A Song to Take the World Apart

by Zan Romanoff

  Paul and Lorelei catch each other’s eyes, and smile, and look away. For the first time Lorelei understands the appeal of a wedding ring: some silent symbol she could flash that would say off-limits. Not unfriendly, just unavailable.

  “Have you heard these guys play before?” Paul asks.

  “Yeah,” Lorelei says. “A couple of times.”

  Should she be flirting with him, and trying to get a rise out of Chris, who’s tuning his guitar onstage? It seems pointless to pretend. Instead, she sips at her icy beer, so cold it doesn’t really taste like anything, and lets the chill and the alcohol numb her from the inside out. Chris not kissing her stings less and less and less.

  “So they’re good?”

  “I think so,” she says. “Pretty good.” Lorelei nods at Chris on the stage. “He’s my boyfriend, so. You know.”

  “Oh,” Paul says. He smiles at her. “Got it.”

  By the time the band comes on, Lorelei is buzzing. She feels like a firecracker about to go off: tightly wrapped, full of sparks. She knows all the songs by now, from the last show, and the practices, and Chris humming them unconsciously under his breath.

  It’s different, though, when the band comes together, when the sound rolls up and spreads through the air in the room. Instead of concentrating her inside herself like the first show did, this one connects her to everyone around her. It’s nice to look at a crowd and see every face in it: to think, You and you and you and you. At the first show she wasn’t sure she belonged, or whether she could move in a mass governed by a beat. Now it seems easy. Natural, almost. She understands how to let her body tell her what to do.

  If she was the one onstage, her voice might snare all of these people the way it did on the Pier. When it first happened, Lorelei was horrified by herself. She doesn’t want anyone under her thrall. But the power Chris wields, up front, holding the microphone—that’s something she recognizes. It’s something she wants to have, and if she can’t have it, she wants to touch someone who does. Chris finds her in the crowd and Lorelei lifts her hands up to him, mouthing along with his words.

  Zoe nudges something cold against her thigh, and she looks down to see another bottle of beer being quietly handed her way. Lorelei shakes her head to clear it, and purses her lips to take a sip.

  Zoe and Lorelei retreat to the bathroom after The Trouble’s set ends, taking turns in the single relatively clean stall. “Ugh, I feel like I’ve had to pee all night,” Zoe says. She has to yell to be heard over the din coming in from outside and Lorelei running the sink.

  “I know,” Lorelei yells back. “Wait, how many have you had?”

  “One and a half?” Zoe emerges, a little unsteady on her feet. “Two, actually, I guess. I had one, and then I split that one with you, and one with Daniel.”

  “Yeah. So. Daniel.”

  “Daniel,” Zoe agrees. She smiles at Lorelei in the mirror. She looks pleased and pretty, pleasantly distracted. Lorelei wonders if that’s how she looks when Chris is around. “He’s, like, cute, right?”

  “Cute,” Lorelei agrees. “Maybe don’t let him buy you any more beers.”

  She doesn’t want to sound like a downer, but she’s never seen Zoe’s eyes shine like this before, and she doesn’t know anything about how much beer a person can drink. In the wake of the music, she’s feeling steadier, but still slightly off-kilter, like there’s a thin layer of static between her and the world.

  “Oh, come on,” Zoe says. She turns to lean her back against the sink’s damp ledge. “Have I given you shit about Chris? I have not. Your dumb brother might, but I have been—” She covers a hiccup. “I have been very supportive. And I’m not gonna, like, marry this dude, or even go home with him. Carina would never let me. I’m just seeing what I can do.”

  That makes sense to Lorelei: she thinks of the moments on the Pier before she realized that anyone was watching her, when singing almost felt like stretching her wings. Her voice lies coiled up inside of her most of the time, unacknowledged and unused. Most people don’t even know she has it. The power of it scares and seduces her in equal measure.

  “Just be careful with yourself, then,” Lorelei says. “You might not plan on going home with him, but you’re— He would be an idiot if he didn’t try.”

