Chapter Text
The Velvet Neon was packed past comfort. Every table taken, every wall propping up someone with a drink against their chest, the whole place crammed in like a tin of fish. Surprising, how many bodies a small pub could swallow. The noise of overlapping conversation and laughter was easy to ignore once you felt the rest of it—the sweat, the dead air, beer and vape smoke layered into one warm room-temperature soup. Yeah, it was perfect alright. Keeping Vi’s mind occupied and distracted, exactly what she needed after today, and a whole week, and maybe even a whole year.
On stage, equipment was being checked—microphones tapped, amps humming, the lights being moved by a guy on a stepladder who would rather be slinging vodka shots behind the bar.
Ekko and Vi would perform regularly here. Sometimes just them, and sometimes a couple of other losers who don’t really have a life or anything to do on Thursday nights. They played funk. They played loud, and always drew a crowd. The problem was never the audience. The problem was everything that happened once the set ended and the room cleared—no studio they could afford, no label interest, no distribution beyond whatever Ekko uploaded to SoundCloud at two in the morning. Most of their songs existed in rooms like this one. Alive and homeless.
Vi was in her corner of the stage, assembling her sax. Reed on, ligature tightened, a few silent fingerings to warm up. Took her less than two minutes. She pulled out her phone while she waited.
A text from Max, the facilities guy at CSULB. She’d been using a practice room on campus since graduating—Max had kept her card active as a favor, looked the other way when she swiped in after hours. It was the only place she could afford, and the only place in the city she could play without somebody calling somebody.
The band had tried rehearsing at Ekko’s mom’s place. Once. Once. His mom had come downstairs in a bathrobe, yanked his amp from the wall mid-song, and told them to get out. They hadn’t asked again.
So the practice room was it. And now Max was telling her they’d changed the access codes campus-wide because someone had been stealing equipment from storage, and her ID was officially a useless rectangle of plastic. He said he’d try to find her a workaround, but the tone of the text didn’t sound hopeful.
Vi locked her phone and set it face-down on the amp.
Cool. Great timing. The city really wanted her gone.
Before she could sit with it, a voice cut through the noise. “Hey!”
Vi looked up. Dylan, front and center. Her dark choppy hair that looked like she’d cut it herself in a bathroom mirror with a cigarette between her teeth. The guy next to her flinched from the volume of her shout. She waved him off with a laugh and a flick of her hand. “Sorry, that’s my friend, I’m just saying hi.”
And to Dylan’s right—Rose and Nicole, already looking at the stage, waving.
Of course Dylan had called them. She wasn’t going to let Vi come undone solo. It was almost unfair, how completely these three had stitched themselves into her life, how they’d turned the idea of Leaving LA from a clean exit into something that would actually cost her.
“Hey, hey, hey.” Ekko climbed up from the backstage steps and tapped Vi’s shoulder.
“Hey little man. You seem pretty chill tonight.” Vi said. She’d called him that since the first rehearsal, when he’d been the youngest in the room and showed up in an oversized hoodie that made him look even younger. He was stocky, shorter than Vi, with a wide jaw and dreadlocks bleached white at the tips. They met a year or so ago, during a practice sesh for school. Vi liked him from the very beginning. He’d been glued to his drum kit for nearly every minute they’d ever spent in the same room, which earned him her respect on principle. The kid just fucking loved to play drums. So he played drums. Religiously. Until he was the best drummer Vi’s ever heard, for his age, which she would admit out loud to anyone except him.
Sam appeared behind him and Vi grinned. “Hey Sam.”
“Hey!” Sam slapped her palm in passing on the way to his keys. Ryan came up a moment later—nod, return nod, no words required. The guys hustled into position.
“Sorry I’m late,” Ekko said to Vi as he settled behind his kit. “A’right, let’s fuckin’ go. Sam, you good?” He tucked his earpiece in and glanced over. Sam gave him a thumbs up.
Four clicks of the sticks above his head. Then the kick drum, and the whole thing caught.
