I tipped my head toward him and Stevie smiled. She tossed her change into the man’s case—he nodded at her without stopping playing—and pulled out her phone, recording a video for a few seconds. “I’ll send that to my dad,” she said. “He’ll love it.”

“So what now?” I asked as I looked around at the signs for the different trains.

“We need the B or D uptown, which is… there.” Stevie pointed, letting out a small groan when she saw getting to the train meant going down more stairs.

“Should we buy you some flats?” I asked as we descended and she gripped the railing again. “We could break my hundred dollars.”

“You mean our hundred dollars.”

“Sure, our hundred dollars. Think of the shoes we could get with it!”

Stevie laughed as we reached the platform, which, in contrast to the station, was cold again, and drafty. I pulled Brad a little closer to me in case he was cold too. “There,” she said, pointing up at the B and D sign, “that’s what we want.” We walked up to the edge of the platform, standing just behind the yellow safety line.

I looked around the station. Most everyone was looking at their phones; a few people were reading as they waited. There were advertisements along the tiled back wall of the subway for movies that came out last month, now scribbled over excessively.

I glanced up at the electronic sign, trying to see how long it would take for the train to arrive, but it was flashing an error message, 00:00 where the arrival time of the train should be. “Apparently, the train is coming never,” I said, shifting Brad to my other arm.

“I don’t know about that,” Stevie said, nodding at it. “It’s coming at zero, apparently.”

“Maybe it’s a fancy New York way of saying midnight.”

The couple standing next to us on the platform, who’d been having one of those whisper-hissing arguments, suddenly both started to get a little bit louder. Apparently, Richard was always pulling this shit and his—boyfriend? husband?—was over it. Without discussing it, we walked a few feet down the platform to give them some space. That must be the hard part about being in New York—you had to live your life in public, no cars to duck into when you needed to cry or yell at someone.

“So I don’t know anything about Mateo,” I pointed out after a few more minutes of silence, mostly to distract myself. The train still hadn’t arrived, which was beginning to worry me. We still had a lot of time, but I was realizing that when I’d done the time math, I’d planned on things like trains arriving immediately. “Besides the fact that he’s a freshman at Columbia.”