A Song to Take the World Apart

by Zan Romanoff

  Jackson shrugs, and takes one. It shouldn’t break the tension, and it doesn’t, entirely, but it fractures enough of it that Lorelei’s shoulders loosen. She’s done her part without making a big deal out of it. Bean comes to join them and starts joking with Chris; after a while, Jackson chimes in. Lorelei lets them have their boy-banter. See? she thinks at Jackson. I’m not trying to take anything from you. I promise.

  The food disappears so quickly it looks like a magic trick, or stop-motion animation: Lorelei sees it happen in flashes, and all of a sudden it’s just her and the boys and a sea of greasy wax paper. No one seems to be in a hurry, though. Bean folds his napkin into a floppy origami mouth, and Jackson is lingering over the last of her French fries. The talk turns toward music like it always does when they’re together.

  “I want to play another show before the end of the year,” Jackson says. “We do better when we’re practicing for something, instead of just, like, dicking around.”

  Bean wads up his napkin and tosses it vaguely in the direction of Jackson’s head. “Like now, you mean?”

  “We’ll get to it,” Chris says. “In a minute. You think I brought Lorelei out here just to make her smell your farts all afternoon?”

  “Wouldn’t want Lorelei to be bored,” Jackson says.

  “I’ve got homework,” Lorelei says. Maybe she shouldn’t try to placate Jackson—there’s no reason for him to be a dick—but she’s not really in the mood for the afternoon to turn sour, either.

  “Forget that. You should practice with us,” Chris says.

  Lorelei makes a face. Of course she’d love to sing with him—for him, even—but that’s not something she’s ready to try out in front of a group yet. She’s just as worried about her family’s mysterious legacy as she is gripped by plain old stage fright. “Nah.”

  Chris tips sideways so he can lie down and rest his head on her thigh. “Someday you’re going to say yes,” he tells her. “And you’re going to blow us all away.”

  “You’ll have to say I’m good, after you’ve spent all this time trying to convince me.”

  “You will be,” Chris insists.

  “We’d tell you if you sucked,” Bean cuts in. “Just so we’d never have to hear this argument ever again.”

  “Oh, please.” Jackson’s voice is cold and furious. “Lorelei will never do it. She just wants to make sure Chris has to keep asking her.”

  Lorelei’s face goes white and then red.

  “That’s not—” she starts.

  “Oh, shut up,” Jackson says. “I know he’s gagging for it, but some of us are tired of the sound of your voice.”

  Lorelei reacts without thinking: she pushes Chris’s head off her leg and stands up shakily, grabbing her backpack as she goes. Distantly, she can hear Chris saying something, but it doesn’t matter: whatever it is, she doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t try to stop her when she slips out of the studio. He doesn’t follow her down the hall, or come running out the front door of the building.

  Lorelei pulls out her phone—and stops. Shit. If she asks Nik to come get her, he’ll have questions, and if she can’t answer them, he might stop covering for her when she needs him. Jens will have fewer opinions but even more questions, and she doesn’t want to draw his attention if she doesn’t have to. She weighs her options and hates each of them. In the end she texts Jens, mostly because she’s sure he’ll come no matter what. I went to a thing with Zoe and Carina but now I’m not feeling great—can you pick me up? she sends.

  A minute later he says he will, and asks for the address. Lorelei hopes she can pretend she’s too sick to talk. She almost wasn’t lying about that: now that the initial shock has worn off, all she feels is the nauseating pulse of her anger.

  She leans against the building’s front railing and trembles, little starbursts of rage exploding under her skin. How dare Jackson talk to her like that. How dare he act like she’s just some awful girl, when she’s done everything she can to be good for Chris, to be good for everyone. He has no idea what she’s protecting him from. Something dark spills loose in her, and she thinks: I could show him, and then he’d really be sorry.

  When the building’s door opens again, it’s not Chris coming to see her. It’s Jackson. He doesn’t look like he’s going to apologize.

  He comes down the steps and stands next to her. “Jesus, seriously,” he says. “Did you put that dude under a spell or something?”

