Free Pretty by Jillian Lauren

the corners of my eyes. I haven’t seen that face in over a year now. I haven’t seen it since the funeral.
    It’s an article about Billy. The headline is: The Radical Reinvention of Jazz Legend Billy Coyote . Some words I see are: sober , new band , new sound , new vision , reinvented , reborn .
    The bees start to pump into my bloodstream every time my heartbeats and then the rhythm speeds up and my breath catches as if there’s a little door in my windpipe and it blows shut. I can’t suck in enough breath. The dark spots in front of my eyes grow larger and the memory loop gets rolling and no matter how tight I hold my head there’s no stopping it. The film runs through the machine making that flickaflicka sound. A shaft of light shoots the pictures out onto the world in front of me. It starts with the lie I told Aaron: that I was going to California.

    I had been working at Rusty’s four nights a week since the summer after I graduated high school. A summer job that turned into a year that turned into three years. We had jazz and blues at Rusty’s. Mostly local guys and not too bad. Once in a while a small touring act came through. For bands on tour, Toledo was somewhere to fill in a show between Cleveland and Detroit.
    I restocked the beer at around four the night Aaron’s band showed up. I was already keyed up before they even walked in. They were an out-of-town band, a wild card. He ambled in the door first, trumpet case in his hand. I looked up. I hadn’t seen anything like him in my life. I couldn’t read him. Not a white guy but not a black guy, with a head of dreads and slow, brown eyes behind those Buddy Holly kind of glasses. Tall like me but all angles.
    He strode up to the bar.
    â€œHi,” he said. “I’m Aaron.” He extended his arm, smiling a goofy smile with those pointy wolf teeth on the sides that I always liked.
    I wiped my wet hand on my jeans and shook his. Long and dry and warm. No other musician had ever walked in and shaken my hand like that. Maybe he thought I was somebody I wasn’t. But probably not. I didn’t look like anybody. Kind of pretty in the face, maybe, but not like I was somebody.
    The rest of the band and their one roadie filed in the side door behind him.
    â€œDressing room is around the left side of the stage,” I said, pushing my hair back out of my eyes. “First door on the right.”
    He headed toward the back of the club. A couple of the other musicians nodded or mumbled hellos as they followed him. The last one in was the guy holding the guitar case, whose band I assumed it was: Billy Coyote. He kept his sunglasses on and his head down, with a lit cigarette dangling from his lip. He looked lost, like he couldn’t find his way even through the simple geography of a bar.
    If I had to be in Toledo, which I did until I could formulate an escape plan, Rusty’s wasn’t such a bad place to serve out the sentence. Most of the assholes from my high school went to the bar with classic rock cover bands. There was good music at Rusty’s and a bunch of harmless, regular drunks who were sloppy but nice to me.
    Mike, the real bartender, was a fat, laid-back guy with a bad mustache and an emergency Twinkie always hidden behind the bar. He had been working there for a hundred years and he had some good stories about my pop. His old lady died the year before from cancer and I think he knew something about me and something about a lot of things, though we didn’t talk about it much. Instead he asked dumb stuff like when I was going to apply for college and maybe if I didn’t like regular school that I should go to cosmetology school like his oldest, Janice, who had her own shop now and made a grip of money and didn’t even live in the old neighborhood anymore but had a ranch-style house on the north side of town.
    I always replied, “Why would I want to apply to school when I won’t be