Free Pretty by Jillian Lauren Page B

was like to touch such a creature who owned all this music inside and carried powerful drugs in his shirt pocket and whose hands were so long. A guy who said he was going to California and probably would. Probably he wasn’t the liar that I was.
    He put his glasses on the hood of the car and placed his hands on either side of my face like I was someone he knew or cared about or something. I was wearing my Levi’s tight on the hips then, red hair feathered over to the side and too long over one eye. I grabbed his wrist because I don’t know what, and then let it go and let him be there and touched his shoulder blades over his nice, cotton button-down shirt, because jazz guys don’t wear T-shirts even in dingy bars in drab towns. And kissing him was leaving Toledo right there. A promise of another side. Easy to lose myself because I probably wouldn’t see him again and really I was just standing there in the gravel next to my mother’s car.
    I asked him with my mind, my psychic will, to take me with him to California, to Cleveland, to Chicago, to anywhere. Things you don’t say out loud. He tasted like whiskey just turning to late-night sick sugar mixed with my own spearmint gum. Smelled like nice sweat and some kind of coconut hair oil. And we didn’t kiss for too long and we didn’t get sloppy sucky mouth open too wide and he didn’t try to grab my tits, which made him the first in history.
    That night I drove away with him still standing there. Always good to be the one who leaves first. Advice from Mom that she never took herself. But I went back. I went back the next morning. I went back with a bag packed and figured I was at the beginning of my own little fairy tale.

    â€œBreathe slow, now, Bebes. It’s okay. Just slow it down.”
    I’m on the floor with my head in my hands. Buck sits next to me and rubs my back. I don’t remember falling. Another panic attack. They happen pretty regular since the accident but mostly in the car.
    â€œGood thing I came back for Vi’s headband,” Buck says. In her hand is a bedazzled red bow.
    Billy Coyote. Son of a bitch. Of course after all of it, he’s the one who reinvents himself.

Eight
    â€œH ello, Beth,” says Susan Schmidt, our director of counseling here at Serenity. Susan Schmidt insists on calling me Beth because my born name is Beth Baker. She has this theory that nicknames reinforce “old behavior,” even though I’ve explained to her that my own mother calls me Bebe. It’s not like it was my gang name.
    Susan is always calling a meeting with me about some concern she has. “Concern” is her favorite word. I can’t figure out why she doesn’t like me. Why I don’t like her is that she is a big rich phony who looks at us all like we’re a bunch of derelicts and thinks of herself as some heiress Mother Teresa, when really she’s a control freak with the tiniest sadistic streak. Like she enjoys it when she has to kick someone out of the house for an infraction. I’ve noticed a glimmer of pleasure in her eyes when she alters someone’s life completely with a stroke of the pen. I saw it when she cajoled my friend Tammy into coming clean about her stash of diet pills and then gave her the boot.
    â€œCome in, please.”
    The office is set up faux cozy. A framed print of a sunflower with a Maya Angelou quote underneath hangs over a wall of mismatched filing cabinets. I sit on a lumpy thrift store love seat facing a new brown leather chair. I can tell Susan Schmidt thinks her chair is very therapisty. All of this crowds into what may have been a walk-in closet when this place was a grand Victorian house, before it was a haven for half-crazy drug addicts.
    I look around at the same crap I have looked at a hundred times—potted plants, a crystal paperweight, a wooden plaque that says Keep It Simple —just so I don’t have to look at Susan. The