A Song to Take the World Apart

by Zan Romanoff

  Lorelei lets herself be like the storm, gathering slowly, wind and air pulling water and electricity from all around her. She thinks about Chris’s hands, and Oma’s, her mother’s soft touch and angry mouth. She thinks about Zoe’s sweet, serious eyes, and all of the things she wants. All of them. The crackle that she felt in her chest in Chris’s sunroom, weeks ago, now, has nothing on this sensation, which threatens to overwhelm her. It will not be quieted.

  She sings the thing that’s been haunting her all the time in between, the song she started and never finished. The song they were supposed to sing together.

  The first notes, furious with tenderness and ache, collide with the boom of a thunderclap. The sky sets a slow, rolling beat. Lightning comes across the water, closer and closer. When she finishes, she’s so empty that she just wants to lie down and sleep in the sand until morning.

  She doesn’t, though. At the end of her songs, she’s just a body again, and her body knows the way back home.

  THE SCHOOL DAY FLOATS by like she’s watching it happen to someone else. Lorelei just keeps thinking: a siren, and every time she slides right out of her skin. Everyone else is living in the same world they’ve always known. Only she can see how it’s been shifted.

  She wants to sing again but can’t figure out how to do it. She doesn’t want to be like those communities of women wherever her family comes from, keeping their power private the way women always do. For the first time Lorelei really understands what Oma wanted when she climbed onstage and looked out at a crowd. She was tired of hiding, and of being isolated, and lonely. She wanted her strange, lovely voice to join with everyone else’s.

  She wanted to act. To act out.

  The knowledge simmers in her all day. By the time school ends, her skin feels tight and hot. Lorelei walks through the halls like she’s stalking something, head turning, eyes scanning. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for until she finds him.

  Jackson. Of course.

  He’s primed for her voice, and almost too easy to persuade.

  “Yeah,” he says. “That would be amazing. I kept trying to get you to sing for me again, but you wouldn’t, you ignored me, and Nik said—”

  “Don’t talk about Nik.” Hearing her brother’s name reminds Lorelei of all the reasons she shouldn’t be doing this. She can’t be sure she knows what Nik wants or needs, or that she’ll be able to deliver Jackson safely through the storm of her voice.

  Oma would have counseled discipline, and restraint. But Oma also lied to her, telling her she couldn’t sing when she can. She can. And Hannah said she could.

  Kind of.

  Which is why she needs to figure out what she can do. She would gladly use her power on herself if she could, but the thing about being a siren is that it only matters when someone else is around to hear it, and bear whatever it is you give them to carry.

  Jackson doesn’t ask questions. He puts them in his car, and drives.

  At first he heads toward the practice space, but Lorelei isn’t ready to be back there yet. His mom is at his house, he says, so that’s out. Lorelei thinks about taking him to the beach before it occurs to her that her own house will be empty: Nik has practice, Jens is writing a history paper at the library, and her parents are still at work.

  Lorelei hums along with the radio and watches Jackson’s shoulders relax fractionally, and then some more.

  “What changed your mind?” he asks.

  Lorelei doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m good at keeping secrets,” he says. “I think that’s why you both picked me.”

  Nik again.

  “Does he want to keep it a secret?” Lorelei asks. If it really is Nik’s choice, she shouldn’t get herself in the middle of it.

  “He did when we started,” Jackson says. “Now I guess it’s my secret, because, you know. Angela.”

  “So you guys are still hooking up.”

  Jackson darts a glance at her, startled and wild.

  “He didn’t tell me,” she says.

  “If I tell you, I won’t be keeping the secret.”

  This is it. This is how she’s supposed to test him: to draw out what he doesn’t want to say. It’s not changing him, Lorelei reasons. It’s just leaning a little harder on him than she would be able to, normally. It’s just trying to learn the truth behind one more well-kept secret.

  They pull up in front of her house before she knows whether she should go through with it or not. Adrenaline snakes down her spine. Her stomach flips. Her voice shakes with nerves when she opens the door and says, “We’re here.”