The opening groove hit fast and tight and slightly unhinged. Sam’s keyboard riff came in syncopated and bright, Ryan locked in underneath with a bass line that bounced off Ekko’s snare. Vi came in on the fourth bar and filled every gap the other instruments left open. The crowd caught up by the time the groove settled, clapping on the two and four, bodies in motion.
They’d played this one before. It was the crowd’s favorite. Would’ve been a real flex if the song had a name to put on a setlist, but it didn’t. None of them could agree. Ekko had pitched something he thought was funny and nobody else did. Ryan kept lobbying for something in Latin. Sam wanted to number it like an old jazz standard. So the song stayed nameless, which was fine, sure. But what it actually needed even more was a voice. Vi kept asking the alto to do something only a voice could really do. She’d said so. Multiple times. But they didn’t really have anybody brave enough to fill that gap. So they just played without one.
The room hushed as the song built. Vi leaned into her solo and let the notes pour out, fingers ahead of her brain. Four minutes of this. Four minutes where nothing else existed—just breath and sound and the instrument vibrating against her chest, and everything she’d been carrying all day, all week, all year, lifted off her like steam.
The song ended and the crowd exploded. Vi found Rose at the back, two fingers in her mouth, whistling above the applause. She smiled and turned to set up for the next track.
A girl, somewhere in the dark, shouted, “Can I have your number?!”
The whole band heard it. Nobody knew who it was meant for. They all looked at each other and grinned. Ekko, who had never once been embarrassed in his life and wasn’t about to start tonight, leaned into his mic and called back, “No, I have a girlfriend!”
The front rows laughed. Then, from the same patch of dark: “Not you! The sax!”
The crowd around her cracked up. Vi glanced down, out of habit, at the inside of her right forearm, where the keys of a saxophone were inked in black, a column of little buttons running wrist to elbow. Right. That’d be her. She tugged the white tank off her ribs where sweat had glued it down, pushed the long red side of her hair back off her neck. She got a vague heading on the voice—somewhere left of center, somewhere past the lights—but the lights were doing their job, which was to make her briefly and completely blind any time she tried to look at an actual person. She smiled toward the general direction and made a show of scanning, hand cupped over her brow like a sailor squinting at the horizon, mostly to cover the fact that she couldn’t see a single face out there.
Before she could find whoever it was, Ekko clicked his sticks and the next song started. Vi shrugged at the dark and came in on the downbeat.
They played four more songs before one came up that didn’t need sax. Vi stepped off stage and slid into the crowd. She spotted Dylan first—back of the black leather jacket, the two red, mean-looking dogs printed across the shoulders. Vi tapped Dylan’s right shoulder and ducked left.
“What the—” Dylan spun right. No one there.
“Vi! Come, come!” Rose spotted her first, hand beckoning.
Dylan clicked her tongue and threw a punch at Vi’s arm. Vi winced, laughing. “Ah! Sorry not sorry.” They both cracked up.
“Is it just me or is the place more packed than usual?” Nicole asked, sipping her drink through a straw. She wore a black velvet choker, her shoulders pale, angular, sharp-boned.
“Couldn’t tell, I’m fucking blind up there.” Vi looked the group over. Rose and Nicole had gone with matching outfits tonight—dark tops, gold jewelry, Rose’s long nails painted black and catching the light every time she moved her hands, which was constantly. If they weren’t chronically late and terminally disorganized, you’d call them a power couple.
“So you’re planning on leaving LA? What’s up with that?” Nicole tilted toward Vi.
Vi’s eyes went wide. She puffed her cheeks and blew the air out slow. She hadn’t even processed today yet. Way too early for this conversation. “Said who?”
“Dylan?” Nicole replied.
Vi shot a look at Dylan.
“Well maybe. I don’t know.” Vi looked away. She could feel it in her face—the flat, drained thing she was trying to keep off it. She’d already done today’s crying. She wasn’t doing seconds.
“What bullshit,” Rose said.