  Zoe laughs and ducks her head against the intimacy of the moment. It’s hard to talk about, Lorelei knows: the feeling you have for your very best friend, the kind of love that isn’t romantic and isn’t family. It’s just love, the kind that hooks into your heart and pulls.

  She does love Zoe, and doesn’t understand how anyone could not want to spend time with her, how anyone could not think she’s the coolest, the greatest, the funniest and smartest. Of course some dude in a bar is buying her drinks, trying to buy himself a slice of her time.

  “You know I can take care of myself,” Zoe says again, looking over her shoulder as she pushes the bathroom door open. “Coming?”

  Lorelei follows her back to the bar. Chris is over with his friends, but she isn’t allowed to talk to him, so she talks Carina into sharing more sips of her beer instead. She figures that if Zoe’s still standing after two, a little more won’t undo her. This one is Rolling Rock, slippery with condensation in its green glass bottle.

  Zoe picks up her practiced flirtation with Daniel, and Lorelei leaves her to it. Paul has long since disappeared, and the assurance she felt earlier in the evening has mostly evaporated.

  When she sees Chris slip backstage, she goes to follow him.

  It’s not even really a backstage: just a narrow hallway from the back half of the stage to the alleyway where they load equipment. Hidden from the crowd, she grabs Chris’s arm and rocks forward into him. She’s a little unsteady on her feet. He’s mostly washed the paint off his face, so he’s pink-cheeked again, looking like himself.

  “Hey,” he says, laughing, leaning down to kiss her.

  “Hi,” she says, and goes back to the kissing. It feels different when she’s tipsy, honey-warm and loose. She just wants to be closer.

  “Did we sound okay?”

  “Sounded great.”

  “Better or worse than the first time?”

  “Better?” Lorelei doesn’t really want to talk about music right now, for once.

  “We didn’t play the new song,” he says. “The one that freaked you out.”

  “I wondered about that.”

  “Wanted to get it really right,” he says. He’s pulled away a little bit, but he leans in and brushes the tip of his nose against hers. “I wanted to see if you’d sing it with me, actually. We could do a little duet.”

  “You’ve never heard me sing,” she says.

  “Have so,” he counters. “I hear you humming, sometimes, when you don’t think anyone’s listening.” She blushes. “It’s cute,” he insists. “And I’m sure— I know you’re talented, okay, I just know it.”

  “That’s a big bet,” she says.

  “We’ll practice,” he says, kissing her again.

  Lorelei thinks about telling him: It’s a little complicated, because there’s—a thing, with my voice, and my family. My grandmother wouldn’t talk about it. My mother thinks it’s a curse. And I want so badly to believe that they’re both wrong, and it’s safe. That I’m safe.

  Her train of thought drifts off the track as he kisses her again. And he keeps kissing her until Bean bangs into the hallway. Chris says Bean is basically married to his drums. He has no time for women, and even less patience for his bandmates’ needy girlfriends.

  “You seen Jackson?” he asks. “We need him to pull the car around.”

  Chris sighs and peels himself away from Lorelei. “Probably making out with Angela in a corner,” he says. “I’ll take a look.”

  “Thanks, man,” Bean says. He’s already jumping up the steps to start pulling the last of their equipment down.

  Lorelei drifts out the back door and breathes in the cold, clean air of the night. She leans against the building’s exterior wa
ll, stucco prickling the backs of her bare arms. She looks up to the cloud-covered sky and tries to shake the excess energy out of herself. She almost misses the tentative sounds of scuffle at the narrow end of the alley.

  There are two bodies there, one shoved up against a wall, the other curving over it. As her eyes adjust, she can see that there’s no threat to the way they’re touching, even if it looks like a struggle.

  It dawns on her slowly, unwillingly: One shape resolves into the outline of Nik’s familiar silhouette, his rabbit ears knocked askew above him. The other one is so unlikely that it takes a minute before she can put a name to it. Jackson isn’t inside. He’s here, leaning against the wall and tilting his throat up to be kissed. That’s Jackson in her brother’s arms.

