Jazz Funeral

hollered “No!” at the top of her lungs, as if she could make it stop, turn time back and erase disaster, regain her innocence, and start being grateful for the imperfect world she had known up to that instant to ward off this new, shattered one.
    She was embarrassed about that, felt silly. Oddly, the memory of her hysteria was almost as painful as the other memory—the moment in which everything had come apart. After yelling, she had simply stared for a moment, trying to hang onto history, to the moment before it happened, and then she had split. Forgetting her backpack, forgetting her name, practically. She had just run out of there and kept running until her lungs hurt, and then she’d settled for walking fast. Aimlessly at first, while she tried to figure out what to do.
    She wanted a shower, she wanted to wash this thing off her, but she couldn’t go home. She was absolutely, utterly, completely, devastatingly alone in the world. That much she knew. Unless … could she call Madeleine Richard? No way! She almost laughed at the absurdity of it. Richard was always saying how she was Melody’s friend, she was her advocate, but who paid Richard? Melody’s mom. She was bought. And she was an adult. No way was Melody trusting any adult. Not after what had happened. She was alone. Completely alone. Absolutely alone. She hadn’t known it was possible to feel so alone.
    There wasn’t even a kid she could trust. Well, maybe Joel. Yes! Maybe Joel. But she couldn’t just turn up at his house. And she certainly couldn’t go to Flip’s. And she’d run away from Blair’s. That left exactly nobody.
    She walked down streets she didn’t think her parents would think to go, but she knew she had to get out of sight pretty soon. They’d come looking. She had to decide what to do. She had a few bucks in her jeans pocket, enough to take a bus, but—where to? And then when she got there, what was she going to do for money?
    As she walked, as her tears dried and her head cleared, she became aware of a curious, liberated optimism, almost a high. The down side was she’d lost everything and everybody in one tragic ten-minute interval. But there was an up side. If she could pull it off. She was beginning to see the rosy edges of it, to hear one of her favorite songs in a way she never had before. It was “Me and Bobby McGee,” a song she’d heard a thousand times, sung a thousand times, cried over. The line that was getting to her was, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” a sentiment that always before had seemed unbearably sad. But reverse it and what did you have? “Nothing left to lose is just another word for freedom.”
    Freedom!
    That was something you didn’t get when you were sixteen. What you did get was school at eight A.M. , and your mom telling you what to do, and no car because your dad said you were too young, and no career, no real career yet because your dad said you were too young, and curfews because your dad thought you were a baby and just generally that sort of thing—prison, more or less, because you were too young.
    The only way to get around it was to run away, and Melody had never thought of that before. Why should she? Okay, so her mom and dad weren’t perfect, but she had had Ham and Ti-Belle. And Flip, and her friends, and most of all, her music.
    Which was the key. The rest of it was gone, but what really counted anyway? The music. It was her life. It was what she loved most and what she wanted to spend her life doing, and she could go so much faster, she knew it… it was the only thing she could depend on. It was what was going to get her out of this hole.
    If she were on her own, she could sing—did she dare say it?—professionally. She could bypass high school and college and sororities and other people’s weddings and her own first divorce and all that crap.
    She could be a professional singer tonight!
    Ti-Belle had done it. She could do exactly what Ti-Belle had done—get on a bus for the French Quarter and join a street band.
    The great Ti-Belle Thiebaud had actually done that. Caught the bus in New Iberia or St. Martinville, somewhere like that, and roared right on down to the Quarter.
    Yes, but Ti-Belle has a great voice.
    Well, hell, I do too.
    I think.
    But I don’t know. I’ve never had a chance to try it out. All I’ve ever done is sung at parties for Country Day kids.
    I can do it! I know I can do it!
    The debate raged within her even as