Vi turned the look on Dylan, who stood to her right with her eyebrows raised and her hands jammed in her jacket pockets. Dylan shrugged. “What? What?! Why are you looking at me like that? If you got something to say to us, say it to our face.” Dylan took a sip of her beer. She wasn’t being harsh. She was nudging the door open. But now wasn’t the time.
“Come on, I don’t wanna talk about it tonight. Can’t we just enjoy the show? I know you’re busy. Honestly, didn’t wanna bother you guys.” Vi slipped past it and lifted a hand toward the bar. House rules—if you played, you drank free. She leaned against the counter and the bartender set a beer down without asking, then moved on. Dark hair scraped back, eyes done in the perfect liner that Vi could never get as sharp on herself if she tried. Her hands were pretty. Well fuck, it’s been a while…
Vi took a sip and watched her work for a second longer than she needed before turning back to her friends.
Rose started telling a story about a coworker who’d emailed the entire company a selfie meant for her boyfriend, and Nicole kept interrupting to argue that it was intentional, and Dylan leaned against the bar and laughed at both of them without picking a side. The conversation moved on and Vi let it carry her. Grateful for the noise.
She set her bottle on the counter. “I gotta get back up. Hey—thanks for showing up.”
“We live here now,” Rose said.
“You’re stuck with us,” Nicole added.
“We gotta find you a new job,” Dylan said.
“I already have one. It’s called unemployment.” Vi looked back over her shoulder and grinned.
Funk wasn’t their genre, and they showed up anyway.
###
Earlier that day…
Vi shut the door hard enough that it echoed through the walls.
She walked past her helmet on the counter, past the kitchen where Dylan stood over a paper plate with her cheeks full, and went straight for the fridge. Grabbed a Coke. Dylan didn’t look at her.
The apartment smelled like garlic and sesame and fried food.
“You’re back early,” Dylan said, the words thick and split around whatever she was chewing.
The microwave beeped and she pulled out a steaming tray of dumplings—pork and chive, from the smell of it—and set them next to the containers already spread across the counter. Noodles. Some kind of chicken. The whole apartment had that greasy-good smell that clung to Dylan’s clothes after every shift at the restaurant. The smell made you hungry even when you weren’t.
Vi popped the tab on the Coke and headed for the couch. “Uh-huh.”
She tucked a foot under herself and took a long drink. The carbonation burned the back of her throat and almost punched a hiccup out of her.
A year since she’d finished school. A year of the courier job—flexible hours, and no commitment. Temporary while she auditioned her way into session work.
Except the session work never came.
She could hear Dylan moving around the kitchen behind her, opening containers, the clink of a spoon against the plate. The apartment was small enough that every sound could be heard—two bedrooms off Hobart in Koreatown, the kitchen and living room divided by a counter and a change in flooring. Tile to carpet, and neither was great. Dylan’s stuff stayed in Dylan’s room. Neither of them had ever suggested making the place look like two adults lived there on purpose.
“Got any of that left for me?” Vi asked after a few minutes, tilting her head toward the kitchen.
“There’s like three days’ worth here.”
Dylan finished warming the last of it and carried what she could in one trip to the low table near the couch—the dumplings, the noodles, a container of spicy rice cakes, the chicken. She sat cross-legged on the floor and dipped something fried into a small puddle of sweet chili. “I had a feeling we’d need this today.”
Vi reached for the noodles and grabbed chopsticks. “Dude, no wonder I’m not getting any work. You’re already meal-prepping for my failures.”
Vi played fine. But someone else always had the chair before she sat down—someone whose dad knew the contractor, whose college roommate was now an assistant music supervisor in Burbank, who’d been around long enough that their name was pencilled into the call sheet before the listing went up. That was the thing about LA’s session world that nobody mentioned until you were already in it.
She could be home. She could be teaching back home, where rent didn’t try to kill you and the gap between what she wanted and what she had wouldn’t feel like something she had to defend every morning before strapping her helmet on and kicking the bike into traffic.
Dylan smiled and said, “Have you tried smiling more?”
