terminus.
There is a stretch of stops on Line One which feel like a sort of in-between. You are not in the city, but you aren’t out of the looming shadow of Toronto, either. These are my favourite stops—without fail, no matter how crowded the subway starts, when it gets to the end, it is always nearly empty. If you’re there in the middle of the day, as I tend to be, it feels like an alternate reality, a dystopia where people have disappeared but the trains still run. I am regularly late for appointments in the mid-afternoon, always underestimating how long it will take to ride to the end of the line and back again. It is possible, in the stretch between Eglington and Vaughan, to pretend that you have stumbled into a sort of alternate dimension, where the outside world ceases to exist.The subway doesn’t have the dated charm of the streetcars, the chirp of excitement when they cross paths. They will never collide—courtesy of the parallel tracks—but they never ignore each other. It is so different from the harshness of the subway, its cold isolation.Trains meet at nearly every stop, but they never speak. As a child I crafted storylines to explain it, the most detailed of which I concocted after my mother lost sight of me during a subway rush. She got off. I did not. I sat on the red-carpeted seat and kicked my legs up and down and up and down, wondering when she would get back on. As I waited, I began to count the number of times the trains would arrive at the station at the same time. On stubby fingers, I took careful note of each encounter—and became progressively sadder. Collision would be violent, but wouldn’t the connection be worth it? They seemed so lonely, former lovers so stuck in their own ways that they couldn’t see the other person was what they needed.I prefer the older cars—the ones that run on the Green Line—they are easier to hide in, individual silver boxes that will fill up like an overflowing bathtub in the right circumstances, but I find myself on the Yellow Line more often. I sit as far back as I can, watching as people come on and off. The never-ending hallway of the newer cars is a landscape in itself, the backdrop of a play with an unenthusiastic cast—a necessary evil on their way to other things.I am not like them, my relationship to the subway has always been mutually beneficial. If a situation were to arise—say, something which trapped me and the seven other people currently on this train car together—I would not have anyone to tell the police that I was missing. Unlike the others, I never had another reason for being there when it happened. I was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time because I had nowhere else to be.When the doors slid open, none of us thought much of the woman in all white. We each had different assumptions of why she would wear such an anxiety-inducing colour in such an uncontrollable city, but it was a passing observation. We went back to our own thoughts, our own plans. Nobody was focused on her. It’s funny how these sorts of things work out, how innocuous something appears until the moment that it no longer is. If I were as desperate for attention as I was in my youth, I might have applauded such a bold gesture—even half-seriously considered replicating it in my own life. I am not unaccustomed to the extreme and I was always looking for new ways to make people pay attention to me. The truth is, it would have been effective. None of us looked at her, actually looked, until she shot the gun.
begin your journey?
vaughan metropolitan
He hadn’t planned on taking the subway. It was a Tuesday, mid-afternoon. He had left work early, navigated the labyrinth of cubicles to step out into the cold air—completely at a loss. He was loath to admit it, but he was nowhere near where he had hoped to be when he had imagined himself at twenty-eight. His mother had told him every morning that he was destined for great things. She had said it when he was a child, as he sat on the linoleum floor of the kitchen and watched her cook, and when he had grown up and left home she texted him a daily reminder. In his childhood it had seemed sweet. In adulthood it felt like a reminder that he was not living up to her expectations. A reminder he anticipated every morning.You are destined for great things.
You are destined for great things.
You are destined for great things.It was a constant even on the day she died.You are destined, the message read.He had puzzled over it for a good ten minutes, eventually deciding that it was her way of switching things up. As always, he did not answer. Maybe, knowing what he did now, he would have. He had, at one time, considered his mother to be his best friend—when he was young and stupid and hadn’t yet realized that all people will reveal themselves to be awful if you wait long enough.He dug his phone out of his pocket, thumb sliding across the cracked screen protector. He bypassed the nondescript lock screen and 128 unread messages, going straight to the dating app he had downloaded a few weeks ago after drinking a bottle of rosé and watching Sandra Bullock fall in love. An array of airbrushed images immediately came into view. He swiped right languidly—no pattern to his selections—and messaged the first person who matched with him.
dtf?
