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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.
“Well,” August says. “He’s a shit.”
“He’s a shit,” her mom agrees, nodding gravely. “How ’bout the new roommates?”
“Fine. I mean, kind of weird. One of them claims to be a psychic. But I don’t think they’re, like, serial killers.”
She hums, only half-listening. “Remember the rules. Number one—”
“Us versus everyone.”
“And number two—”
“If they’re gonna kill you, get their DNA under your fingernails.”
“Thatta girl,” she says. “Listen, I gotta go, I just opened this shipment of public records, and it’s gonna take me all weekend. Be safe, okay? And call me tomorrow.”
The moment they hang up, the room is unbearably quiet.
If August’s life were a movie, the soundtrack would be the low sounds of her mom, the clickity-clacking of her keyboard, or quiet mumbling as she searches for a document. Even when August quit helping with the case, when she moved out and mostly heard it over the phone, it was constant. A couple of thousand miles away, it’s like someone finally cut the score.
There’s a lot they have in common—maxed-out library cards, perpetual singlehood, affinity for Crystal Hot Sauce, encyclopedic knowledge of NOPD missing persons protocol. But the big difference between August and her mother? Suzette Landry hoards like nuclear winter is coming, and August very intentionally owns almost nothing.
She has five boxes. Five entire cardboard boxes to show for her life at twenty-three. Living like she’s on the run from the fucking FBI. Normal stuff.
She slides the last one into an empty corner, so they’re not cluttered together.
At the bottom of her purse, past her wallet and notepads and spare phone battery, is her pocketknife. The handle’s shaped like a fish, with a faded pink sticker in the shape of a heart, stuck on when she was seven—around the time she learned how to use it. Once she’s slashed the boxes open, her things settle into neat little stacks.
