ONE LAST STOP

Casey McQuiston is the New York Times bestselling author of Red, White & Royal Blue, as well as a pie enthusiast. She writes books about smart people with bad manners falling in love. Born and raised in southern Louisiana, she now lives in New York City with her poodle mix and personal assistant, Pepper.

“[A] a moving look at the strength of true love even when faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles.” – Kirkus

“McQuiston’s joyful sophomore romp mixes all the elements that made Red, White & Royal Blue so outstanding—quirky characters, coming-of-age confusion, laugh-out-loud narration, and hilarious pop-cultural references—into something totally its own…With all the fun and camp of a drag show (of which this novel features more than one) but grounded in the tenderness of first love, this time-slip rom-com is an absolute delight.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“This delightful love story is everything you need for a feel-good day of beach reading.” – Elle, “The 55 Most Anticipated Books Of 2021”

“A dazzling romance, filled with plenty of humor and heart.” – Time, “The 21 Most Anticipated Books of 2021”

“To say that Casey McQuiston’s latest novel is so electrifyingly fun and swoon-worthy that you’ll miss your subway stop while reading it is probably a little on the nose, but whatever. …One Last Stop is a heart-thawing ode to the impossible magic of New York, and will even leave you feeling somehow wistful for the MTA (yes, really).” – Oprahmag.com, ’32 LGBTQ Books That Will Change the Literary Landscape in 2021′

“Dreamy, other worldly, smart, swoony, thoughtful, hilarious – all in all, exactly what you’d expect from Casey McQuiston!” – Jasmine Guillory, New York Times bestselling author of The Wedding Date and Party for Two

“A breathtaking love story, filled with heart, yearning, coming of age, and the most wonderful found family. Honest, often humorous, always relevant, McQuiston’s writing reads like poetry. One Last Stop is meant to be savored slowly.” – Helen Hoang, USA Today bestselling author of The Kiss Quotient and The Heart Principle

“Casey McQuiston once again creates a world you don’t want to leave, filled with a vibrant cast of queer characters and a couple you root for from the beginning. Casey’s writing is so good it seems only natural to be jealous, but I can’t bring myself to be anything but glad readers get to enjoy their work.” – Meryl Wilsner, author of Something to Talk About

1. Discuss the theme of found family and its importance to August’s growth arc. What moment to you was pivotal to her opening up and ultimately allowed her to fall wholeheartedly  in love with Jane? Why?

2. In her search to find out who Jane is, August studies 1970s history, with an emphasis on LGBTQ+ history. How does  this inform August’s understanding of Jane? What will the past Jane lived in mean for their future together?

3. What are some differences and similarities between Jane and August, and how do these things ultimately bring them closer together?

4. Aside from August and Jane, there are several other romantic  relationships in the novel. Myla and Niko. Wes and Isaiah. Lucie and Winfield. Which is your favorite, and how do  you see their love story playing out after the events of One  Last Stop?

5. August willfully creates distance, geographical and emotional, from her mother. How is this important to August’s growth, and in what ways does it actually allow her to grow closer to  her mother?

6. August’s mother has stopped living her life because of her obsession with her brother’s case, but August starts living  her life because of her obsession with Jane’s case. Why do you think that is?

7. Would Jane and August still have sparked a connection without Augie linking them together? Discuss.

8. Jane and August have to spend the bulk of their courtship  on the New York City subway. In what ways does this restriction help them create emotional intimacy instead of hinder it?

9. August claims she doesn’t believe in much, but she felt big emotions when she first watched Say Anything and saw John Cusack hold up a boom box playing Peter Gabriel’s “In  Your Eyes” during a grand gesture. What is a film or novel  that made you want to believe in big, epic love, and why?

10. McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue and One Last Stop are  both larger-than-life, high-stakes romances. In what ways did you connect to these stories, and did you learn anything  about yourself through them?

1

Taped to a trash can inside the Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen at the corner of Parkside and Flatbush Avenues.

SEEKING YOUNG SINGLE ROOMMATE FOR 3BR APARTMENT UPSTAIRS, 6TH FLOOR. $700/MO. MUST BE QUEER & TRANS FRIENDLY. MUST NOT BE AFRAID OF FIRE OR DOGS. NO LIBRAS, WE ALREADY HAVE ONE. CALL NIKO.

“Can I touch you?”