Are you unemployed? Lol
no, just have the day off.
Ok 😂 yeah let’s meet up
where are you located?
Vaughan
i'm in downtown toronto.
Take line one, you’ll get here fast
I’ll be waiting 😜
He grimaced. As a principle, he avoided public transit with the sort of devotion typically reserved for long lost lovers or crossing the street when faced with a group of middle-schoolers. He did not particularly enjoy its bleak industrial landscape, or the beleaguered drunks that somehow always seemed to consider him a superb conversationalist. In the past weeks he had taken the train four times—which was four times too many. He had gone home to hear the reading of his mother’s will—he had inherited two thousand four hundred and twenty three dollars and her collection of ceramic raccoons—and to attend her funeral. The night before the funeral he had been awake until 3AM searching the internet for ‘vaguely depressing eulogies,’ and due to this looked emotionally devastated at the wake the next morning—a minor positive to his insomnia. He had stared at the obnoxiously patterned carpet until the colours blurred together, like he was pressing his palms against his eyelids. His father was not there, something he found himself increasingly grateful for. The man’s unadulterated joy would have made the funeral even more depressing than it already was.On the day his mother died, four hours after he had received “You are destined,” his father’s name had flashed on his phone screen. “She’s dead.”It was too much, the tone of voice, the low rasp of a man he had not spoken to in years. He knew immediately who she was. He did not ask his father how he knew, or how it happened, or what they were going to do next. He did not want to talk to his father any longer than was absolutely necessary. His mother was dead.He hung up the phone and accepted that fact.The subway was relatively quiet, the sort of midday lull before schools let out, before people began to get off work. It was the sort of environment that provoked too much thought, made him wonder if he was making an idiotic decision going out to Vaughan of all places to meet a person he had never seen. That had never stopped him before, but as climbed down into the underground, his mind began to wander. As he settled into a window seat and stared out at the expanse of darkness, it occurred to him that he was not particularly dtf. He had only sought after an internet acquaintance because today was the anniversary of the day which he had proved to the universe—and his mother—that he was not, in fact, destined for great things. He typed out a message, pressed send. He knew it wouldn’t be delivered. An upside of the out-dated infrastructure preventing proper cell phone service. Still, it was something. A step in a direction.When he got off at Vaughan Metropolitan, he hesitated. Across the way, the Northbound subway car had its doors opened, presumably stopped until the schedule commanded it to move again. To his left, the rickety escalators moved up, back to the outside world—to the harsh climate of an industrial suburb. He did not move towards them. Instead, he took confident steps across the platform, to the Southbound subway. To any outside observer—to me—it appeared as though he knew exactly what he was doing, exactly where he was going. He sat down in a seat a few feet away from mine, and took out his phone, his shoulders straight, his expression determined.
sorry something came up, can't make it.
Lol ur ugly anyways
He smirked, pocketing his phone. He was a lot of things, but ugly was not one of them. He was an amalgamation of his parents’ best features—his father’s sharp brow, his mother’s Grecian bone structure—the sort of cheekbones that would make most people seem gaunt—something he had been complimented on all his life. I would have done the same, had I not been confident that he would be less than receptive to my opinion.With only the two of us on board, the doors slid closed, leaving the concrete room of Vaughan Metropolitan behind.