  “I’ve been here before,” Jackson observes. “Nik snuck me in a couple of times.”

  “Oh,” Lorelei says. She remembers him driving her home from practice that first night, and how easily he took the turns. Of course. “Well. Come in again.”

  Jackson drops his bag in the hall while Lorelei checks her email, one last time, for anything from Hannah, a note that says Just kidding! Or Never mind. It’s all spam, though, and ads, and she either has to do this or get Jackson the hell out.

  “Are you thinking about singing with us?” Jackson asks her.

  “What?” Lorelei says. “What? No.”

  “I just assumed.” He starts to wander away from her, down the hallway to the living room. “I mean, I figured you were going to try to get back together with him somehow. Chris. And it seemed like a pretty easy way to do it. You know: give him what he wants.”

  Lorelei has been trying not to think like that—not yet, anyway. Not until she understands how this works. No need to get her hopes up. “Maybe,” she says. “I wanted to try it out, first, though. Get a more objective opinion from you.”

  “I always want to hear you,” Jackson says. It comes out automatically, the idea she planted that first time, when she didn’t know what she was doing. Listen to me.

  Be careful, Lorelei reminds herself.

  She follows him into the living room, where he’s already sitting on the couch. Lorelei just stands there, looking at him.

  “Go ahead,” he says. He tilts his head up and levels his gaze with hers, almost arrogant, almost like the old Jackson, and then it’s easier to remember how infuriating he was, and is. Then somehow it’s easy to open her mouth and let the song spill out.

  He slumps gratefully into the embrace of the sound. She’s not even doing anything, not trying anything, just singing mindlessly, the song that was on the radio, but he’s completely surrendered to it. His head falls back as his eyes fall shut. His mouth goes slack.

  Lorelei decides to start with something easy, as an experiment: not love, which is all undertow, but something physical and concrete. As she sings out, she thinks of waking up the morning after Oma went into the hospital. She’d missed dinner and slept late, and her stomach was an empty, angry knot. She imagines it so strongly that one hand comes to rest there, and Jackson, wide-eyed, mirrors the movement.

  Lorelei cuts off the song, breathing hard. “You okay?” she asks him.

  “Starving,” Jackson whispers. His voice has gone hoarse. “You’re starving.”

  “I’m not,” she says.

  “You are.” He leaps up from the couch. “Where’s the kitchen? I can get you something, I can fix you—”

  “Jackson!” Her voice stops him in his tracks. Lorelei starts to sing again, mindless again, the tune that lulled him before. Jackson subsides back onto the couch, but he keeps tracking her. Lorelei lets the song drift while what she’s just done washes over her: Holy shit.

  Holy shit!

  It worked.

  It keeps working. She slips through variations on a theme: exhaustion, and then elation, because it seems unfair to keep giving him sadness that isn’t his. It isn’t fair to be doing this at all, really, but Lorelei is strung out on the sensation, almost stoned with the power of freedom and release. He made so many assumptions about her, and they were mostly mean ones. Now he can’t help knowing all of her painful, complicated truth. He has
to feel all of it like it’s his.

  She doesn’t want to stop, but at some point the angle of the sun reminds her that Jens and Nik will be home soon, and she can’t keep messing around. She’s been lazy, playing with sensation, stuff that’s instinctive and easy. Being specific is trickier: she remembers how she sang to him that first time, outside the practice space, but she’s not sure she can do it again. Lorelei hums the song from the radio. Jackson calms and stills.

  “I’m ready,” he says. “Go ahead.”

  “For what?” she asks.

  “Chris’s song,” Jackson says. “Your song.”

  “Sure,” Lorelei says.

  She imagines herself running the melody through with a delicate vein of a question, and a command. This was the song she used to think meant that Chris loved her; now she can use it to find out if Jackson loves Nik.

  “I don’t know,” Jackson says when she’s done. His words overlap the last echo of her last note, so there’s no silence in between. His voice isn’t powerful like hers, but she knows he’s telling the raw truth, anyway. “I feel awful about it, but I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know if that means I love him, or if I’m just selfish. I mean, I am selfish, so it’s probably that. But it’s not like he hates it. I keep thinking, if we loved each other, we would be sure, but we’re not. So. I don’t know.”