“Fuck off.” Vi split the chopsticks and blew on the noodles. She ate a mouthful before she spoke again, the words coming out flat and tired around the food. “It’s not happening. I’m not getting it. I don’t even know why I keep showing up to these things.”
The audition had gone well. She’d played clean, hit the changes, kept her tone warm where it needed warmth and sharp where it needed edge. The panel—the contractor, the music director, someone from the studio she never got a name for—had watched from behind a table with bottles of water and printed schedules, and they’d cut her off after sixteen bars and thanked her for her time.
“They didn’t even let me finish.”
Dylan chewed and said nothing.
Vi put Netflix on and hit whatever was first on the banner. Some movie about demon hunters or something. “Thanks for the food, by the way.”
“Thank my boss.”
She ate fast, not tasting much past the first few bites, tossed the container in the trash, and stood. She didn’t care about the movie.
“I’m going to the gig later. Wanna come?” She paused at her bedroom doorframe.
“Uhmm—” Dylan’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. She chewed, considered, swallowed. “Yeah, I’ll come.”
Vi nodded and shut the door behind her.
She turned around and let her body drop face-first onto the unmade bed. Lay there with her face in the pillow and her arms at her sides, immobile.
A minute passed.
“Ugh.” The pillow ate it.
The window AC unit bolted into the next building over kicked on with a shudder and started grinding out that low metal drone that filled her room every afternoon around this time. It sounded exactly like her grandmother’s fridge—the one that had rattled all night while small-kid Vi slept on a folded blanket on the kitchen couch. A whole life ago. A whole state away.
She got up and pulled the window shut. It half-muted the rush hour traffic four floors below. The street noise plus the AC drone had compressed her room into something smaller and louder than it had any right to be. She watched the light go orange against the building across the alley for a minute, then walked back to the bed and picked up her phone.
A couple of texts from Powder, a meme from Ekko she couldn’t be bothered to look at. And there, among the threads, Vander’s contact photo—the one Powder had taken at Christmas, him squinting into the camera with a beer in his hand, looking like he’d been caught mid-sentence. He’d moved into the house the year Vi turned seven and never moved back out. He was the reason she’d started playing music in the first place. The one who’d never quite said out loud that he thought LA was a mistake—…but who’d never said it wasn’t, either. Vi stared at it and felt the conversation from last week settle back over her like a weather front rolling in.
She’d called him on a Wednesday, middle of the afternoon, when Dylan was at work and the apartment was empty enough for her to come apart in private.
“What’s up? How are you doing—how are things down there?” He cleared his throat, and she could hear it underneath the words, the gladness that she’d called. He always sounded like that. Like he’d been waiting but would never say so.
“I’m—“ Vi cleared her own throat. “I’m doing good.” She reconsidered the lie before it even landed. “Well. Actually. I got rejected again today.”
She let it sit.
“Oh.” He wasn’t surprised. He just sounded like someone carefully receiving something fragile, holding it without squeezing. “Okay. And—are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I just…” She wiped her face on her sleeve before she’d noticed she was crying. “I think I’m done here. I want to come home. I don’t think this is the place for me.”
Vander listened. He waited.
“You were right to try to talk me out of it.”
“Oh, Vi, no—“ His voice went soft, so soft it pressed against her through the phone like a hand on her back. She was crying for real now, and hearing herself cry made it worse. She was done. Done with this city, done trying, done performing a belief she no longer held. She knew she was feeling sorry for herself and the knowing didn’t help—it just stacked on top of everything else, one more line item on a list she’d stopped reading months ago.
“I’m not getting anywhere,” she said, wiping her cheek with the heel of her free hand. “I’ve been doing stupid DoorDash for a year, and done the auditions, and it’s the same thing every time. Someone already has it before I even walk into the room.” She pulled the phone away from her ear, tapped speaker, set it on the pillow, and stood to find a tissue. “I could be doing this at home. Maybe I could just teach in Denver and at least be near you guys instead of pretending this is going somewhere.”
“Vi, listen to me.” His voice filled the room. “You are an excellent player. You know that.”
