Rue first asked her longtime friend Fez if he could help her start to deal, but he turned her down flat. This didn’t dissuade Rue, however. She donned her mom’s blazer to look more like a businesswoman and laid out a brilliant business plan for Fez’s supplier Laurie. Rue told Laurie that she would run a ring of high school girl drug dealers with blackmail on their phones as collateral.
The terms of the deal, and what happens if Rue doesn’t pay
Laurie gives Rue a suitcase full of drugs with the wholesale price of $10,000. She says Rue can flip them for $20,000, and give $1,000 each to three girls. This leaves $7,000 of profit. She says Rue can keep $4,000, and needs to give Laurie $3,000. In total, this means Rue owes Laurie $13,000. She then warns Rue she needs to “pay up and re-up” in a month and warns Rue that if she “screws” her, she’ll have her “kidnapped and sold to some real sick people. I always find a way to make my money back. I’m serious.”
What happened to the suitcase?
In episode 5, the drugs in the suitcase have been flushed down the toilet by Jules, who told Rue’s mom she was using after she found out from Elliot that Rue had been using drugs with him (while she was cheating on Elliot with Rue, btw.) We don’t actually get to see the suitcase, so it’s unclear what happened to it and all the containers the drugs came in.
How much money does Rue owe Laurie?
Rue is now in a bad spot. She’s withdrawing from opiates and owes Laurie $13,000 (the suitcase was worth $10,000 of drugs, and Laurie expected $3,000 in profit from Rue’s sales on top of that.)
Rue returns to Laurie’s apartment without all the money
In a long segment, Rue goes on the run to escape rehab. She looks for drugs at Cassie and Lexi’s house and comes up with nothing, but when she’s confronted by her mom there again she diverts attention away from her by dropping the bomb that Cassie is sleeping with Nate behind Maddy’s back.
She then tries to score more drugs from Fez, but he no longer keeps drugs at the house. Desperate, she goes to his grandmother’s room and sees if she has any prescription opiates she can steal. After betraying her tie with Fez, Rue breaks into a house and finds cash and jewelry, which she takes to Laurie’s apartment as a last resort.
She stumbles into Laurie’s place sick and hurt, aching for a fix, knowing full well that Laurie has threatened to sex traffic her. Laurie is used to this life and had no emotional reaction to Jules’ state. Everything she does and says is methodical, and she even lets Rue know that she’s not angry. It’s clear this is all business as usual for her.
Rue offers her jewelry, which she values at $1000, and $2000 in cash. Laurie has no interest in the jewelry and calmly lets Rue know that she’s going to need all of the debt paid in cash. She then alludes to the fact that Rue will have to pay back the debt by being sex trafficked. “It’s one of the good parts of being a woman,” Laurie says. “Even if you don’t have money, you still have something people want.”
Rue is so desperate for a fix that she lets Laurie shoot her up with morphine in the bathtub, putting her in an extremely vulnerable state to be kidnapped. Somehow, Rue escapes Laurie’s apartment when she wakes up in the morning (but not before checking to see if she could potentially get into Laurie’s locked drug closet and steal some drugs.)
How did Rue plan to make back the money to pay Laurie?
Rue was in a suicidal state for most of this season, and her main concern was always to get the fix. The danger of owing money to a drug supplier was hardly on her radar. Her plan was not to flip the drugs so she would be a drug dealer who used their own supply. Her intention all along was to kill herself when she ran out of drugs.
Thankfully, the intervention interrupted those plans, even if she never made it to rehab again. (Once she was home safe her mother ran into financial and logistic hurdles in finding her residential help.) Still, Rue detoxed from drugs at home and remained clean until the final episode of the show where we see her thanking Elliot for helping save her life. She also told Elliot that she forgave him. She didn’t say for what, but it is heavily implied that she is forgiving him for sleeping with Jules.
What’s happening with Laurie?
We get no resolution with Laurie and Rue in the Season 2 finale (Episode 8.) We do, however, get a narrative out for Rue. Before the deadly confrontation at Fez’s house, Faye tries to save Fez from being turned into the police by concocting a story about Laurie. Custer is there and working with the police. First, however, he’s trying to record Fez saying he had something to do with Mouse’s murder. Faye, however, tips Fez off and lets him know not to talk.
Instead, Faye deflects by saying that Custer told her that Laurie killed Mouse, and gives Laurie’s address. Of course, everything goes downhill from there, but this important point may potentially save Rue, or at least buy her some time, as it gives police a reason to go after Laurie. Even if they don’t pin the murder on Laurie, they may find enough at her apartment to convict her on drug dealing, and maybe even sex trafficking charges.