  Lorelei starts, guilty, but—no, she didn’t, that’s the whole stupid point.

  “He wouldn’t let us get on with it until I came out to say sorry.”

  There’s a deliberate silence in which Jackson does not do that.

  “I haven’t told anyone,” Lorelei says, finally. She owes him this much, and no more. “I haven’t talked to Nik about it or anything. About what I saw.”

  “Okay,” Jackson says. “That’s not even the point.”

  “I know it’s none of my business—”

  “It really isn’t.”

  “I just—”

  “It really isn’t,” he says again.

  He’s my brother, Lorelei wants to say. I love him and I want him to be happy. I wouldn’t do anything—anything—to mess with that.

  “It’s not serious,” Jackson says eventually. “It’s just a thing we do, sometimes.”

  “So, Angela?”

  “I love Angela,” Jackson says. “I like girls, okay, I love her, she’s—it’s just— Nik and I started messing around a while ago. You know, before. Chris was gone a lot, dealing with his dad, and we had time to kill, I guess. And then there was Angela, and we stopped,” he says. “And if you hadn’t started hanging around Chris, Nik would have stayed out of my way.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Lorelei says. “This isn’t my fault!”

  “Oh, right, okay. How silly of me. Of course nothing is your fault. Because what have you ever done wrong? Nothing. Nothing. You’re golden. You have no idea what this is like. You have everything. Enough to just—” He makes a little gesture: dismissive, royal, unconcerned.

  That’s what he thinks of her life, and why wouldn’t he, from what he’s seen of it? He thinks that just because she has Chris, she’s never wanted anything she couldn’t let herself have. Lorelei chokes back a laugh.

  Jackson corrects himself. “No one has everything they want,” he says. “Duh. Yes. Okay. But you seem like you’re coming pretty freaking close.”

  Lorelei slumps against the railing, the sun-warmed metal biting hard against her back. She doesn’t want to defend herself. She shouldn’t have to. Just because she knows one of Jackson’s secrets doesn’t mean he can begin to guess at hers.

  “Look,” Jackson says at last. “You can probably sing. I don’t know why the hell you’re pretending you can’t, but I know that Chris deserves better from you. He loves music. He loves it so much. It reminds him of his dad. And if you’re lucky enough to be in love, and to have someone want to share something they love with you—then don’t waste it. Sing it for me now. The first verse. Don’t think. Just do it.”

  The darkness that spilled loose in Lorelei earlier is all through her, now, threaded across the network of her veins and into her lungs, her marrow, the thick muscle of her heart. She takes in a breath to tell Jackson to be quiet, and the air finds new space in her, in the hollows created by that blackness. When she breathes out again, she knows she’s going to do it. It’s not a thought; it’s a physical fact. She opens her mouth and closes her eyes.

  She doesn’t really remember it, after. All she knows is that while she sang, she was seized in the grip of the sound, channeling something bigger than herself: conducting electricity. The music was white-hot and bright, sparking in her wrists and behind her eyes. It was like she could reach out and touch him: just Jackson, the hidden parts of him, his sadness, his loneliness, his quiet. She could pull at his inner life with her bare hands.

  It came to her instinctually, like kissing, like breathing. She didn’t
have a name for what she was doing. Her whole self was absorbed by the space the sound made between them. It was the first time she had directed a song at someone, making it for him as much as for herself.

  Lorelei gave away feeling without meaning to, with her father and that day on the Pier. She thought it might work like a mirror, turning her listeners into reflections of her own emotional interior. Singing to Jackson, though, and coming back after, she’s distantly aware of something more complicated going on.

  There he was, laid bare for her, his mind open to her mind’s touch. It wasn’t that she gave him what she was feeling. She convinced him to feel something specific. The words came to her as unbidden as the song, but she recognizes them. They’re the ones she’s been biting down on for days and days.

  They echo in her mind after Lorelei has fallen silent. Listen to me, she told him. Believe me, you asshole. From now on, you listen for me. And you believe me when I tell you what I feel.