She rolled her eyes, even though he couldn’t see it. “Thanks.”
“I mean it. And whatever is happening down there—it has nothing to do with you. You hear me? Nothing.”
Vi stood by the window with a balled-up tissue and didn’t answer. For someone who’d never set foot in LA, who hadn’t seen her in over a year, he had a way of being exactly right about the things she most needed to hear.
“It’s their loss,” he said. “It is genuinely their loss that they can’t see what’s in front of them.”
“Okay.” She sniffed. “You don’t have to—“
“But I do.”
She almost smiled at that.
That conversation was the reason she’d stayed for one more try.
And the try had come and gone. Today. Sixteen bars, and the contractor’s overly polite, “Thank you, we’ll be in touch,” which meant they wouldn’t.
Vi lay on her back now, phone resting on her chest, staring at the ceiling where a water stain had been slowly expanding since November. Through the door she could hear the tinny audio of Dylan’s movie, some chase scene, the volume too low to follow. Four hours till the gig.
Her eyes burned and she pressed the heels of her hands against them and held there. She’d already cried about this, last week, to Vander, and it hadn’t changed a thing. Crying was just the body processing what the mind already knew, and she was tired of processing.
She fell asleep.
###
Thursday night…
Vi played two more songs before the set moved past her. She packed up her saxophone, gave Ekko a nod, and stepped off stage to the sound of the crowd still going behind her. Dylan and the others had already left. Vi had promised they’d talk later.
For now, she wanted to wait for the rest of the gig to end. She headed for the bar—mainly for the drink, but the bartender from earlier was still working, and Vi wasn’t going to pretend she hadn’t noticed.
She got herself another beer. A figure appeared next to her elbow.
Taller than Vi, broad through the shoulders, taking up space without seeming to try. He kept a polite distance, one hand on the bar. When he spoke, his voice was low and carried easily under the noise.
“Shot of tequila, please.”
The bartender nodded. Vi turned her head.
He had a beard trimmed close, dark hair past his ears. Green shirt open at the collar. Tie loosened and hanging in two strips like he’d come from somewhere more formal and started shedding it on the way over. In the low bar light she couldn’t make out much else, but he had the bearing of a man who was used to being looked at.
He got his shot and tilted it toward her. “Cheers.”
Vi looked at the glass, then at him, then clinked her beer against it with minimal enthusiasm. “Cheers.”
They drank. He set his glass down with a tap.
“I heard you play,” he said. “You’re good.”
“Sorry?” Vi kept her eyes on the stage.
He extended his right hand. “I’m Jayce Talis.”
Vi shook it because not shaking it would have been weirder. His grip was firm, brief, professional. “Violet Lanes. Look, pretty boy—whatever this is, I’m not interested. And trust me when I tell you it would never work. Like, categorically.”
Jayce laughed, short and genuine, not offended. “No. No, don’t worry. That’s not what this is.” He gave the empty shot glass a half-turn on the bar.
“Okay.” Vi felt vaguely stupid, which she covered by taking a longer sip of her beer. “So what do you want?”
“I’m in a good mood.” He waved for another shot, then nodded toward the stage. “Your band’s got something.”
Vi followed his gaze. “We’re not really a band. We just play together sometimes.” Some part of her was already running paranoid math—figuring this guy had walked up to her because she was the closest body to walk up to, not because she was the one he’d actually come for. Probably wanted Ekko.
“I’m still not sure why you’re talking to me,” she said, louder now over the crowd.
“I want to hire you.”
Vi’s eyebrows went up. Her chin pulled back. “You want to what?”
“I’m a contractor. Session work.” He was speaking faster now, like he could feel her about to leave. He pulled out his phone, unlocked it, and turned the screen toward her—a project file, dense with text and logos. She squinted at it in the dim light.
“What am I looking at?”
“Meridian Sound is recording a video game score, and the lead saxophone player had to drop out last week.” He spoke clearly, close to her ear so she could hear him over the music.
