All On Me

[Pippi]

((Laura Hakštok continued from Return of the Bear))

She was aimless and adrift once again. But it was strange. She had shed so much weight, and yet she could never remember having moved slower before.

That giddy half-hour or so when she’d been running around like a crackhead, yelling at the top of her lungs to see who exactly who had gotten a hold of her, well, crack, seemed like such a fucking long time ago. How long ago had it been, actually, come to think of it? Like, it had to have been less than a week, she was pretty sure, but she didn’t have a goddamn clue about the exact time that had passed since Minute Zero. The fucking production crew really weren’t prepared to let them all keep their phones? The fuck was she gonna do with hers? Call the military to come rescue her? The bastards probably had one hand in the SOTF cookie jar to begin with.

Maybe it was for the best that she didn’t have her phone anymore, though. Lotta photos on that busted up piece of shit. Even more text messages, too.

Laura trudged, because there wasn’t any better fucking way of describing her movement right now, along the jetties, one hand gliding along the railing to her left. She’d had a plan, or something that had just about resembled one, only a few fucking hours ago, and now she had absolutely nothing, literally zilch barring the swanky black collar round her neck and the clothes on her back. And you could barely call this fetish fuel swimware ‘clothes’ anyhow.

She hoped that someone would stumble upon the explosives and pick ‘em up, make a big boom, whether that was just yeeting them into the ocean or making an entire fucking ship cosplay the Titanic. That’d been something to aim for, something she woulda liked to have done, bullshit permitting. But, shock and fucking horror, everyone she’d run into with a gun had been a psycho dickhead killer, with way more interest in blasting holes through people than inanimate objects. Besides, the little bottle was now sitting at the bottom of her bag, languishing back at the RocketBoat. And she couldn’t go back there, now.

She still had the cocaine. To look for, that is, she sure as fuck didn’t have it on her. It was her white whale, and not just cause they shared the same colour, haha, very funny joke. It woulda been really fucking cool if Jewel had just, like, told them which boat, exactly, the baggie was on, she didn’t have to be any more specific than that, but whatever, Laura got it, corporate bullshit and rules of fairness and all that shit.

Actually, hold up, Had they tried asking Jewel that question? Like, they’d tried to wrangle an answer of who held the coke, which had been kinda helpful but also not really. Surely she could say what boat the coke was on, that wouldn’t spoil anything teams related, specially not if the coke had just been, like, dropped or lost or whatevs.

“Hey, Jewel.”

Laura closed her mouth. When she opened it again, it was just to let out a disgruntled sigh, as she shook her head. Fuck it. This was pointless. This was a desperate search for crumbs, like a shitty treasure hunt, one that wasn’t even leading her around in circles, it was guiding her along a fucking plate of spaghetti. And for what? Most likely, a now-empty ziploc bag, cause she would bet her bottom goddamn dollar that it had all been used the fuck up by now. And even if she could grab a hit or two, then what? She was gonna get off her tits and act like everything was just fine and dandy? Try to blackout and forget everything that had just happened on the RocketBoat?

Nah. You could say a lot about Laura, and most things already had been said about her, but she wasn’t ever gonna ignore the truth staring her in the face. No matter how much it burned her up from the inside out.

“Never mind. Fuck it. Forget it. Go talk to, like, someone worth talking to. Or, I dunno, get something from the snack table. How long have you been working the mic without a break anyway, like, Jesus christ bitch?”

She sighed again, stopping for a moment to rest her arms against the railing, and look through a patch of ships, out towards the horizon. She might have been staring straight towards Miami right now. Or maybe she could have been looking in the total opposite direction, and she was looking at fucking Senegal or some place like that. Either way, it didn’t matter. The coastline didn’t exist here. It was just these boats, the people dying on them, and the yawning expanse of the ocean. And the sea wasn’t even the goddamn photographic shining, shimmering blue like you got when the weather was just the right level of unbearably hot back home. It was slate grey. Or shitty cobalt. It was fucking empty, a particularly depressing place to die. At night, when the only lights were pinpricks from the stars and the ships, reflected underneath her in the surface of the water, it felt like they were all stuck inside some pocket dimension, away from innocent eyes, out of sight, and out of mind.

Man, she’d never gone in for that lame-ass shitty emo poetry before, but, hey, turned out, accepting that these were gonna be your last few days as a living breathing human being did something to you, she guessed.

Fuck, she wished she could have spent them all with Alaska though.

Laura halfheartedly kicked one of the poles supporting the railings, not even hard enough to send a tiny throb of pain through her bare foot. She pushed her glasses back up her nose.

Then she kept on walking.

((Laura Hakštok continued in Paradigm))