One Last Stop

Biyu “Jane” Su is August’s main love interest and the mystery at the center of One Last Stop. August sees her as “[f]earsome and flirty and full of bad jokes, an incorrigible sweet tooth and a steel-toe boot as a last resort” (125). She left home when she was 18 because she didn’t feel like she fit there, and when she called from the road once, she was told not to come back. She moved across the US until she landed in New Orleans. She marched in protests and experienced anti-gay bias and racism, which were especially rampant in the 1970s. In New Orleans, she met August’s uncle, Augie, and began to feel like the city might have become her home. However, after seeing the way that the community responded to a fire set by an arsonist at a gay bar—an incident in which she believed Augie died—she decided to go to New York. However, Augie survived, making it to San Francisco and inviting Jane to return home. The night that she was set to depart, she jumped down near the rail to help one of her coworkers from Billy’s. When she did, she tripped and fell onto the third rail at the same moment that the New York blackout of 1977 hit, tethering her to the Q.

Jane comes off as very cool, and August never dreams that Jane could possibly return her feelings. However, after they start kissing “for research” so that Jane can remember her life in the past, August decides to reveal that she has feelings for Jane, who responds that she wasn’t sure whether August was interested in her. She helps August recognize the magic within her, just as August thinks of her as a hero.

Ultimately, after discovering that Jane is connected to the electricity of the Q line because of the 1977 blackout, August and her roommates work together to free her. Ending up in the present, Jane has to reckon with what it means to be from the past but also in the present. The novel ends with Jane and August departing for California to visit Jane’s parents. Jane confides that she’s thinking of going back to using her birth name, Biyu, reclaiming her identity as she starts a new chapter.

Niko is the first of August’s roommates that she meets. A part-time psychic and part-time bartender, Nico has “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” (2). He always seems to know things that he shouldn’t know, and throughout the novel, August increasingly believes in his abilities as a psychic. At first, she asks him for his help as a psychic because she’s completely thrown off by Jane’s presence on the Q once she realizes that Jane is from the 1970s. Niko is entirely willing to help August, so he hosts a séance with the rest of their roommates and Isaiah from across the hall. This altruism is characteristic of him, as he and Myla want to be August’s friends, which she didn’t initially expect. Their welcoming attitude helps her feel more at home.

Additionally, Niko is transgender, but this identity rightly factors little into his character development, as he notes that his family accepted both the fact that he is a boy and a psychic with little questioning. When August asks him, “[H]ow did you know?” she’s referring to his psychic abilities, but he assumes that she’s talking about his being transgender. She quickly tells him that wasn’t what she was asking, and he explains, “‘Whenever someone asks me personal questions, it’s always about being trans. That’s, like, so low on the list of the most interesting things about me. But it’s funny because the answer’s the same. I just always knew’” (185).

Finally, Niko’s decision to tell August that he knew she’d have a difficult journey ahead of her when she moved into their apartment marks an important point for August as a character. He apologizes for not revealing her future to her sooner, even if he wasn’t precisely sure what it entailed. However, August admits that she wouldn’t have changed anything, signaling that she has learned to have hope, even if everything doesn’t turn out the way she wants.

Niko’s girlfriend, Myla, is the second roommate that August meets. Myla is a “pretty Black girl with a friendly, round face and eyelashes for miles” (3). She graduated from Columbia with an engineering degree but decided to pursue art instead, a fact that amazes August because she’s constantly in fear of not being able to provide for herself financially. Myla is the type of person who just “drops into your life, fully formed, and just is. A friend in completion” (31). She immediately makes August feel at home in the apartment, helping her get a job at Billy’s and talking through all the nuances of August’s relationship with Jane—both in terms of the plans to get her out of the subway and in terms of August’s feelings for her. Additionally, Myla conceives the plan to use the Transit Power Control Center as a venue for the fundraiser so that they can access the Q’s electric line.