Vi knew the name. Everyone who’d spent time chasing session work in LA knew Meridian. Their studio in Burbank had a live room that seated eighty musicians, and the waiting list to book time there ran six months out. This wasn’t indie.
The crowd roared as Ekko announced a short break. Jayce continued, “I’ve been following your—“
“Okay, you need to hear how that sounds.” Vi took a step back. “You’ve been following me? Why the hell would I believe any of this? Better question—why come to me? There are like, a hundred sax players in this city who’d kill for a session call.”
“You’re right, and you don’t have to believe me.” He put his phone away. “But it’s real, and the reason I’m here instead of running a proper audition is that we don’t have time. Session’s been going three weeks and we just lost our player. The rest of the ensemble is back in the studio Monday and I need someone in that chair.”
Vi looked at his face and searched it for the tell—the flinch, the oversell, the smile that was doing too much. She couldn’t find it.
The timing was so absurd it almost felt staged. She’d walked out of an audition this afternoon with another rejection still warm on her, come home, made up her mind about flights to Denver, cried about it last week to Vander—and now a stranger at a bar was holding out the exact thing she’d spent a year failing to reach.
She smiled to herself. Didn’t dare feel anything about it. She’d burned through her capacity for hope somewhere around the third sip of Coke on Dylan’s couch.
“Just take my number,” Jayce said. “You don’t have to give me yours. Think about it tonight, and call me tomorrow, as early as you want. Ask me anything—I’ll tell you whatever you need to know.” He paused. “I’m completely sober, by the way. In case you were wondering.”
She pulled out her phone and let him type his number in. “I can’t promise anything.”
“That’s fine.” He handed the phone back. “I’ll stay for the rest of the set. Good show.”
“Thanks. Enjoy.” She turned back toward the stage, the phone warm in her hand. She glanced at the screen once—Jayce Talis, ten digits underneath—then slid it into her back pocket and picked up her sax.
When the set ended and the applause came, loud and sustained, the band found each other onstage in a mess of high fives, fist bumps and the giddy stupid grins of a good night. Sam and Ryan clasped hands. Ekko pulled Vi into a one-armed hug.
“Good work, y’all.”
“Nice.”
“Killed it.”
The crowd thinned. The bartender started collecting glasses. Ekko came over to Vi as they moved toward the narrow hallway behind the stage—barely wide enough for two people, smelling of old beer and electrical tape.
“Hey, wanted to talk?”
Vi had been mentally rehearsing it all day. I think I’m leaving. I think I’m done here. I love you guys and I’m sorry. The whole tidy speech. She’d had a week to put it together. Now there was a phone number in her back pocket and the speech didn’t quite fit the same way anymore.
“You sounded great tonight.” She said it first because it was true, and because she needed to put something solid in the air while she figured out what she actually had to say.
“Thanks.” Ekko grinned, easy and tired. “I love this. I love doing this.”
I know, Vi thought. And I wish we weren’t all so broke and tired and lazy, so we could actually do something with what we have.
“Yeah.” She smiled back. They started toward the exit together.
“I had a really good time tonight,” Vi said. “One of the better ones.” Then, before her brain could catch up with her mouth: “But I don’t think I—“
I don’t think I can stay here. She’d had the sentence planned for a week.
Ekko looked at her.
Vi held the look for half a second and then said, “I probably didn’t pass that audition. Bummer.” Which was not a lie. It just wasn’t the thing.
Ekko’s face stayed open, waiting, like he could read the shape of what was actually underneath.
Vi glanced toward the door. “That’s all I wanted to say, honestly. I’m dead though, so I’m gonna head out. Cool?”
“Sure.” Ekko tapped her shoulder. “See you next gig?”
I don’t know. Maybe. Depends on a phone call I haven’t made yet.
“Yeah.” Vi pushed the door open and stepped into the warm night. “See ya.”
The air outside was still, carrying the smell of asphalt and jasmine from somebody’s fence down the block. Vi pulled out her phone. Jayce Talis. Ten digits and an area code she didn’t recognize.
She looked at it longer than she needed to, then locked the screen and started walking toward her bike.