That’s the first thing the guy with the tattoos says when August settles onto the rubbed-off center cushion of the brown leather couch—a flaking hand-me-down number that’s been a recurring character the past four and a half years of college. The type you crash on, bury under textbooks, or sit on while sipping flat Coke and speaking to no one at a party. The quintessential early twenties trash couch.

Most of the furniture is as trash as the trash couch, mismatched and thrifted and hauled in off the street. But when Tattoo Boy—Niko, the flyer said his name was Niko—sits across from her, it’s in a startlingly high-end Eames chair.

The place is like that: a mix of familiar and very much not familiar. Small and cramped, offensive shades of green and yellow on the walls. Plants dangling off almost every surface, spindly arms reaching across shelves, a faint smell of soil. The windows are the same painted-shut frames of old apartments in New Orleans, but these are half covered with pages of drawings, afternoon light filtering through, muted and waxy.

There’s a five-foot-tall sculpture of Judy Garland made from bicycle parts and marshmallow Peeps in the corner. It’s not recognizable as Judy, except for the sign that says: HELLO MY NAME IS JUDY GARLAND.

Niko looks at August, hand held out, blurry in the steam from his tea. He’s got this black-on-black greaser thing going on, a dark undercut against light brown skin and a confident jaw, a single crystal dangling from one ear. Tattoos spill down both his arms and lick up his throat from beneath his buttoned-up collar. His voice is a little croaky, like the back end of a cold, and he’s got a toothpick in one corner of his mouth.

Okay, Danny Zuko, calm down.

“Sorry, uh.” August stares, stuck on his question. “What?”

“Not in a weird way,” he says. The tattoo on the back of his hand is a Ouija planchette. His knuckles say FULL MOON. Good lord. “Just want to get your vibe. Sometimes physical contact helps.”

“What, are you a—?”

“A psychic, yeah,” he says matter-of-factly. The toothpick rolls down the white line of his teeth when he grins, wide and disarming. “Or that’s one word for it. Clairvoyant, gifted, spiritist, whatever.”

Jesus. Of course. There was no way a $700-a-month room in Brooklyn was going to come without a catch, and the catch is marshmallow Judy Garland and this refurbished Springsteen who’s probably about to tell her she’s got her aura on inside out and backward like Dollar Tree pantyhose.

But she’s got nowhere to go, and there’s a Popeyes on the first floor of the building. August Landry does not trust people, but she trusts fried chicken.

She lets Niko touch her hand.

“Cool,” he says tonelessly, like he’s stuck his head out the window to check the weather. He taps two fingers on the back of her knuckles and sits back. “Oh. Oh wow, okay. That’s interesting.”

August blinks. “What?”

He takes the toothpick out of his mouth and sets it on the steamer trunk between them, next to a bowl of gumballs. He’s got a constipated look on his face.

“You like lilies?” he says. “Yeah, I’ll get some lilies for your move-in day. Does Thursday work for you? Myla’s gonna need some time to clear her stuff out. She has a lot of bones.”

“I—what, like, in her body?”

“No, frog bones. Really tiny. Hard to pick up. Gotta use tweezers.” He must notice the look on August’s face. “Oh, she’s a sculptor. It’s for a piece. It’s her room you’re taking. Don’t worry, I’ll sage it.”

“Uh, I wasn’t worried about … frog ghosts?” Should she be worried about frog ghosts? Maybe this Myla person is a ritualistic frog murderer.

“Niko, stop telling people about frog ghosts,” says a voice down the hall. A pretty Black girl with a friendly, round face and eyelashes for miles is leaning out of a doorway, a pair of goggles shoved up into her dark curls. She smiles when she sees August. “Hi, I’m Myla.”

“August.”

“We found our girl,” Niko says. “She likes lilies.”

August hates when people like him do things like that. Lucky guesses. She does like lilies. She can pull up a whole Wikipedia page in her head: lilium candidum. Grows two to six feet tall. Studied diligently from the window of her mom’s two-bedroom apartment.

There’s no way Niko should know—no way he does. Just like she does with palm readers under beach umbrellas back home in Jackson Square, she holds her breath and brushes straight past.

“So that’s it?” she says. “I got the room? You, uh, you didn’t even ask me any questions.”

He leans his head on his hand. “What time were you born?”

“I … don’t know?” Remembering the flyer, she adds, “I think I’m a Virgo, if that helps.”

“Oh, yeah, definitely a Virgo.”

She manages to keep her face impartial. “Are you … a professional psychic? Like people pay you?”

