Free Subway Love by Nora Raleigh Baskin

long. Can’t move too soon.
    He had done the Pink Panther car. That was a hit. Some other writers, some dope writers like Snake131 and Lil Hawk, were still talking about it. But not his masterpiece; no, his masterpiece was still to come.
    It had to be just right. It would take all night and he would need a crew. The secret to life is good timing, and good timing might require warmer weather.
    IT was a month and a half before Laura returned to New York City again, to a rainy, cold January. There had been flurries when she left Kingston. Here it was freezing rain. Only a few people stood on the platform. Laura read the wall behind her while she waited. It was covered with graffiti, messages left in response to other messages, different handwriting, who knew how far apart in time.
    Beatniks are worthless.
    (and underneath)
    Your attitude is worthless.
    (underneath)
    Beatniks have been extinct since 1960. Where have you been?
    (underneath)
    Beat the draft.
    To beat is cool.
    To beat-cool is not to be beat.
    To beat-cool and not to be beat is nowhere.
    Laura wondered if it made sense to anyone. She only vaguely knew what Beatniks were, precursors to the hippies, the Beat Generation, underground and nonconformist. Laura wondered how long ago these messages had been written, if the people who wrote them ever came back to see the responses.
    She hadn’t stopped thinking about him, about Jonas, but she’d tried. She’d imagined so many stories, about how the boy had called her father’s apartment while she was away. She didn’t talk to her dad between visits, but in her fantasy he called their house in Woodstock, about some issue or another, and then casually mentioned that some boy had called looking for her.
    Jacob, Jeremy?
    Jonas?
    Yeah, that was it. He called and explained he had wanted to call over the weekend but had gotten run over by a taxi. . . . No, that was no good. . . . No matter what story she came up with, nothing really worked. If a boy wants to call you, he calls. So when Laura looked up and saw Jonas Goldman walking into the subway car, she was over him. Done. Finished. She lowered her eyes and hoped he hadn’t noticed that she had seen him.
    “Laura?”
    He said it again before she raised her head slightly.
    “I tried calling you and calling you. I think you gave me the wrong number.” He sat down right beside her. He was wearing an odd jacket, some strange kind of woolly material she had never seen before. He had no umbrella, but he was the only person on the train who wasn’t wet at all.
Wrong number.
Laura shifted away slightly. Her intuition was right; he was bad news, but then again, he looked so sweet, earnest, without guile.
    “I must have called a million times.”
    And he didn’t seem to mind looking eager. Most boys wouldn’t have admitted that. Unless he was lying, that is.
    “No, I didn’t give you the wrong number. I gave you my dad’s. You never called.”
    Laura realized that, to a degree, she had just given herself away — let him know that she had noticed he hadn’t called; she had been waiting, and she probably let him hear her disappointment.
    “I even checked my phone line,” Laura said. “About a hundred times.” She laughed. Somehow with this boy it didn’t matter.
    “Well, don’t you have a cell phone?”
    “What’s that?”
    Jonas made a face that Laura couldn’t interpret.
    “I guess you don’t,” he said. “Maybe I could just sit and talk to you? Wanna go to a Starbucks or something?”
    She didn’t want to do it again, look stupid, let on that she had no idea what he was talking about.
    Her mouth opened but nothing came out.
    “Coffee?” he asked.
    So she answered, “Sure.”
    IT was just too crazy. It wasn’t like everyone had poured out of the subway car and they’d simply lost track of each other in the throng. It was weirder than that. Jonas just disappeared. The doors opened. Jonas actually held out his arm to let Laura go first. She stepped onto