Literature / One Last Stop

"That's the way it happens on the subway—you lock eyes with someone, you imagine a life from one stop to the next, and you go back to your day as if the person you loved in between doesn't exist anywhere but on that train."

August Landry leads an unhappy life. She's recently moved into a run-down New York City apartment with a couple of oddball roommates, juggling waiting tables at an old Greasy Spoon with what little of her school life that she bothers to tend to. She's determined to leave her checkered past behind and withdraw into mawkish cynicism, and the Big Apple seems like just the place to do it. However, there is one significant bright spot in her new life: Jane Su, a cool, confident girl who she meets on the Q Train on her subway commute, with whom August is instantly smitten.

But there's this peculiar trait about Jane that August discovers by chance: she's time-displaced from The '70s, bound to the subway and unable to get off of it, not having aged at all for the past forty-five years, and remembering nothing of her former life. It's up to August and her gaggle of new friends to figure out what's wrong with Jane, how she got into this pickle, and, if possible, free her from this curse.

And so begins One Last Stop, a Queer Romance novel written by Casey McQuiston of Red, White & Royal Blue fame, published in 2021.

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Tropes found in One Last Stop include:

• The Ageless: Jane hasn't aged a day since she was first bound to the Q Train.
• invokedAngst? What Angst?: In-universe, August notes that Jane had adjusted well to being flung forty-five years out of her time, and bound to the Q Train indefinitely. However, Jane confesses to her that she didn't even notice that anything was wrong until she met August. After months of August visiting and slowly recovering her memories, Jane eventually does start to feel the weight of her situation and has a breakdown. August had been expecting it since Jane had until then been "shockingly casual about her entire existential predicament."
• The Big Rotten Apple: Discussed early on. August moved to the Big Apple because she thought that its grimy streets, worn-down buildings, and tough, world-weary inhabitants would complement her cautious, cynical outlook on life, like no other city had before. It did, for a while, until she met genuinely friendly people like her roommates, her neighbors, her coworkers, and Jane.
• Chekhov's Gun: Two big ones - the early hints that August's grandparents have money, and the envelope of papers that Suzette sends her about Augie in New York, which she barely looks at.
• Cluster F-Bomb: McQuiston's narration is riven with swear words, sometimes as often as once every tenth sentence.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: After August discovers that her schooling is almost finished, she panics about having little in the way of practical skills with which she could line up and hold down a job.
• Disappeared Dad: August never had a father in her family, and mentions that her mother merely had an unknown sperm donor instead.
• The Drifter: Pre-Q Jane spent her years hitchhiking across the USA, and left one city for another whenever staying there became more trouble than it was worth:
  Jane: But everywhere I went, someone hated me. And then there were other girls who were like me, who... I don't know, they were stronger than me, or more patient. They'd stay and build bridges. Or at least try. I wasn't a builder. I wasn't a leader. I was a fighter. I cooked people dinner. I took them to the hospital. I stitched them up. But I only stayed long enough to take the good, and I always left when the bad got bad.
• Endearingly Dorky: Jane assures August that she finds her nerdier tendencies cute when August is mortified after Jane mentions that she knows about August's private "sex notebook", which she updates after every time they sleep together with whatever she finds Jane likes during sex.
  Jane: No, it's cute! You're such a nerd. It's endearing!
• Epigraph: Chapters begin with various brief logs relating to Jane, often either a newspaper blurb or a classified advertisement from various people who've crossed paths with her. However, most of them are dated decades ago despite featuring descriptions of Jane that're no different from her in the present day, and are thus the first things to clue the reader in to the fact that Jane is far from an ordinary human. After that point, though, they're merely anecdotes of Jane's life before and during her stay on the Q Train.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Jane was originally from 1976, but was ferried through time on the Q Train to the year 2021.
• Freudian Slip: In Chapter 2, when August meets Jane for the second time on the Q Train:
  August's brain tries "hi" and her mouth goes for "morning" and what comes out is, "Horny."
• Gender-Blender Name: August is called after her uncle; Niko could also be a boy or girl's name.
• Generation Xerox: August looks just like her mom, and they share a talent for the unglamorous side of detective work: Suzette may not have found Uncle Augie in all these years, but August mentions she's helped clear up three unrelated cold cases. August eventually decides that her life's work is finding lost people, too.
• Happily Adopted: Myla is Ghanian by birth but was adopted by a Chinese couple, and mentions that her mother once tried to cook a Ghanian dish to help her little girl feel closer to her heritage.
• Identity Amnesia: Jane can't remember anything about her life before being bound to the Q Train, and only knows that her name is Jane Su because it was printed on the inside of her jacket. It's up to August to try to jog her memory of her life with an assortment of items, such as a specific bagel/coffee order.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: August's mother has been on a frantic search for her missing older brother for all of her daughter's life, until August decided that she didn't want her life to be defined by a wild goose chase after somebody who she's never known. This makes her cross about missing out on the simple joy of a close-knit family life, like Myla's family.