“He’s part-time,” Myla says. She floats into the room, graceful for someone with a blowtorch in one hand, and drops into the chair next to his. The wad of pink bubblegum she’s chewing explains the bowl of gumballs. “And part-time very terrible bartender.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“Sure you’re not,” she says, planting a kiss on his cheek. She stage-whispers to August, “He thought a paloma was a kind of tumor.”

While they’re bickering about Niko’s bartending skills, August sneaks a gumball out of the bowl and drops it to test a theory about the floor. As suspected, it rolls off through the kitchen and into the hallway.

She clears her throat. “So y’all are—?”

“Together, yeah,” Myla says. “Four years. It was nice to have our own rooms, but none of us are doing so hot financially, so I’m moving into his.”

“And the third roommate is?”

“Wes. That’s his room at the end of the hall,” she says. “He’s mostly nocturnal.”

“Those are his,” Niko says, pointing at the drawings in the windows. “He’s a tattoo artist.”

“Okay,” August says. “So it’s $2,800 total? $700 each?”

“Yep.”

“And the flyer said something about … fire?”

Myla gives her blowtorch a friendly squeeze. “Controlled fire.”

“And dogs?”

“Wes has one,” Niko puts in. “A little poodle named Noodles.”

“Noodles the poodle?”

“He’s on Wes’s sleep schedule, though. So, a ghost in the night.”

“Anything else I should know?”

Myla and Niko exchange a look.

“Like three times a day the fridge makes this noise like a skeleton trying to eat a bag of quarters, but we’re pretty sure it’s fine,” Niko says.

“One of the laminate tiles in the kitchen isn’t really stuck down anymore, so we all just kind of kick it around the room,” Myla adds.

“The guy across the hall is a drag queen, and sometimes he practices his numbers in the middle of the night, so if you hear Patti LaBelle, that’s why.”

“The hot water takes twenty minutes to get going, but ten if you’re nice.”

“It’s not haunted, but it’s like, not not haunted.”

Myla smacks her gum. “That’s it.”

August swallows. “Okay.”

She weighs her options, watching Niko slip his fingers into the pocket of Myla’s paint-stained overalls, and wonders what Niko saw when he touched the back of her hand, or thought he saw. Pretended to see.

And does she want to live with a couple? A couple that is one half fake psychic who looks like he fronts an Arctic Monkeys cover band and one half firestarter with a room full of dead frogs? No.

But Brooklyn College’s spring semester starts in a week, and she can’t deal with trying to find a place and a job once classes pick up.

Turns out, for a girl who carries a knife because she’d rather be anything but unprepared, August did not plan her move to New York very well.

“Okay?” Myla says. “Okay what?”

“Okay,” August repeats. “I’m in.”

* * *

In the end, August was always going to say yes to this apartment, because she grew up in one smaller and uglier and filled with even weirder things.

“It looks nice!” her mom says over FaceTime, propped on the windowsill.

“You’re only saying that because this one has wood floors and not that nightmare carpet from the Idlewild place.”

“That place wasn’t so bad!” she says, buried in a box of files. Her buggy glasses slide down her nose, and she pushes them up with the business end of a highlighter, leaving a yellow streak. “It gave us nine great years. And carpet can hide a multitude of sins.”

August rolls her eyes, pushing a box across the room. The Idlewild apartment was a two-bedroom shithole half an hour outside of New Orleans, the kind of suburban built-in-the-’70s dump that doesn’t even have the charm or character of being in the city.

She can still picture the carpet in the tiny gaps of the obstacle course of towering piles of old magazines and teetering file boxes. Double Dare 2000: Single Mom Edition. It was an unforgivable shade of grimy beige, just like the walls, in the spaces that weren’t plastered with maps and bulletin boards and ripped-out phonebook pages, and—

Yeah, this place isn’t so bad.

“Did you talk to Detective Primeaux today?” August asks. It’s the first Friday of the month, so she knows the answer.

“Yeah, nothing new,” she says. “He doesn’t even try to act like he’s gonna open the case back up anymore. Goddamn shame.”

August pushes another box into a different corner, this one near the radiator puffing warmth into the January freeze. Closer to the windowsill, she can see her mom better, their shared mousy-brown hair frizzing into her face. Under it, the same round face and big green bush baby eyes as August’s, the same angular hands as she thumbs through papers. Her mom looks exhausted. She always looks exhausted.

Copyright © 2021 by Casey McQuiston