  The first real thing she sees after is Jackson like she always sees him, standing in front of her. Now, though, he’s wide-eyed and shaken, and very white. He reaches out and touches her face with his fingertips, as if to check and see that she’s real.

  “What—” he asks. “What are you?”

  “I’m—” Lorelei says, and doesn’t know how to answer.

  “You’re so—” he says, and stops again, fumbling for the words. “You—I could feel—”

  Jens’s car pulls around the corner, and he leans over to open the door and yell out at her. “Come on, Lorelei, I’m supposed to meet Nik in, like, half an hour.” She pulls the door the rest of the way open, and slides into her seat.

  For the first time since this whole mess started, she sang to someone on purpose. She let her voice loose, and let it tell someone what to do. Lorelei doesn’t know what it means that she did it, or whether she’ll be able to undo it, or whether she cares.

  All she knows is that she loves it. She loves what she can do.

  SECRETS HAVE THEIR OWN specific weight in the human body, some unidentifiable but precise number of ounces, of pounds. Lorelei starts to feel all of the things she’s not telling dragging on her like weights on her shoulders, or barnacles on the bottom of a boat. Letting go of that one phrase—listen for me, believe me—made her conscious of how much other stuff she’s been carrying.

  Jackson texts her a few times that afternoon: can I see you and I need to talk to you. She deletes the texts as fast as she can and tries to pretend she never read them. She calls Zoe, gets her for once, and arranges to meet up with her on the boardwalk, just to get herself out of the house for the rest of the day. At the last minute she leaves her phone inside when she goes. She doesn’t want the distraction, or the reminder.

  It’s an especially chilly afternoon, with a storm threatening over the ocean. Zoe is wearing jeans and boots and an oversized windbreaker, her long hair pulled back into a neat bun. Lorelei has never been so grateful to see anyone in her life. Zoe’s tall, slender form against the darkening sky seems like a beacon along a rocky shoreline, guiding her somewhere familiar and safe.

  “I’m glad you called,” Zoe says when Lorelei reaches her. “I totally have news.”

  “Good news?”

  “I think so, anyway.” They start walking along the paved path that runs parallel to the shore. “I gave Daniel my phone number when we were leaving the Whiskey the other night,” Zoe admits. “Just to see. I didn’t think he would call but he, um…he did. So we’ve been hanging out. Kind of a lot.” She is shining with pleasure.

  Lorelei is happy for her, but also nervous in a way she can’t quite parse. Chris has always been a known quantity but Daniel is alien, in addition to being older. He’ll pull Zoe further away from her and their friendship. She was probably with him the other day, Lorelei realizes, while she waited for Zoe’s text like an idiot.

  “That’s cool,” she says.

  “You sound even less enthusiastic than Carina did.”

  “She doesn’t like him?”

  Zoe waves a dismissive hand. “She doesn’t know him.”

  “I thought she introduced you guys?”

  “I mean she, like, knows him, like, she knows his name and stuff. But she’s just pulling older-sister bullshit: be more careful, I know what’s best for you, whatever, whatever.”

  “And you don’t think she does?”

  “Whose side are you on, exactly?”

  “I mean, I just don’t know him,” Lorelei clarifies. “And he’s. You know. A senior.”

  “Speaking of which, how are things with your older boyfriend?”

  “Fine,” Lorelei says.

  “Just fine?”

  “Not just fine.” Lorelei looks out over the ocean. The sky and sea are tinted by the same gray darkness. “I don’t know, I’ve never— I don’t have anything to compare it to. But I’m happy, so.”

  “You still going to band practices and stuff?”

  There goes not thinking about Jackson. “Yeah.”

  Lorelei doesn’t realize that she’s stopped walking until Zoe nudges her and asks, “What?”

  She shakes Jackson out of her head. Nothing comes to take his place. “I don’t know,” she says. “Chris wants me to sing with them, I guess.”

  “That’s kind of random? Because you don’t really sing, do you?”

  “Not really.” Lorelei searches for the right thing to say. She settles on “I think it’s just his way of trying to let me be closer.”

