A Song to Take the World Apart

by Zan Romanoff

  “See you at school tomorrow?” Zoe asks.

  “Yeah,” Lorelei says. She unlocks the door and pushes it open. Chris is standing on the front porch.

  His hands are stuffed in his pockets and his shaggy head is hung low in the dim yellow light. He’s half turned away, as if he lost his nerve at the last minute, or thought better of coming in the first place.

  He looks up at them and says, “Oh.”

  Should she let him leave? Lorelei gives him a tiny wave. “Hey.”

  Zoe says, “Hey,” and she and Chris nod at each other. “I was just going, but I’m glad you came.”

  It feels good to know she has Zoe’s blessing: that Zoe trusts her, and thinks she’s doing okay at this, with him. Lorelei watches her friend skip down the steps to where her mother’s car is idling quietly at the curb. Then it’s just her and Chris on the porch, hemmed in by the darkness all around them.

  “I wanted—” he says, and stops. The smile he gives her is happy but puzzled, strained at the corners. “I really wanted to see you. I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to come.”

  “It seemed weird to ask,” Lorelei says. “We don’t really, um, we don’t know each other that well.”

  Chris doesn’t say anything. His hands are still in his pockets. His body inclines toward hers but he doesn’t touch her. It’s like he’s deliberately holding himself back, but she can’t imagine why. Isn’t he older? Shouldn’t he be sure?

  She steps in a little closer and marvels when he does the same.

  “I didn’t want to see people, sometimes,” Chris says. “After my dad.”

  “You’re not bothering me,” Lorelei says. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  At this his smile breaks out, wide and white and dazzling, and he reaches at last to loop an arm around her and tug her in close at his side. She noses at the folds of his sweatshirt, inhaling the strange, musky boyscent of him, clean laundry and his sweat, his skin.

  “It’s actually been kind of boring, being shut up in the house all week,” Lorelei says.

  “You want to get out of here?” he asks. “I mean, can you? We could go for a drive or something. If you want.”

  Lorelei looks behind her to where the front door is still just slightly ajar. Jens is in the kitchen, starting to get dinner ready. Nik and her parents are still upstairs. She’s wearing leggings and a sweater, and there are probably flats kicked off under the dining room table. Her keys are hung over a hook in the front hall. “Yeah,” she says. “Hang on.”

  Jens has three different pots on the stove. It doesn’t smell half bad, actually, but he looks pretty frazzled when he hears her come in and turns around.

  “I might go out for a minute,” she says.

  “Yeah, okay.” He stirs a wooden spoon through something thick, and frowns. “You’ll be back to eat, though, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell Zoe I say hey,” Jens says.

  Lorelei doesn’t correct him. The lie needles at her, small and sharp. She chooses to ignore it.

  She slips out the front door again and closes it behind her, feeling the snick of the lock sliding into place all the way down to her bones. Now she’s alone with Chris and the whole huge, dark night.

  In the car, the city flashes around them, dim, narrow residential streets quickly giving way to Venice Boulevard’s wide lanes. Well-lit window displays and the occasional neon sign mark their progress, though Lorelei doesn’t think Chris knows where they’re headed, exactly.

  “Zoe said you and your grandmother were pretty close,” he says eventually.

  “Yeah,” Lorelei says. “She lived with us.”

  “That must have been nice.”

  “I guess.”

  “I don’t really know my grandparents.” He slips the car three lanes to the left, hanging a turn at the next intersection. The streets get smaller again, quieter. “My mom’s parents are both dead, and my dad’s are pretty far away.”

  “I guess that’s tough for you guys,” Lorelei ventures. “Being just, you know. The two of you.”

  “It’s hard on her,” Chris agrees.

  “Is that why she comes to your shows?”

  Chris heaves a long sigh instead of answering. He navigates a few more turns, purposefully, now, like he has some sense of where he’s going.

  “Sorry,” Lorelei says. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  Chris pulls over to the curb and turns off the car. He runs his hands through his hair and fiddles the keys out of the ignition. Lorelei tries to be patient. Inside the car it’s quiet and warm, and—intimate, she thinks. That’s the word. She’s surrounded by the stuff of Chris’s life: crumpled essays, fragments of gum wrappers, loose change and empty Starbucks cups and stray guitar picks. Her own life seems distant and abstract in comparison.