highway 407
The girl stood at the next station, the scuffed toes of her mary janes grazing the abrasive yellow warning line sculpted onto the edge of the platform. She seemed to be about twenty, though she could also be sixteen or twenty-five. She had the sort of face one could project onto, a blank slate—though it was not currently visible. Her head was down, staring intently at her shoes. Either unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge the incoming train, she barely moved backwards as the subway’s lights slowly brightened the walls of the tunnel. She did not know how long she had waited, or if this was the first train to arrive. She did not realise she was the only person on the platform.She imagined, sometimes, slipping away with a crowd of students from the University, finding her way to a lecture hall large enough to hide in. She imagined herself being jostled by the crowd, led into an auditorium for a first-year level class about the basics of Political Science or gender in Ancient Greece. The professor would flip through the presentation, oblivious to her presence—just another student in a crowd of hundreds. There, in anonymity, she’d be free to think of life past the bleak grey landscape. She could pretend, for a moment, that there was a possibility of getting out of the dead-end town she had lived in her whole life. The low buzz of a projector, the quiet hum of the fluorescent lights. She had long wondered if there was any point in continuing to go into the city, if her compulsion to leave had clouded her judgement so monstrously she could no longer make rational decisions. It was true, walking in the proximity of the campus of the University evoked a sort of feeling she had been running from since she turned eighteen. She was not where she was supposed to be, she thought. She considered every missed opportunity, every time she shouldn’t have been afraid—she was always afraid. Would she have been better if she had gone there? Would she have liked who she was? She didn’t know. She didn’t think she could bear the answer.Things will all work out, her father used to say. Things will turn around. I love you.That day, he said nothing. The car was quiet, the only sound was old rock music droning out from the too-expensive speakers. She wanted to break the silence, to shatter the barrier between them like the time she fell through the ice as a child, when all that existed around her was overwhelming blackness and shaky breath. I would have died, she wanted to say, I would have jumped too if I knew things would have been like this. But she said nothing and her father said nothing and she got out of the car as quick as she could without slamming the door. She wanted to slam the door, really. She wanted to close it so hard that it dented the obnoxious red paint, she wanted it to fall off the hinges. She wanted to, she just wasn’t strong enough.Highway 407—in all its concrete illness—stood quietly against a backdrop of grey and green and the yellow of the highway markers. She wondered what the trees had looked like before its creation, if their spirits lingered behind to see what had been erected in their rightful place. She wondered if they saw the bleakness and hated it, or if she was simply projecting again. It was a nasty habit, one she had long attempted to shake—with little success.The previous night, when she had broken up with her boyfriend of four months over text, the thought occurred to her that she was worse than her father in nearly every aspect. He, at least, had the excuse of being unfeeling. She had none of that. She felt the guilt that pooled in her stomach, she just ignored it.She scraped her shoes on the harsh concrete of the parking lot, silently delighting in another mark on her mary janes’ once perfect exterior. Good, she thought. Lived in, scratched up. A mirror into her general sentiments; regardless of that, or maybe because of it, she was something less than she could be. It was easier…to blame him, to blame circumstance or God or the doctors, than it was to blame herself, or to think of her mother in the proper tense.In the morning of that day she stood beside the track, again considering what her mother had those years ago. The urge to jump down was a murmur rather than a scream, maybe because she was better, or maybe because she had gotten used to it. Untreated depression, they’d said. Their voices full of pity and sorrow and wary of her father standing morosely in the doorway. The view from the hospital window was a highway and fall leaves and the great expanse of Lake Ontario. Variety, she’d told her father, when they’d walked into her mother’s room. You get a little of everything.He had said nothing, and she looked out the window and wanted to drown. It was a passing fancy, a guaranteed failure. She would have faded with the pollution and the fish and the feeling that life had never been worth it at all, if it had ended this way, that at least her mother’s methods had a dramatic flair. It was easy to forget how sullied the water was when she was watching it from the sixteenth