  Lorelei wishes the answer was easy. That if you were in love, you knew it, and knew what to do about it. She can make him say anything, but he can’t tell a truth he doesn’t know.

  What she can do is make it easier on all of them.

  So she tells him, “Stop, then. If you don’t love him. Leave him alone.”

  “Okay.” Jackson looks up at her, wounded, but he doesn’t flinch.

  “And leave me alone, until I tell you not to.”

  “Okay.”

  Lorelei can’t resist one more question.

  “If I did want to sing with you guys,” she says. “Would Chris— Do you think he would let me?”

  “Chris loves you,” Jackson says. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  LORELEI DOESN’T LET HERSELF think about singing to Chris like a plan. It’s not— She’s not plotting anything. It’s in her back pocket if things get unbearable. But there has to be another way out of what she’s feeling.

  Every day she walks around school and keeps her eyes fixed on the ground, trying not to see Chris, trying not to see who he’s with. Her blood is always wild with adrenaline, anyway. Going from class to class becomes a game of roulette. The idea that she did this herself—to herself—takes on a raw, ugly edge. So what if she had the power, if all she used it for was to make a mess of her life?

  She gets a text from an unknown number. Hey it’s paul, it reads. U comin 2 Daniel’s tmrw?

  “Oh shit,” Zoe says when Lorelei asks her. “Yeah. His birthday party. I was going to invite you, and then he said he’d asked The Trouble to play, like we talked about, and it seemed weird to ask him to cancel that, so I—I don’t know. I figured you wouldn’t want to go.”

  “I don’t,” Lorelei says. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “No, but I do want you to be there,” Zoe says.

  “I wouldn’t know anyone. You’d just have to entertain me.”

  “I don’t really know anyone, either, honestly. His guy friends aren’t interested in me—obviously—and the girls always ignore me when I’m around.”

  “Zoe. It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine! And I think you should come, actually. Especially if Paul’s inviting you. If he wants to see you. Might be good to remind Chris that you can move on if you want to.”

  Lorelei tries to pretend the thought hasn’t occurred to her.

  “C’mon,” Zoe continues. “I’ll dress you up. Carina’s coming, and she said she’d drive. And we can all have a sleepover afterward! It’ll be so fun, L. Fuck Chris and Daniel and Paul. We’ll have ourselves a good old-fashioned laaadies’ night.”

  Lorelei likes the idea of showing up somewhere with her best friend, and an older girl. It’ll be like that night at the Whiskey, except she’ll know what she’s doing this time. She won’t go up to Chris at all. He can watch her from across the room, and wonder who she’s talking to, and why. She can dance with Paul, and kiss him, even, if she wants to.

  The meanness of this plan curdles in her stomach. It doesn’t feel good, but it feels better than blankness, and nothing. Lorelei remembers how scared she was before she sang to Jackson, and how good she felt after. She woke up in the morning and her hair was soft and her cheeks were pink. She wants to feel that way again: bright and fresh and clean. She’ll kiss someone for the first time at this party. She’ll leave her tired, sad self behind and find a way to become someone brand-new.

  Lorelei checks in with Angela on their way to sixth period. She asks, “Are you coming to the show tomorrow?”

  “The one at your friend’s boyfriend’s house? Probably. I don’t know. You’re going?” Angela seems to weigh something before she continues. “I’m not really sure it’s a good idea.”

  “I’m fine,” Lorelei says.

  “Oh.” Angela slants a funny look her way. “Yeah, no, I meant—Chris is, like, super broken up about this whole thing, you know.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Jackson said he still loved her, but he’s seemed fine whenever she’s seen him.

  “He’s incredibly bummed. He feels like shit about what happened between the two of you.”

  “Breakups suck.”

  “He misses you.”