• Invisible to Normals: Downplayed. When Myla boards the Q Train by herself, Jane never appears to her, but she meets Jane later when August is in tow.
• Like a Duck Takes to Water: Jane has little difficulty adjusting to smartphone use after August bequeaths her her burner phone. However, she still bookends her texts with proper greetings and sign-offs, like a handwritten letter, something that August doesn't have the heart to dissuade her from doing.
• Limited Wardrobe: Jane only ever wears her leather jacket, white tee, jeans, and red canvas sneakers.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: In Chapter 9, August and Jane have sex on the Q Train in the dead of night.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Jane's real name is Biyu, and she got her better-known name from a burger bar called Drunk Jane's that she briefly worked at, until the name Jane stuck.
• Parents as People: August has a strained relationship with her mother because Suzette's obsession with solving her missing brother's case lead her to neglect August's wellbeing her entire life. It comes to a head when August learns her mother kept them in Perpetual Poverty to keep funding the investigation, while simultaneously keeping August from seeing her grandparents who wanted to meet her and were funding her school tuition because of how they treated her uncle. August is so furious she was denied a normal life and familial connection that she cuts her mother off for several months.
• Punny Name: Annie Depressant and Sarah Tonin, two drag queens who live near August and company.
• Really Gets Around: As August helps Jane rediscover her memories, it becomes apparent that the latter had kissed over a dozen girls back in the '70s.
• The Reveal: August first realizes that something's amiss with Jane when she sees the girl from the Q Train in a photograph at Billy's, dated to 1976.
• The Runaway: A very young Jane was convinced to run away from home, and the family restaurant job that awaited her, after being enthralled by a seventh-rate punk band that played at the restaurant. While there was little good that could have been said about them, they showed her that there was more to the world than her stifling restaurant life.
• Saving the Orphanage: Pancake Billy's is under threat from raised rents, imperilling several characters' jobs - and also the one "unchanged" place since Jane's time-slip. The friends organise a fundraiser: which provides a cover for their "time heist" to try to rescue Jane from the Q.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Initially, August frantically tries to downplay her attraction to Jane, even before, during, and after The Big Damn Kiss, trying to justify it to herself as just another thing to jog Jane's memories of her former life.
• Sherlock Scan: Owing to her mother dragging her along on the search for her brother before she could walk, August has a knack for analyzing people and figuring out minute details about them from only a few visual cues.
• Shipper on Deck: Myla constantly prods August about her attraction to Jane, which August initially brushes off.
• Shout-Out:
  • When August notes to her roommates the absurdity of Jane's predicament, one of them name-drops 50 First Dates, prompting August to claim that She Is Not My Girlfriend.
  • On first meeting Niko, August remarks that he looks like the frontman for an Arctic Monkeys cover band.
  • One of the things to jog Jane's memory of her former life is The Chi-Lites' "Oh, Girl".
  • Myla mentions A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court when discussing Jane's being unmoored from the '70s.
  • Myla's room is stocked with Dune merchandise.
  • When Jane socks August in the nose after the latter snuck up on her, August compares her to Jason Bourne, only for Jane to say that she doesn't know who he is.
  • Niko also mentions Quantum Leap, which turns out to be quite apposite: judging by the news snippets and missed connections, Jane has travelled through time standing up for underdogs and making life better for people however she can. And her memory is "swiss-cheesed" in a similar way.
  • The hint that cynical August is a romantic at heart? Her favourite movie is Say Anything....
  • In Chapter 1, August remarks to herself how Billy's has an indescribable "New Yorkness"-type quality to it, comparing it to Monk's Café from Seinfeld.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: In Chapter 2, when August is awestruck at seeing Jane for the second time:
  "August absolutely, definitely, is not picturing Subway Girl just as delighted and fond across the table on a third date. And she's certainly not the type of person to sit on a train with someone whose nae she doesn't know and imagine her assembling an Ikea bed frame. Everything is completely under control."
• Take That!:
  • From Chapter 3, when August spills her life story to Myla:
    Myla: Anyway, [your mother having commandeered your young life] sucks. I'm your mom now. The rules are, no Tarantino movies and bedtime is never.
  • From Chapter 7, when Wes' friend Isaiah helps move some furniture of August's to her apartment:
    August: Hey, do you mind if we put the radio on?
    Isaiah: God, please. If I have to listen to Bon Iver for another block, I'm gonna drive into a telephone pole.
• Weirdness Censor: In Chapter 6, when August tries to determine if there's any station that Jane can get off at without magically teleporting back onto the train, none of the other subway-goers seem to bat an eye at Jane rematerializing in front of them.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Discussed. Jane did feel this, and that her family were better off without her, but just before she disappeared in 1977 had decided to go back to see them. The book ends with her leaving with August to find them, with an open mind about what may happen.

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