  “It’s weird, right?” Chris says. “That she comes.”

  “I don’t know. I guess everyone’s family seems weird to people who aren’t in it.”

  “She and my dad used to come together,” Chris says. “When I was playing in orchestra, in middle school. When he was good. I mean, they had to drive me, so obviously they came, but—my dad was a musician, have I told you that?”

  Lorelei shakes her head. Chris keeps talking. “She was never much for it, but he was so excited that I played. So when she comes now—I don’t know, everyone hates it, everyone in the band thinks it’s so lame, and I do too, but—” He turns to her and splays his hands, helpless. “She’s my mom,” he says. “What am I supposed to do?”

  It’s a question without an answer. There are no rules, Lorelei knows now, about how love works, or how family makes you feel. Everyone knows what they’re supposed to feel, of course, but what if you don’t? There isn’t a law against it. There’s only the black fact of your own heart.

  “At least you love her,” she says finally. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Right?”

  Chris’s hand hovers for a moment before it slips across the gearshift, landing lightly against the outside of her thigh, the bony ridge of her kneecap. “I’m crazy about you,” he says. “That’s— Is that a bad thing?”

  “Why would I think it was?”

  “I don’t know.” Chris gets bolder. He keeps the hand on her thigh and slides his other one up to her shoulder, brushing against her throat. The network of veins there pulses keenly at his touch. “I barely know you.” His fingertips find the hollow where skull meets neck and slide up, into the tangle of her hair. “You might want me to play hard to get.”

  “I don’t want anything to be difficult,” Lorelei says. “More difficult than it has to be, anyway.”

  Chris surges forward and kisses her breathless, his hands on her tightening like he’s desperate to keep her. Lorelei has no intention of going anywhere. She wriggles her way toward him, one blind hand coming up to clutch at his ribs through his sweatshirt.

  “This is crazy,” Chris says again, mumbling against her mouth. “You—you—”

  “I what?” Lorelei does pull away just a little bit, uncertain. Her mouth is buzzing, humming, swollen.

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” Chris says. He unwinds himself from her and leans his forehead against the curve of her seat. “When you were gone. I wanted to see you, and I kept thinking that I shouldn’t. I’m the last thing you need to be thinking about right now. But it was like—like you were calling to me. Like I could hear something echoing. I don’t know.” He sounds lonely, and lost, like he’s somehow far away from her even though they are so close. “Sorry. I can stop being weird.”

  Lorelei thinks she knows what he means, though. That was how she felt after she saw him in the hall that first time: like he was echoing in her, bouncing off her hollows, resounding again and again.

  Chris shifts back so that he’s facing forward again, not looking at her at all. “There’s a coffee shop down the block. That’s where we were going before I got distracted. If you want to.”

  “Yeah, I could—yeah.�
�

  The place is small and cozy. Chris is apparently a regular: the women working the counter greet him by name and get to work on his order. Lorelei asks for chamomile tea. When it comes, slopping at the edges of an enormous orange mug, it smells like Oma, like home.

  Lorelei takes a deep breath of the sweet steam before she asks her question. “How did you handle it? Going to school with all of that happening with your dad, and everything?”

  “I didn’t have a choice.” Chris is unsentimental. “I just kind of muscled through it.”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t have to, though. I mean, whatever, I don’t know, it’s just…It’s really hard. I don’t think I understood how hard it was going to be.”

  “Zoe said I was allowed to feel however the fuck I wanted,” Lorelei says. “When she was over, before.”

  “Yeah.” Chris nods thoughtfully. “You can,” he says. “You should.”

  He reaches for her again, but this time his touch is reassuring, just solid and warm. Lorelei leans into him and thinks, So this is what having a boyfriend is like. Here is someone who looked at her and saw what she needed. He’ll help her put her life together again.

  Chris presses his face into her hair. “It’s so hard. But I’ll take care of you,” he murmurs. “If, I mean. If you want me to.”