  Lorelei doesn’t know that she’s been waiting for this particular set of words until she hears them. Hope blooms in her chest before she can name it. It’s different from Jackson trying to placate her after she sang him into mindlessness. Angela says it like everyone knows it’s a fact.

  Lorelei says, “I miss him too.”

  “So it might be good to see him,” Angela prompts. “You guys could work things out, maybe.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Yeah. Is your brother coming?”

  “Jens or Nik?”

  “Nik,” Angela says. And then, in a rush, “Look, I know he and Jackson used to—”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Whatever, Lorelei, okay, everyone totally knows that.”

  “They do?”

  “I know, anyway,” Angela says. “And I’m just wondering, because he was hanging around for a while, and then he wasn’t, and if you’re going to be there.”

  There’s no question about where her loyalties lie, but Lorelei feels awful for not telling Angela the whole truth. And besides, it’s over now. She made it be over, for all of them.

  “I haven’t seen Nik all that much recently,” she says. “I can’t imagine why he’d come to the party.”

  “Okay.”

  They’re just in front of Lorelei’s stop when she works up the nerve to ask a question of her own. “Chris said something the first time we hung out,” she starts. “About your parents? Being pretty religious?”

  “Yeah,” Angela says.

  She doesn’t sound like she’s about to shut down the conversation, so Lorelei presses on. “So you must have to lie to them. About what you do. Sometimes.”

  “Yeah,” Angela says again.

  “I just. I don’t know. I don’t understand why Chris can’t do that. Won’t do that. For me.”

  Angela looks up and down the hallway, as if preparing to share a secret—which, Lorelei supposes, she is.

  “I don’t agree with my parents,” she says. Her smile is surprisingly kind. “I don’t think Chris feels that way about his mom, and her reasons for keeping you apart.” She’s a few steps away before she turns to add one last thought. “I didn’t say I liked it, either,” Angela tells her, before disappearing down the hallway to class.

  DANIEL’S PARENTS’ HOUSE IS enormous, a supermodern fortress spiked high on one of the bluffs in the Pacific Palisades. The driveway is already full, so they h
ave to park blocks away and then hike up in their high-heeled shoes.

  Carina stops them at the top to brush some of Lorelei’s hair from her face and hand around a compact for a quick makeup check. Zoe is nervous and twitchy. She glances at her phone over and over again, even though they’re basically at Daniel’s front door.

  It’s a cold night but they’re all wearing dresses anyway, bare-legged and shivering in thin jackets. The wind is raw with chill and dank with brine blowing in from the ocean below. The air smells like her last conversation with Chris, and those last little hopeful moments. Lorelei wonders if he’s already here.

  Zoe punches in the gate code and turns around to link her arm through Lorelei’s. Together they step over the low metal track as the gate pulls back. Lorelei spots Chris’s battered Mercedes up the drive.

  “You ready?” Zoe asks. She doesn’t slow her pace.

  “Ready enough, I guess,” Lorelei says.

  Inside, the band is setting up on an enclosed patio at the far end of the living room. The glass reflects the interior lights, making the boys look like miniature figures in a crystal jewel box. The house is very stark, all concrete and glass. Sound echoes wincingly off every surface. Bean and Jackson appear to be talking about hanging rugs before they perform. Jackson turns to gesture at the space, and for a second his gaze locks with Lorelei’s. He looks down, frowning. Chris has his back to her and he doesn’t turn. Lorelei forces herself to look away. The room is punctuated by cactus plants with flowers blooming at the end of their twisted, spiky arms.

  The girls are shedding their jackets, still shivering even though it’s warm inside, when Daniel and Paul swoop down on them. Now Lorelei recognizes how handsome Daniel is, in his proper context, with his sharp jaw and careful stubble. He’s wearing black pants and a white button-down with a skinny black tie and a gold tie clip. Zoe’s dress is a Goodwill find, short and tight and covered in gold sequins. Her skin is tawny and her lips and cheeks are sweet, glossy pink. She looks so lively next to him: very fresh, very young. He wraps an arm around her waist and kisses the top of her head. It’s a move that says to everyone in the room: We belong together, or maybe, She belongs to me.