  “You guys seem like you’re pretty close.”

  Lorelei feels this for the dig it is: she disappeared into Chris’s world before Zoe even met Daniel. No wonder Zoe’s excited that someone is paying attention to her, and taking up her time.

  “It’s weird with his mom and everything,” she explains. “That’s why we have to, like, sneak around, and hang out at school and stuff. I’m sorry about that, by the way. That I’ve been a little MIA.”

  “It’s whatever.”

  “I guess if you and Daniel get serious, you’ll be busier too.”

  Zoe shrugs. “You’ll have band practice,” she says without malice.

  “No I won’t.” If it comes out a little too fierce, Zoe doesn’t seem to mind. “I mean, just, we can find other things to do together. And you and I can make time for each other. If you want.”

  Zoe doesn’t say anything in response, but she knocks a shoulder against Lorelei’s again while they walk. Her arms are wrapped tightly around herself. She’s folded in against the wind, but she straightens long enough to drift into Lorelei’s space and then back into her own. “I’ve missed you,” she says quietly. “I don’t want to be selfish or anything, but it sucks when you’re not around.”

  “I’ve missed you too,” Lorelei says. “I’m sorry. I know it’s my fault.”

  “It happens.” Zoe disentangles herself and shoves her hands in her pockets. She looks out philosophically at the bleak boardwalk in front of them. “But, you know. It would be nice if it didn’t happen to us.”

  LORELEI SPENDS THE WEEKEND buried in the letters and finds piles and piles of nothing.

  Chris called to apologize that night, but he does it again first thing at school on Monday. “I thought maybe Jackson would be able to work it out with you on his own,” he says. “Clearly not the case. He came back in all glassy-eyed and quiet, and I was like, Oh shit! I don’t know why I thought he could behave himself. He was probably stoned or something.”

  Lorelei shrugs. She doesn’t want to talk about it any more than she has to. If Chris asks her about Jackson’s strange behavior, she has no idea what she’ll say.

  “But it also made me realize,” Chris goes on, “that it’s kind of crazy of me to ask you to sing with the whole band as, like, the first time you do it. Of course you’re shy about that. And my mom’s working late tonight. So I was thinking if you wanted to come over, maybe I’d play a little bit, or whatever. That it might be nice. And it would be just the two of us.”

&nb
sp; The words just the two of us swallow the rest of the sentence. Yes, Lorelei thinks. She says, “Yeah.”

  “Cool.”

  Chris considers her for a moment. Then he touches her cheek with his fingertips and pulls her face toward his, cupping her jaw with his palm. He kisses her, and his other hand comes to rest at the back of her waist, low. He curls against her, pressing her tightly to him. The kiss sings with its own slow intention. Suddenly Lorelei understands all of what, exactly, she’s just said yes to.

  She texts Zoe, SOS gonna need an emergency conference at lunch Chris wants me to COME OVER after school?? Followed by a bunch of X-mouthed, blushing emojis. She’s just slipping her phone into her backpack, rooting through the main pocket to make sure she’s got her workbook for first period, when Jackson appears at her side. He seems casual at first glance, but when she looks again, he’s white-knuckled and thin-lipped, in the grip of something intense.

  “You didn’t answer my texts,” he says. “What’s up with that?”

  “Sorry,” Lorelei says. “Busy weekend.”

  “That’s bullshit.” He stops and she stops with him, too startled to realize that she should shake him off and keep going. “I saw Nik,” he says. “He said you were home, and that you saw Zoe but—”

  “You asked him about me?”

  “I had to,” he says, and then again: “You weren’t answering my texts.”

  “Where was Angela during all this?”

  “Don’t worry about Angela.”

  The first bell rings and everyone seems pulled as if by gravity into their classrooms. It’s just the two of them alone in the halls.

  “I can’t stop thinking about it,” Jackson says. One hand reaches out to grab Lorelei around the wrist. His fingers dig into the bones there, burning against her skin. “Sing for me again. Do it. Please. Do it now.”