floor of a concrete monster, a looming shadow over the speeding cars and the children running along the rocky beach.She hated that her father wouldn’t look in the room, that she was the only one to hold her mother’s hand when she died. Not when she took her last breath, not when she passed away. When she DIED. The grief counsellor said it was important to say the word. She had to compensate for her father, who only referred to her mother in the present tense.On the subway platform, she reached up to touch her face, surprised to feel it wet to the touch. She hadn’t realized she was crying, she hadn’t prepared for that sort of emotional response. It wasn’t to her father’s silence, she knew that much. She had been ignored so many times that it no longer felt out of the ordinary; on the days when she reminded him too much of her mother he would simply act as though she did not exist. It used to make her feel sick, back when she thought of herself as nothing more than that same child begging for attention, begging to be heard and listened to. Now it just made her angry, a ferocious feeling she could not express without making him equally upset and everything considerably worse. It was important, her counsellor had said, not to think of herself as an extension of his pain, a physical embodiment of his grief. It was not her fault that she resembled her mother, it was not her fault that her father was never able to move on. She had told herself this enough times that the words no longer sounded real unless she said them aloud, unless she quantified them some way.I am not responsible for his grief.She spoke it to the dust below the tracks and the smiling face of the insurance advertisement and the vast expanse of space that would soon be filled by the incoming train. Her voice echoed back to her, mixing with the smell of stale concrete and the hope that she didn’t sound insane. Like mother, like daughter, she supposed. Maybe the sound of her own voice would make the tears stop, something akin to turning off a leaking faucet.She had once watched someone almost die at College Station, watched them sit down on the platform and dangle their legs off the edge. Embroidered on their grey sweatpants was the University logo and her first thought—idiotic, stupid thought—was that they must not be doing too awfully, because they had somewhere to be after this. That maybe their school association would protect them, even if that school had record levels of suicides and suicide attempts.She stepped onto the train, sitting down as quickly as possible. Her dark hair curtained her face, protecting her from some unknown force. Nothing to grow from, nothing to learn. Life wasn’t supposed to be the way it was, the way it had been. As the doors closed, she imagined it would be the last time she’d ever see Highway 407. It was a nice thought.
pioneer village
The truth is that if you give any self-respecting high school student an opportunity to skip class, they will. Neither of them had gone to school with the intention of going somewhere else, but it wasn’t as though they were entirely attached to the prospect of sitting through another lecture on the inner workings of the cell. Stupid, they both thought—though neither dared to articulate it, how desperate people can be to make things more than they are. They could not exist of skin and bone and blood, there had to be more. They could not be as they were, there had to be a reason for it.Their hands were intertwined as they stepped onto the subway car, a display of public affection and multi-coloured nail polish. The catalyst was one party out of a hundred drunken gatherings. Four, tipsy off of cheap wine and the feeling of freedom—Three’s eyes on hers from across the room, dark and intent. The lingering smell of lavender; the first time in a long time that neither felt they didn’t belong. Orange flavoured lip gloss. Sparkling water and bloated strawberries.Four was thirteen when she decided she could hear the subway. The low wheeze of breath when it pushed itself out of a station, the gasp just between the streets, the veins of the city underneath her feet. She loved the warmth, the breeze, however artificial. When walking in the city, she always walked over the metal grates; felt the metal breathe underneath her. It was a technological tightrope, a balancing act with no consequence or impact, something to teeter on.She pressed her manicured thumb to the pulse of the city and pushed down, waited for the bruise to form; for her mark to be made. She was not gentle, and in many instances she could be cruel—crueler than she meant. Three never seemed to mind, and for that Four loved her, loved her more than any jewellery she had ever owned, more than she loved her parents—however disappointed they had been, however empty it made her house feel. She didn’t feel the way she felt towards them with Three. Which was to be expected. It wasn’t the same, it would never be the same. She didn’t want to go to class today, she wanted to go to the art gallery and stare at the stupid mediaeval faces and compare