by Zan Romanoff
They’ve lived near the beach for almost her entire life, but Lorelei can barely remember the last time they came here as a family. She would have been six, maybe. The memory is dim and fuzzy, faded at the edges, nonsensical in the way childhood recollections are. She spent most of the afternoon on the towel at Oma’s side, sitting under an umbrella. After lunch the boys dragged her out with them. She loved to swim but was wary about giving herself to the ocean, which was so big and so strong.
“Come on,” Nik said. He was serious even then, hands on hips. “We have to teach you how.”
At first there was just too much of it. The mass of water overwhelmed her. But their father came out with them and held her in his arms when the twins tried to take her out too deep. When she was ready, he carried her toward the horizon. It wasn’t so scary after they got past the breakers. Once she’d adjusted, they brought her in a little ways so that Nik and Jens could teach her how to slam up against the waves and how to swim under them, letting them pass right over her head.
It seemed crazy, then, to face down that enormous oncoming rush and throw yourself into it, under it. It seemed like you’d never be able to come up again once you went down. It took Lorelei the whole afternoon to train herself to do it, and to believe that she too would surface behind the wave, sitting on its back, her hair slicked against her skull from the water’s rushing force.
It’s the best way to take on the big ones, Nik told her then. So now she faces down the wave that’s coming, the one that looks like it will envelop and destroy her. The water rolls over itself, speeding forward to swallow her whole. I am your daughter, your daughter’s daughter’s daughter, she thinks. She closes her eyes and dives as far down as she can go.
LORELEI COMES HOME A WRECK. Nik has finally gotten rid of Chris, or at least he’s not in the living room. She makes her way up the stairs with leaden legs. She’s so, so tired. Her brain is fuzzy and weak. She has to crawl the last few feet to the bathroom, slumping against the door as she pulls it shut behind her.
Her skin is still wet and her clothes are damp and clinging. She runs a hot bath and lies on the floor to undress, then hoists herself over the lip and into the tub.
She’s covered in sand and flecks of seaweed. The bathwater cools quickly against her icy skin, getting grainy and dark as everything she picked up flakes off. It doesn’t feel like the ocean did, limitless and purifying, but it’s nice, anyway. Lorelei is half human, after all. Her skin craves warmth and quiet just as often as it wants to be rushed upon and overrun.
In the stillness of the bathroom there’s nothing to distract her from the situation with Chris, and from what and who she is. A siren: a scream that rings out across water, through dark, at night. What she can do is ugly, or difficult, but it’s also hers. It’s her.
Some families keep darker secrets, Lorelei knows. Some run to violence or madness or other kinds of ruin. Hers ran to singing and then to silence. They were magic but never the right kind, the kind that can fix things. Just the kind that’s good for cracking them open to show you exactly what’s inside.
Even though she couldn’t have fixed it, Lorelei wishes that Oma was here to talk to. She didn’t have spells, but she could have told stories. Here is how I screwed up; here is how I kept living. And then Lorelei would know that she was allowed to keep living too.
It would have been a grown-up conversation, she thinks now. She and Oma would have leveled out with each other over time, maybe.
Instead, Oma will only ever have known her as a child.
And trying to stay a child won’t bring Oma back. This is Lorelei’s after. Now there’s nothing to do but live with it. It seems unbearable. Lorelei counts the seconds passing and wonders when she’ll stop being surprised to make it through this one—and that one—and the next one—and the next.
Floating in warm, soft water, naked and scraped clean by knowledge, she hears her great-aunt’s sentences clear as a ringing bell: If you use your voice, use it carefully: never sing for anyone you need something from, someone you want to summon or bend or change. Sing for yourself, Lorelei, and you will always find happiness in it.
Lorelei has only ever allowed herself to sing in desperation and confusion, in moods dark with fear and need. She wonders if doing it just because she wanted to—for herself—would make a difference. Part of her thinks it’s too late to care either way; part of her, the part that pulled her body into the ocean, under the waves, and then all the way out again, understands that sometimes too late is as soon as you can start.
WHEN SHE’S DRY AND WARM, Lorelei takes the bus to Chris’s house. He’s still spell-wreathed, with big, blank pupils and a smile that unfolds itself for her. “Your mother told me I had to go home,” he says. “But I knew you would come.”
Lorelei’s voice feels like something swollen inside of her, creating a nauseating pressure against the rim of her throat. “Is your mom here?” she asks. Chris shakes his head. “Did you tell her?” Lorelei asks. “About us?”
“I did,” he says. He reaches for her. “I told you. She doesn’t care. She wants me to be happy. And I want to be with you. To give you what you want.”
Lorelei feels the words like her own knife turned back on her, needling against her breastbone: what you want. “How did that go?” she asks. “When you told her.”
“Not as badly as I would have thought. She doesn’t hate you, you know. She said you have a beautiful voice.”
“Yeah,” Lorelei says. Everything is too big and too heavy. She’s too tired to keep on.
“Come in,” Chris says. “Come upstairs.”
Despite herself, Lorelei does.
They curl up in his bed together. Lorelei shelters herself in the cove of Chris’s body. If she closes her eyes and holds very still, it seems peaceful to pretend with him. He runs his fingers through her hair and kisses the top of her head. “Finally,” he murmurs, drowsy. The draw of his breath lengthens and evens. Lorelei doesn’t stir. They both need to rest, she tells herself. She’s too wrung out to be useful. She drifts off without meaning to, floating away from herself so slowly that she doesn’t even realize that it’s happening.