  Lorelei is frozen to the spot. Jackson turns his head and sees her. His open mouth turns into a snarl. Nik doesn’t seem to notice. Lorelei shakes her head frantically, silently. She whirls and darts inside without looking to see if he’s following.

  Carina is still by the bar, flirting with someone new. Daniel has one of Zoe’s hands in his; she’s got a third beer in the other. Chris is all the way in the back, talking to his mother, whispering in her ear. Lorelei pulls out her phone and texts with shaking fingers.

  Where are you? she sends to Nik. Let’s get out of here. I’m tired. I want to go home.

  LORELEI DECIDES NOT TO tell Nik she knows. She worries that Jackson might do it for her, but days go by without him mentioning it, so Jackson must want to keep it quiet too.

  She’d like to support Nik, but she can’t figure out how, when he hasn’t asked for any support. She thinks about asking Jens but can’t bear the idea that he doesn’t know, either: that Nik doesn’t trust anyone but Jackson, of all people. She understands why it isn’t public, pretty much—it’s easier not to talk about that kind of thing if you don’t have to, and Nik was raised by Oma just like she was. It’s not in any of them to make a fuss.

  It should have been his to decide what to do with, is the thing.

  Lorelei wishes she could give them both the moment back.

  Because it’s one thing to know that everyone has interior layers and private worlds. It’s another thing to find herself with unasked-for access to some of them. Who knows what other secrets Nik is keeping? It gives her a queasy sense of vertigo to think about it, the hollow-belly sensation of falling without quite knowing when or if she’ll hit the ground.

  Lorelei is consumed by restlessness. She tries to pretend that other people are the reason for it: Chris asks her to sing with him again, and Jackson keeps kissing Angela like nothing has changed, and she can’t ever seem to find Zoe, or catch up to her for more than five minutes at a time.

  But it gets worse when she’s alone. Eventually there’s no escaping the knowledge that there’s a song that’s haunting her, melody like a ghost making its home under her skin. Desire sears her veins and turns her insides to dust. Her eyes itch. Her throat burns.

  She gets distantly curious about how long she can stand it. Oma taught her discipline, and she learned her lesson well. Her mother hasn’t sung for years now, and Lorelei is certainly as tough as Petra.

  She bears it until she can’t.

  It’s an ordinary kind of Thursday when she puts down her homework and slips out the front door. The sky is settled low and heavy, mist drifting through the air as she heads toward the beach. The surf is quiet, and the shore is almost deserted.

  Lorelei walks down to the water—as far from people as she can get—before she gives in. The sound that emerges from her mouth is so huge that even she is stunned by it. Her wail arcs up into the soft, still air. That night, for the first time since Oma died, she sleeps deeply and well.

  In the morning she starts going through the letters again with a renewed sense of purpose.

  The first time Lorelei sang, she felt awful, after, and haunted by the people she’d taken with her. This time she feels so good she can’t imagine what could be wrong with doing it again. Its effect on other people is chilling, but singing by herself, to herself—that’s fine. Whatever Oma’s curse/not-curse was, or is, it’s worth investigating until she understands what she can do, and what she can’t. She won’t let herself be silenced forever.

  Lorelei starts looking for letters from the year she was born. Hannah is thrilled about the pregnancy—she sends short notes that clearly accompanied packages, funny little gifts for the new baby, as soon as Oma tells her that Petra is pregnant again.

  Lorelei wishes keenly that she had Oma’s side of the correspondence in hand too. Was she excited? Or was she already exhausted by the twins, tired of living in a foreign country, resentful of the way her daughter just kept making inexplicable decisions and then forcing everyone else to live with them?

  The only real clue comes from a letter Hannah wrote in March, a few months before Lorelei was born.

  I know pregnancy was hard on Petra the first time. And this one you’ve been so quiet about, which means either it’s much better or much worse. Of course I hope she’s feeling better, but if she isn’t, you know I’m happy to come visit if you just tell me when. I think it would be good for both of you to have some community again—and don’t tell me you have your little circle of friends there, Silke, because you know it’s not the same. Friends are not the same thing as family—and our family, in particular.