Three to them. She was more beautiful than any of those men could have dreamed up. Four was confident in that assertion, in her knowledge that no painting could ever measure up to the way Three smiled and things fell into place and something felt different, better. Better than she felt before, better than the ache of loneliness and her brother’s voice in her head saying she would never be better than she was now, that the person she was was not worth knowing.The city whispered beneath her feet, the low rumble of an organism that happened to be alive, that was there whether it wanted to be or not. I do not think the city wanted to spread as it did, like a rock covered in moss, drenched in green. It kept growing, bigger and bigger as it got older, as times changed and people changed and the environment bent under the weight of a culture that always wanted more.It’s New York City, a taxi driver told me. He had been here 19 years and now was the most New York it had ever been, a city drenched in life and death and something in between, something that couldn’t be named, only felt.Three didn’t feel it. She had lived in the city since her tenth birthday, when her mother had won custody and the two of them had moved into a tiny apartment over a convenience store. The two of us are special, her mother said. We stick together, right?Right, Three had replied.She didn’t quite understand then what together meant, only that her mother needed her and she was happy to be needed. It became more clear as she got older, when her mother took the role of friend rather than parent and she realised that ‘special’ was code for dysfunctional. She learned to be independent, to sit at home waiting for her mother to come back to make sure she was safe, and how to cook without burning the tips of her fingers on the stove. When her father called—which was rare—and asked how her mother was doing—which was rarer—Three got the opportunity to practise her storytelling, to spin a tale so unrealistic that it couldn’t possibly be a lie.She’s dating a millionaire, she’d say.It would build off of whatever stupid thing she had told him last, something about how her mother had gotten a job as a tutor for a kid in Richmond Hill with a widowed father and a house full of empty rooms.See how much better she’s doing without you?Everyone’s a millionaire now, her father had said. He always seemed to be two sentences behind. That’s hardly impressive.Every morning, when she took the subway exactly three stops to get to school, she watched the mothers ushering their children into the car, pushing them out of it when it was time to get off. Every morning, she wondered what was so different about her. What made her relationship with her mother so special.That day, she had looked at the hollow of her empty apartment and wondered if she should ask Four to run away with her. They could sell some of Four’s jewellery, rent an apartment in a town by the ocean. They’d barely be able to afford a month of living alone, but she’d get a job and they’d get a cat and maybe her mother would finally wake up one day realise that what her daughter needed wasn’t a roommate, it was a parent.Probably not. It was the sort of thing you told yourself to fall asleep, a fantasy you would never attain. She told Four as much on their way to Biology, and Four had stopped in the middle of the hallway to stare at her.Let’s go, she said. Who the fuck is gonna stop us?For how long?Just today.Okay, Three said.She felt no connection to the city. It was simply a place she was forced to exist in, somewhere to live while her mother went out and her father forgot about her. All it represented was what she had to become to survive. She had no affection towards the city, but she loved the way Four came alive in it, the way her eyes seemed to glow when the subway lights illuminated the walls of the tunnel. When they got on, their fingers intertwined, she entertained the possibility of staying here a while longer, even after graduation. Maybe she didn’t need to run away. Maybe it wasn’t about escaping. Maybe it was about acceptance. As the doors closed behind them, it occurred to Three that she was not sure she could tell the difference.
york university
Congratulations.He hadn’t realised the number was still saved.It was one word, the most they had spoken in nearly a decade. He could not read the tone, or maybe he didn’t want to. In this case, sincerity might have been worse than sarcasm.