  THERE’S ANOTHER THE TROUBLE show. “You should come,” Chris says. They’re spending the last minutes of their lunch period together, lying in the grass. It’s been three weeks, and it never stops seeming magical to Lorelei that she can hang out with him whenever she wants. He smiles when he sees her. He makes room and time for her in his day. “It might be a little weird because of my mom and whatever, but I’d like it if you came.”

  He laid out the rules for her over tea that Sunday night. He isn’t allowed to date, so he can’t make too much time for her, and can’t bring her home, and doesn’t want to meet her parents, either. Lorelei almost doesn’t care—she can’t imagine ever wanting anyone to meet her mother—but she minds it in moments like this, when the specter of Mrs. Paulson hovers over the little bits of time they’re supposed to have for themselves.

  The truth is that she’d be dying to go even if Chris wasn’t playing. She’s made her way through the first stack of Oma’s letters and gotten midway through the second without finding another word about music; apparently Oma’s reply was blistering enough to put Hannah off the subject. Lorelei’s questions are still mostly unanswered, but she wants to get back into a room filled up by sound now that she knows what to expect from it. Maybe she’ll find a way to sing something of her own—humming, even. A tiny test. An experiment. To see.

  Hannah said you didn’t have to treat it like a curse.

  So Lorelei weighs her options and asks Nik for a ride to the show while they’re supposed to be setting the table for dinner that night. He surprises her by not putting up a fight.

  “I’ve never actually heard them play,” he says. “I’ll come as long as Jens doesn’t need the car.”

  Lorelei didn’t mean to ask him to accompany her, exactly, but she can’t tell him that now. “What would Jens need the car for?”

  “It’s his car too,” Nik says, instead of answering. “Or he might want to come with.”

  Great. Lorelei feels, not for the first time, that two is an excessive number of brothers.

  Jens and Henry walk into the dining room, carrying plates of food.

  Jens says, “Come where?”

  “To see The Trouble on Saturday.”

  “I have an enormous history test Monday,” Jens says. “I’m not going anywhere this weekend.”

  “Does that mean you have a test on Monday too?” Henry asks Nik.

  “I’m not in AP,” Nik says. “Mine’s next week.”

  Lorelei does have a test on Monday, but she and Henry haven’t spoken directly to each other since the thing with the letter, so he doesn’t know that. He doesn’t ask her if she ought to be studying. A tiny piece of her is disappointed. Lorelei is still learning the contours of an Oma-less life. The freedom is a little bit dizzying. She doesn’t want her brothers to watch over her, exactly, but she misses knowing someone else was keeping track.

  The show falls near Halloween, which means costumes. The band gets skeleton sweatshirts. On Friday, Lorelei goes with Chris after school to pick up palettes of face paint, and sits with him in the bathroom at the practice space while he coats his face in white and sweeps streaks of black along his bones: his nose and cheeks, and then across the swell of his mouth.

  She expects it to be harder for one or both of them, but he doesn’t look like death at all: it’s just Chris as a cartoon. He pulls some funny faces at his reflection, and then at her in the mirror. He forgets himself and kisses her, smudging them both with gray.

  She and Zoe spend Saturday scrounging up thrift store punk outfits: tight jeans with holes in the knees and safety-pinned tank tops. They rat their hair up into faux hawks. Lorelei narrows her eyes and practices making tough faces. “You’re such a marshmallow,” Zoe says. “You look like one of Carina’s angry troll dolls.”

  Lorelei frowns down at her outfit. “Is it dumb?” she asks. “Should I change?”

  “The point of Halloween is to be whoever you’re not,” Zoe replies philosophically. “I mean, you are definitely not a street punk.”

  Lorelei is nervous, but the drive there soothes her. Nik and Zoe are both good at distracting her. They might even be flirting with each other a little bit. She watches her reflection in the window flash by under each passing streetlight, and it looks—okay, she thinks. Not so crazy, now that she’s away from her little-girl bathroom at home.

