Banshee | $crim

5. Gorgon

The day before Mabel and I were due to leave for Texas, Mabel was the worst I'd ever see her. She had been sick for days, only leaving the house to see her dealer. I'd insisted she not use on the drive to Texas, mostly out of fear of it making us a target to the police, so she started detoxing the day before.

"I can't do it," she moaned as I pressed a cold rag on her forehead.

"I'll see if Scrim can hold off for a few days," I said, holding back her hair.

"No, Penny," she whined. "I can't do it at all. Look, my dad is going to hire that fancy lawyer from the billboards. He said he can get most of the charges dropped and get me out of the informant stuff."

On one hand, she didn't need to worry about me; taking down Scrim was no problem. But I didn't want to go to El Paso alone and I worried she would snitch on me to help herself. I couldn't say I wouldn't do the same if I was in her place.

There wasn't much time to stew in my thoughts. Audra, a "normal" friend of mine, texted me that she was standing at the front door. She immediately pulled me into a hug.

Audra moved with me to New Orleans from our hometown of Magdalene. She was always nice to me back home, even when things were rough. Audra had always been a true friend to me, even staying with me in a waiting room of a detox center until I could be admitted while I cried and shook from the pain.

Magdalene is a small town (if it can even be called that) of about 300 people. My house sat on the shore of the water, a dock extending from our backyard to where the family planeboat sat, untouched for years. Like many of the townsfolk, my grandparents before me were fishermen for generations. My great-great-grandfather opened a bait store in the center of the town, the best one for miles. My uncles still run the shop but gave up caring for the house a long time ago. This became especially true after Katrina ruined a lot of the town.

Audra didn't live too far from me, just a stone's throw away, so we usually had sleepovers together or ran errands in town together.

When we turned eighteen, we decided to move to New Orleans together. Things didn't go as planned when I got into drugs and partying and she went to college and didn't even like drinking. I missed her graduation last year because I was too strung out to know what day it was. But, like always, she forgave me.

"I've been so worried about you," Audra said as she let go of the hug. "I haven't heard from you in weeks."

Most of my time was spent trying to get Mabel to get her shit together for this run and finetuning the details with Scrim. Moonlighting as a normal, functioning civilian and as Scrim's pack mule was a difficult dichotomy to balance.

"I'm sorry," I said, trying to put on my best apologetic face as Mabel's sickness could be heard in the background. "Mabel has been sick, and I've been job hunting, so the time just escaped me."

"Are you using again?" Audra asked.

"Wh-"

"Tell me the truth," she demanded.

At first, I resisted, telling her she was crazy for thinking I could have relapsed. From her perspective, I've been clean since July last year. She still didn't buy my fabrication and started rummaging around my room until she found a baggie of pills in my nightstand.

"I knew it," she said. "You're a fucking liar."

I didn't know what to say to her. Not anymore. She didn't either because she just left without another word. It wasn't long before the itching beneath my skin got to me and I found myself at a place I've been to too many times before.

"Penny," Brandon scoffed. "I thought I told you not to come by here anymore."

I met Brandon shortly after I moved to New Orleans. We used to have a thing, a tit-for-tat, so to speak, where he gives me any pills I want from his collection and I give him something in return, monetary or otherwise. We stopped talking a few months ago when he caught me taking more than he agreed to.