  Hannah has a habit of doing this, Lorelei has discovered: feinting at something that she and Oma clearly understood, and disagreed on, before darting away again like she never meant to touch the topic. It reminds her a little bit of the way the twins handle their parents, one of them planting seeds while the other makes sure they never notice what’s being encouraged to take root. It swells something in her to think that her brothers’ mischievousness is inherited: that there is a family legacy other than silence and anger, fear and guilt.

  On the other hand, it means that Silke and Hannah had their own kind of silence between them, something they could interpret and decode. Now Lorelei is left with the letters she can only barely translate—often literally. She’s gotten better, but her notes are full of scratches and question marks and keyboard shortcuts for foreign symbols she can’t name.

  She’s learned enough vocabulary that sometimes she thinks she’s catching the drift of a sentence, only to plug it in and find out that she had wisps of the content but no idea of the context. German grammar is a nightmare, loosely organized and barely structured. Lorelei wants to find an index, a Rosetta stone, but every day that she sifts through the piles of correspondence, that seems less and less likely.

  And maybe there isn’t an explanation, really. Maybe there’s just something in her voice, and her mother’s voice, and her grandmother’s voice, and no one knows what it is. Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships and started a war. Some women are just that beautiful. Would the story be so different if she had sung them out into the ocean, to battle?

  Beauty in any form can bend the world to its will, and its shining surface can work dark magic. Lorelei thinks of the way the ocean glints and calls, and of poisonous snakes and frogs in the rain forest, painted with neon caution signs on their backs. Their beauty is an invitation and a warning. Her voice might serve the same kind of purpose.

  Lorelei carefully puts down the letter that she’s holding and lets herself stare into space. She’s sitting cross-legged on her bed, wearing the sweats and T-shirt she changed into after school ended. Her phone is at her side, waiting for a text from Zoe—she sent something a couple of hours ago, just a hey what’s up, and has been waiting for a response ever since. She made a deal with herself that she could read letters until it comes, but that’s starting to seem foolish the longer Zoe stays quiet.

  Hoping to hurry the process, she skips through the letters from the intervening months and finds the one that must have come just after her birth announcement reached Hannah in Hamburg. A girl! her letter says. The writing is round and sloppy with excitement that warms Lorelei.
Someone, at least, was uncomplicatedly thrilled when she was born. And such a lovely name. Did Petra let you choose, or have things really unthawed so completely? Lorelei doesn’t know what to make of that.

  Her phone throbs against her knee, lighting up with a text. It’s not from Zoe, but Chris is just as good. It says, You coming to practice tomorrow?

  Lorelei wants to—she always wants to. She turns back to her laptop and clicks away from the translation site she’s on to her calendar, to skim through and see if there’s any reason to say no. But the week is mostly free of tests and essays, and Nik will still cover for her. Jackson will be there, and maybe she can get him alone long enough to clear things up with him too.

  Yeah, she texts back. Between the phone and the computer she can’t keep from noticing what time it is: past the hour for putting this down and picking something practical up. Lorelei folds the letter onto her pile of already-read, stacks the to-read on her bedside table, and opens her backpack.

  She’ll return to all of it again, tomorrow, and the next day, until somehow it actually gets done.

  CHRIS DETOURS ON THE way to practice to pick up McDonald’s drive-thru for everyone. It’s been three hours since lunch, so of course all of the boys are going to be starving. Lorelei gets French fries and extra barbecue sauce, mostly just to be companionable.

  She’s glad they have the food, because as soon as they walk in and Jackson sees her face, he shuts down like a light being flicked off.

  “We brought burgers,” Chris says.

  Jackson takes the paper bag he’s offering without saying anything back.

  A month ago Lorelei would have felt awful. She would have curled in on herself and gotten small and silent, hoping that the awkwardness would somehow resolve itself around her, or just wash itself away. Now she looks at Jackson’s bad mood and thinks, If you would just talk to me, you’d know there’s nothing to worry about. She folds down onto the floor next to Chris and holds out her own bag in Jackson’s direction. She tries to sound neutral when she asks, “Want fries?”