  They park somewhere up in the steep, sloped hills above Sunset. Nik is wearing a tight black T-shirt and a pair of bunny ears taken from Lorelei’s old dress-up box. She’s surprised to find that he’s handsome enough to get away with something like that. He’s just her brother. But when Zoe looks at him, Lorelei can kind of imagine how other girls see him too.

  Carina drives over from UCLA to join them. She knows Bean even though he’s a year younger than she is, and she’s curious to hear the band play too. She meets them at the bottom of the hill. When they stumble down to her, she’s halfway through a clove, wreathed in its pale smoke. She isn’t dressed up, so she looks like she always does: tough, casual, careless.

  “Carina,” Lorelei says, “this is my brother Nik.”

  Nik and Carina have met once or twice before, but only ever in passing. It’s strange to see the two of them together. It feels like they should know each other already, just by osmosis.

  “Nice to meet you,” Carina says. She gives Nik a split-second once-over and then turns her attention to Lorelei. “I hear one of these dudes is your boyfriend now. Nice going.”

  “Uh,” Lorelei says. “Thanks?”

  Nik cocks his head at Lorelei. “Chris? I didn’t know he was your boyfriend.”

  “He’s—”

  “The show’s gonna start,” Zoe says before Nik can ask any more questions. “Let’s go inside, yeah?”

  Carina takes one last, long drag on her cigarette. The smell of her exhale is so thick and sweet that it makes Lorelei a little light-headed. “Sure,” she says. “Whatever.”

  Carina’s smoky scent envelops all four of them as they walk into the Whiskey, giving them an air of unquestionable, indifferent cool. Chris is already onstage. He’s tuning his guitar, haloed in white light, exactly where he belongs.

  “That’s my boyfriend,” Lorelei says, allowing herself one satisfied smile when Carina draws her breath in through her teeth. Someone else must have done his makeup tonight: the lines are slim and precise, stitches radiating out from around his lips, his dark eyes surrounded by a sea of black.

  “He certainly looks like trouble,” she says.

  Nik says, “You have no idea.”

  The two of them share a look over Lorelei’s head that has her instantly feeling five again, maybe twelve, definitely
young and left out. So she leaves them behind and bounds up to the stage, leaning against its lip to look up at Chris. “Hey, baby,” she says. Chris smiles back and then freezes.

  “Hey,” he says. “Shit, we, uh— Remember, we talked about this? My mom?”

  Mrs. Paulson is once again stationed at the back of the room. She’s as silent and watchful as ever.

  They did talk about this, about how she would be there, how Lorelei shouldn’t do exactly what she’s doing. “Sorry,” she says.

  “Nah,” he replies. Chris flicks his hair out of his eyes, his little habitual gesture. It’s familiar, endearing, and it soothes the hot lick of shame Lorelei feels. “I’m glad you want to. But. Later, maybe?”

  “Find me,” she says. “I’ll be around.” She tries to walk back to the rest of the group with some measure of confidence and cool.

  “Not in front of the Mrs.,” Nik says. He looks at Chris’s mother. His gaze lingers on the group of kids around her and then flicks up to the stage where the boys are finishing their sound check. He used to hang out with some of them, Lorelei remembers. Jackson, soccer, all of that. She wonders if he’s embarrassed to be seen with his little sister.

  Nik says, “Carina’s at the bar trying to round up a beer or two. I won’t tell if you want to have some sips.”

  There are a couple of guys at the bar who Carina knows. They’re Chris and Nik’s age, seniors at a different Valley private school than the one Bean goes to. They’re badly groomed and neatly dressed, the stubble covering their chins marking them definitively as older than Lorelei’s smooth-skinned classmates. Carina introduces them all around—the dark-haired one is Daniel, and his friend, a blond, is Paul. Daniel has a fake ID with someone else’s face on it. He flashes it at the bartender and buys them all their drinks.

  Lorelei can see the boys doing the math in their heads: three girls, three guys. Nik is charming Carina as easily as he charmed Zoe in the car; Zoe tilts her face up toward Daniel’s when she talks. He motions that he can’t hear her. She rises onto the balls of her feet and props a hand against his shoulder to steady herself.