Gunpoint
Because Abby and Mary Elizabeth had been best friends for over 30 years, mutual friends and acquaintances would inevitably ask how they met, as if they were some old married couple. The reply was always the same for both women, “At gunpoint.” Around the time of her 29 th birthday, Abby had been in New Orleans just over a year. She was renting the downstairs unit of a two-story duplex in the Garden District on Jena Street, one block off St. Charles Avenue, across the street from Sacred Heart Girls Academy. Every weekday morning, as she sat on her front porch with her coffee, Abby, herself a product of a Texas public school education, would watch, fascinated, as parents dropped their 12 and 13-year-old daughters off at the school’s side door. All decked out in their catholic school uniforms, plaid skirt, white short-sleeve blouse, white knee socks, and saddle shoes, the girls would stand at the curb waving good-bye to their parents until they turned the corner onto S