Thank you, he wrote. His thumb hovered over the send button.He deleted it and tried again.You aren’t d—He hated the message before he’d even finished typing it out, quickly reverting the text box to an empty bubble. He stared down at his phone, even after the screen went to sleep and he was left staring at his reflection in the black. It wouldn’t work, no matter how elegant his words, He knew it wouldn’t, knew before all this. He had tried to take charge of the feeling, to free himself from it. Over and over and over again. It didn’t matter. Abandonment festered, it worked its way into every aspect of yourself, every memory. It had manifested, most recently, in a pain just below his hairline. At first it was a dull throb, an ache he could ignore, another feeling he had to push aside, to box away and buckle down and power through. He had spent much of his early twenties on the fifth floor of the Reference Library, inhaling the stale smell of books that had not been touched in decades, utterly unaware of their own uselessness. There, he could bury himself, he could let the emotion go in a way he could not quite bring himself to follow through with. The plan—as it had always been—was to find a research position, pursue tenure. His new-found independence was an asset, something to be celebrated rather than mourned.He couldn’t go to the Reference Library anymore, something about optics and camera phones and too-open space. He wasn’t even really supposed to be on the subway, but he had taught a semi-successful guest lecture and decided to push his luck.You’re not that sort, his publicist had said, when he asked her what he needed to improve on, what part of him should be most hastily fixed. You’re above it, people don’t even bother trying to drag you down.He had nothing to say to that, no way of articulating how absolutely incorrect she was without sounding self-pitying, ungrateful.She took his silence as compliance, and gave him a quick once-over, considering. Maybe you should do something for your far-sightedness. Get rid of the glasses, get some contacts.He didn’t get rid of the glasses.At least, he hadn’t yet. He had only recently reached the recognizable stage of stardom, where being in a few indie features and one sleeper hit seemed to garner you a niche of people who knew who you were and didn’t hate you for it. Where you couldn’t tell if you were being stared at out of idle curiosity or recognition. He had never realized how piercing the stares of strangers could be. He rarely looked at other people when on public transit. Before, it was out of a sense of deference, not wanting to burst their bubble—whether that be calm or chaotic—he preferred to be ignored, so he did others the same courtesy. After, it was because he didn’t want to know he was being stared at. He wasn’t supposed to take the train anymore. He had the money to take a car, the convenience of wealth to cater to his every whim. He didn’t care.His agent had begged him not to take it, but it was a lost cause. He missed his aimless days, staring at the ceiling of One’s dorm room, listening to the sound of his heartbeat. He missed not having anywhere to be, anyone to disappoint. He did not think of their time together much anymore, he tried to cover the emotion with a schedule so busy that the only thing he did besides work was sleep, but he never quite got rid of that pressure. The subway was the one place where urgency loosened its grip, where he could pretend that he was still that aimless college student, sure that things would work out as they were supposed to.He should have looked. He shouldn’t have written off the sharp inhale of breath he heard as he got on as the wheeze of the train. If he had looked, he could have had a chance at self-preservation, he could have known better. It had made sense, at the time, to assume it was the subway’s exhale.There are people who carry their sadness in their body, whose very being seems to radiate sorrow. He wasn’t like that. You could look at him and see exactly what he wanted you to see. It was, perhaps, what made him such a compelling actor. Any emotion, no matter how rehearsed, would seem like a genuine outburst, a rare moment of feeling; something you were honoured to be privy to. There are people, I think, who feel so deeply that they become accustomed to hiding it.He grew up in an upper-class neighbourhood in the suburbs of Montreal, where his mother taught arithmetic and his father grew overpriced roses. When he was a child, he had thought all families were like this, supportive and loving and sometimes cold, but never uncaring. This, he thought, was what everyone strived for. A nice house and a job you liked and someone who loved you. As he had grown up, as the rose tint had faded, he had held onto those three things—the formula for a meaningful existence. He had one of those things. While it didn’t necessarily make him happy, it had to count for something. He had had, at one point, all three.He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, buried the feeling as deeply as possible, past the stretch of veins and bone and the memories he held too close at one time to ever forget. He did not look at the rest of the passengers. Maybe he should have. Maybe things would have been different. To be perfectly honest, I am not sure anything would have changed.In any case, he didn’t look.Doors are now closing.
finch west
He knew he could not outrun the subway. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t going to try. He had gone to bed at four that morning, after staring at the text for so long he had to go into his sister’s bathroom and steal her eye drops.not working. sorry.
did you mean to send this to your manager?
