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.
By the radiator: two pairs of boots, three pairs of socks. Six shirts, two sweaters, three pairs of jeans, two skirts. One pair of white Vans—those are special, a reward she bought herself last year, buzzed off adrenaline and mozzarella sticks from the Applebee’s where she came out to her mom.
By the wall with the crack down the middle: the one physical book she owns—a vintage crime novel—beside her tablet containing her hundreds of other books. Maybe thousands. She’s not sure. It stresses her out to think about having that many of anything.
In the corner that smells of sage and maybe, faintly, a hundred frogs she’s been assured died of natural causes: one framed photo of an old washateria on Chartres, one Bic lighter, and an accompanying candle. She folds her knife up, sets it down, and places a sign that says PERSONAL EFFECTS over it in her head.
She’s shaking out her air mattress when she hears someone unsticking the front door from the jamb, a violent skittering following like somebody’s bowled an enormous furry spider down the hallway. It crashes into a wall, and then what can only be described as a soot sprite from Spirited Away comes shooting into August’s room.
“Noodles!” calls Niko, and then he’s in the doorway. There’s a leash hanging from his hand and an apologetic expression from his angular features.
“I thought you said he was a ghost in the night,” August says. Noodles is snuffling through her socks, tail a blur, until he realizes there’s a new person and launches himself at her.
“He is,” Niko says with a wince. “I mean, kind of. Sometimes, I feel bad and take him to work with me at the shop during the day. I guess we didn’t mention his, uh—” Noodles