Subway Love by Nora Raleigh Baskin

it.
    “So, then, who survives?” she asked.
    “Well, not the strongest,” Max said.
    He wanted to help her. Really, he did. She was a searcher. He liked searchers. A truth seeker, like he was. You don’t find them every day. But shit, she was really obsessed with the Holocaust. And she wasn’t even Jewish. But she felt it, he knew. He could see it in her eyes. She was a seeker. And he wanted to help.
    “The survivors were the ones with imagination,” he told her. “They were the ones that never stopped believing.”
    She looked like she was buying it. Hell, it sounded pretty damn good, if he must say so himself. “Strength has nothing to do with it,” he went on. “It was weakness. Weakness for food, and pretty clothes, parties, for the good old times, for love. It was the ones that could still dream. They were the survivors.”
    “For love?”
    “Yeah, for love. Survivors are the artists, the painters, the writers,” Max went on. “The dancers, the poets. The ones who can live in their minds while the rest of the world is falling apart.”
    They were on their way back again, after riding uptown to the very last stop, traveling in an unbroken line to Midtown, where she belonged.
    “This is your stop,” Max told her. Fifty-ninth Street. She’d figure it out from here.
    “Well, I guess I should get off,” she told him. She reached for her bag beside her.
    “Sorry I couldn’t help you find him,” Max said.
    “That’s OK.”
    And then, wouldn’t you know it, when the train stopped, that white boy was waiting for her, right there.
    A goddamn fucking miracle, if you asked Max.

THE goal, of course, was to get a name for yourself. That’s what
getting up
meant. A writer who has hundreds,
thousands,
of throw-ups, who has his name everywhere, all over a certain train line, is considered king of that line. But Max wanted more than that. He wanted to paint his masterpiece. He wanted people to talk about his work for years to come. He wanted them to remember him, not just for his name, but for his style.
    In the future, they would write books and make movies about him. He had the talent, everybody knew that. He had already transformed the art of graffiti writing. When he first started, the lines were messy and flat, boring. Max had been the first one to move into 3-D, then into bubble style, filling in with fading colors. Practically no one was doing the fade when he started. Now, of course, you see it everywhere, but he was one of the first. Or so he said.
    At the Writers’ Corners, the one on 149th, they all wanted his tag in their black book. He was going to be famous and everyone knew it. He just needed to do something big, a whole car, end to end. He was almost ready. The weather was getting warmer, but not too warm. The 6 train was his target. He knew the route by heart. The One Tunnel was the ultimate layup. He had enough paint. The time was now, before he turned sixteen and could get in real trouble.
    The MTA was all geared up about this new World Trade Center, but Spike was going to take the headlines; his burner would pull right into that station for the opening ceremonies next week.
    It was going to be magnificent, and no one would ever forget.
    JONAS woke up to his mother’s crying. He slipped out of bed and knocked on her door as softly as he could, soft enough not to wake Lily but loud enough to be heard over her wretched sobbing.
    Jonas heard his mother reach for a tissue, blow her nose, and pretend to be pretending nothing was wrong. “What is it, sweetie?”
    “Mom, can I come in?” Jonas said through the door, although there was nothing he wanted to see less than his mother’s blotchy, wet, swollen face. He didn’t really want to see his mother in her bed. Before his dad left, his mother had never stayed in bed this long. Jonas had probably never been up before his mother in sixteen years. Now it was a daily occurrence.
    “Certainly.” She was wiping her face and pulling up the