no.He didn’t respond. His father always said that the internet was ‘ripe’ for misunderstandings and his father was always right. Except when he wasn’t. Instead, he set an alarm for the mid-afternoon. He’d be awake by noon, at the time when he knew she was going into the city. He wasn’t able to get back to sleep for at least two hours, unable to stop himself from creating a list of reasons for her text in his head.1. She was kidnapped. This was the only way for her to tell him without arousing suspicion.(What if she was in some rando’s basement right now, and he was lying under his Looney Tunes duvet, doing nothing?)2. Last week, when they had watched The Lion King, he’d mentioned that Scar was his bisexual awakening. That could have been a deal-breaker. Not the bisexual thing—she already knew that. The Scar thing.(She’d laughed, though. He loved her laugh.)3.She’d found someone better. This was most likely.(Someone who could answer her questions, who wouldn’t let her down.)Last Friday, they had gotten milkshakes and drove down to the water to watch the geese from the safety of his car. He’d caught her sneaking glances at him. When he’d asked her what was wrong, she had shook her head.Would you rather drown or be burned alive? She’d tilted her head, waited for his response.Drown, I guess. Sometimes she asked questions he didn’t know how to answer. He had never really thought of it before. Cause at least you wouldn’t feel your skin burning. I think I’d rather my last conscious thought be fear than pain.Aren’t they the same thing, when it comes down to it? She shrugged. You know, the first time I ever heard about someone attempting suicide, it was a guy on the radio talking about how he lit himself on fire. I was like seven, my mom turned the volume down right after that so I didn’t hear the whole thing, but it still seems like overkill to me. If I was that desperate, I’d fill my pockets with rocks and walk into Lake Ontario.You would? Is this something you think about a lot?No, she’d said. No, not really. Sorry, I didn’t mean to get all intense.I don’t mind. You can tell me anything you want.Oh. Thank you. She’d looked away then, out at the horizon. Can you take me home now?He nearly tripped over the turnstile as he sprinted into the subway station, his worn-down high tops skidding on the tile floor. He’d parked his car in the nearest parking lot in the worst show of parking since his driver’s test, a barely passable attempt at symmetry. He didn’t care. There were other things to worry about. Namely: the almost empty subway he was about to miss. If she wasn’t on this one, she’d have been on the one before it–which meant that he’d have the whole ride into the city to decide what sort of grand gesture he could make once she went on break at work.He took the steps two at a time, moving as fast as he could without falling the rest of the way down. In front of him, the train sat, lonely. Across the station, a train to Vaughan arrived and departed, no acknowledgement of its companion on the parallel track. I wonder if I should have gotten off, joined a much larger group of people going back the way I had come. It would have turned out differently, surely. It was not as though I had anywhere to be. Still, something kept me tethered to my seat. I cannot explain the feeling—but if you’ve felt it, you will understand—of knowing you should be getting off the subway but watching your stop pass instead, unable to move from your spot. I did not get off at Finch West, though I likely should have. Instead, I watched a young man slide through the doors as they closed.For the first time, the girl with the smudged mascara looked away from the window, towards the doors. Something flashed in her dark brown eyes when she saw him—apprehension or excitement, maybe both. Before he could return her stare, she snapped her head back to the window, staring resolutely out at the darkness.In and out. In and out. In and…His attempt to catch his breath was thwarted by a movement out of the corner of his eye, the unique brown of her hair, the way each of her motions was always so grounded. In what, he couldn’t say. In something.He understood that her presence on the train left him with several options.1. He could ignore her. Play it cool, stride down the hallway like he hadn’t noticed her at all.(This was the sensible option.)2. He could make his grand gesture now. Sure, he hadn’t figured out the gesture yet. So what? He could still do it. It could still work.(This required more thinking than he had the strength for, as he was still trying to catch his breath.)3. He could sit down next to her and pretend like everything was fine. His sister frequently chided him for his inability to take things at face value. You don’t always have to make things more than they are, she’d told him. Sometimes things just happen because they happen and all you can do is accept it.(She was sixteen, why did she have things figured out? Why didn’t he?)In the end, with as much self-control as he could muster, he sat down beside her—shoulder to shoulder—and stared straight ahead, as if he had chosen this seat out of necessity, as if the train itself wasn’t almost completely empty.If he had been looking at anyone other than her, he would have seen the two highschoolers turn to each other.He’s hot, mouthed Four.Three rolled her eyes. He’s sweaty, she mouthed back.Four snorted, scooting nearer to her. Side by side, their knees occasionally brushed. Neither of them moved away. Five caught a glimpse of them from across the car. He hated the act of it, the sight of such closeness. The intimacy of friends who had known each other a long time—wrapping their arms around each other’s shoulders, the way neither pulled away from their casual touch. Jealousy spread like a forest fire, burning a hole in Five’s chest. He had never done that, why did he not take advantage of that closeness when he had it? When he was still someone worth loving? When was the last time someone had looked at him and moved closer rather than away?
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