sixth extinction. In any case, winter was over, and despite the bigger picture, we were all relieved that the wind no longer chafed our faces raw. Tashya started learning a new concerto, for next year’s competition. Benny took his PSATs and aced them.

The day came to go back to the train yard and perform my service to the community. Georgie and Tashya came with me. On the subway down, Georgie kept talking about suicide. “I mean, evolutionarily, it makes sense that, you know, like . . . if you’re badly adapted to your environment, your serotonin levels reflect that, and you self-select out.” She drew a finger across her throat as Tashya mouthed, “Shut up!” when she thought I wasn’t looking. But in fact I thought it was sort of a relief—to finally talk about it openly, and to have the right language. Georgie had taken it upon herself to destigmatize mental health, especially around me. So far she had given me a voucher for a free video session with her therapist, a book on psychedelics and depression, a sun lamp for seasonal affective disorder, and a family-sized bottle of vitamin D gummies that tasted like stone fruits.

“The problem is,” Georgie continued, “then the environment started changing too quickly. The agricultural revolution made everyone a serf, then the industrial revolution made everyone a factory worker, and now no one is adapted to any environment, because every environment is artificial. No one’s well adapted to anything, we’re just all trying to off ourselves.”

“Georgie,” Tashya said.

“What?” said Georgie. She linked her arm through mine. “I’m just saying. Anyway, sixth extinction and all. Did you know that almost all the frogs are dead?”

The train yard looked really different during the day. The light made everything uglier and revealed all the weeds and loose trash. Georgie was delighted. “This place is so weird,” she said, again and again. We found an MTA worker, who apparently had no idea we were meant to be there. I explained to her the situation—how I had vandalized a train and was here to clean it and fulfill my community service.

“But these trains don’t need to be cleaned,” she said, baffled. “They’ve been retired—they’re headed for the ocean, to become artificial reefs.”

“No way,” said Georgie. Her face was shining like this was the most wonderful thing she’d ever heard. She started asking a lot of questions. It turned out the train cars were to be stripped of their stainless steel, loaded onto barges, and then dropped along the Eastern seaboard, to become habitats for marine life. I watched Georgie, talking so easily, and I realized what it meant to understand someone: it was to see the world as they saw it. Georgie saw everyone as interesting, so even when they intimidated her, she still found them worth her time. That was why Georgie could win over just about anyone, and could find a way to talk to them. Tashya saw everyone as reasonable—even Thomas Sato had his motivations.

But I saw everyone as dead, which was to say I thought of them as props in my own life, like no one else was real at all. That was the root of all my problems; it was why I was so prone to loneliness. Constant saw everyone as lost, which was how he had found me.

“Anyway,” said the MTA employee. “You see that there’s no real point to cleaning them.”

“But didn’t the court contact you?” Tashya asked. “To make sure this was okay, as community service?”

The MTA employee snorted. “Honey, if anyone in this city knew how to communicate, we could save a billion dollars a day.”

I nodded along—I thought communication was valuable too. “But the thing is,” I said, “I still have to do my community service.”

“Look,” she said, sighing. “Why don’t you girls pick up some trash, and then we’ll see what else there is for you to do?”

Luckily, there was a lot of trash in the train yard. “Most of the city is built on landfill,” said Georgie, and started rattling neighborhoods off as we gathered trash bags and gloves: Battery Park City, Canarsie, big chunks of Ellis Island and Staten Island. “They built Ellis Island with all the dirt they excavated when they were digging the subways,” she said. I made a note to suggest she try leading groups of tourists through Manhattan, when she got tired of tattooing.

We filled several bags with trash. Our hands got dirty, despite the gloves. The trains in the yard weren’t the same ones Constant and I had painted—I looked for his map, but it was already under the sea. The wind smelled so promising that I would have stayed out there for longer, but the train yard wasn’t huge, and eventually we ran out of stuff to pick up. We stacked our bags by the guard vestibule and admired them: destined for landfill, and then remade.

The MTA employee poked her head out. “Good work, girls. I’d say the community has been served.” She waved me off when I tried to protest. “Go on.”

Tashya and Georgie looked at me. “Now what?” said Georgie.

I shrugged. “Well,” I said. “I guess we should get back on the subway.”