When she wakes again, the angle of the light has changed, and there’s something about the stillness of their bodies, the bed and the room, that makes her think: It’s like a grave in here.
Chris’s chest rises and falls in rhythm, but the blank slackness of his body reminds her of Oma’s when she was lying in that hospital bed. Lorelei envies him for a moment. She wishes she could put herself under her own spell, and stop caring what happens next. But that’s not living. That’s what the living give up in order to move on. And it’s not what Chris wanted, or would have chosen for himself.
When Oma died, it seemed for a little while like there were no more rules left to break. Lorelei could unravel however she wanted, and it wouldn’t matter at all. But just because there wasn’t a punishment doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be consequences. Now it’s up to her to figure out how to deal with them.
In the end there’s only one thing for it: “Do you want me to sing for you again?” Lorelei asks. Maybe she can soothe him with her voice, and convince him not to need her so much, though that’s just another kind of compulsion. He’ll never be the same as he was before he knew her. Everyone leaves marks, but these are scars. Chris might never recover himself from the force of her greed, or her love.
“Yeah,” Chris says. His face is lit up with what Lorelei can no longer mistake for genuine feeling. “Of course I do.”
They go down to the sunroom together. Lorelei moves carefully, afraid of jostling their fragile peace. Her body feels like it’s held together by wet glue. Chris slides into place on the piano bench, fingers poised eagerly over the keys. “Tell me what to play.”
“Play me something you love,” she says. “Play me what your dad used to like.” Maybe she can call him back to something older than her selfish magic.
“You won’t know the words,” he sa
ys.
“I’ll make them up.”
He plays and she sings. It’s the first time they’ve really done this together, standing apart from each other, making something new. I release you, Lorelei thinks, like the words will be enough.
She tries to think of him and him alone, but that’s not how she’s known him, so he appears in her imagination as he always does: his dark head bobbing through the hallways or haloed in stage lights, just in front of her or at her side. The air in the room shifts while she sings, rustling like the warm, dry breath of the night they met and the cold, damp spray of the afternoon they broke up. She remembers his hands on her, tender, searching, in his upstairs bedroom, and how badly she wanted him to love her, how the raw edges of her longed for him to reshape her into someone else.
She was looking for love that would save her, which doesn’t exist; if love could anchor you in place, Oma would still be here, and so would Chris’s father. Lorelei was looking for lightness that didn’t balance itself with dark, love without consequence, desire cut free from obligation. She wanted the impossible, and she got it, and now she has to find a way to give it back.
She sings herself into the blank empty center of sound, the part of it that is just sound, and nothing more. The music becomes a wave, and her voice is the energy that moves through water, racing under the ocean’s glassy top to throw it forward. Deeper, though, in the very deepest parts, all is calm and still and whole. Lorelei imagines Chris floating up out of it, dazed as he stumbles onto dry, sandy land.
He stops playing abruptly. His hands still and he looks at her, confused. “What was that?” His voice is rusty. “What did you do?”
“I let you go,” Lorelei says.
“Did you have me?”
“I did,” Lorelei says. Her legs are watery. She drops down next to him on the piano bench. He scoots over as if to make room for her, but he makes a little too much room. She can feel the air between them, stirring the fine hair on her arms.
“I don’t understand.”
“I put a spell on you,” Lorelei says, because that’s the simplest way to explain it. “I know how crazy it sounds.”
“It does sound crazy,” Chris agrees. His tone is less skeptical than it is puzzled. “But it feels like it might be true.”
“I never meant to do it. I never wanted to hurt you. Or make you do anything that you didn’t want to do.”
Chris looks down at his feet and swings them back and forth, back and forth, their arc stunted so he doesn’t kick the piano’s base. There’s a long, uncomfortable pause. “You’re still beautiful,” he says. “You look the same to me. Mostly. Is your voice—”
“That’s really what I sound like,” she says. “I’m not— That’s not how it works. I’m not a witch or anything. It’s just…more powerful than some people’s.”
“I’ve felt crazy, the last few days,” Chris says. He almost reaches out a hand to touch her face, and then pulls it back. “God, did I really show up at your house? What a lunatic.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s messed up.”
“It was what I wanted. For you to, you know, want me. To want me enough.”
“It was more than enough.”
“Too much.” Lorelei ducks her head. “I got greedy.”
“You broke up with me!”
“I wanted to make you realize what you were missing,” Lorelei says. “I tried that, I tried Paul, this guy, it doesn’t matter, anyway, I just—I don’t know. All I wanted to do was show you that I loved you. I thought if you really knew that, you wouldn’t be afraid to love me back. And I’m sorry.” Lorelei’s voice breaks. “I’m sorry. I hate what I did. I hate that I—that I’ll never know if you could have loved me for real, if I’m even—if anyone could have loved me like that.”
Chris closes the piano’s lid over its keys and rests his elbows on the slick, lacquered wood, shoving the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he says. “I don’t know how I feel. How I’ve felt.”
“Okay.”
“I think I almost knew,” he says. “I’ve had girlfriends before, and you—after that night at the Roxy I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I wondered. About how sometimes it felt normal, and sometimes—not so much.”
“So there were times when it felt normal. Like. Okay.”
“I think so.” Chris frowns down at the piano. “Hard to tell. I’d never been under a spell before.” His laugh is ironic, and short. “I’m sorry. I just—I need some time to think about this. To figure it out.”
Which means it’s time for her to go. Lorelei stands up and tugs at the hem of her sweatshirt. It’s Zoe’s, and a little bit baggy on her, but she’s glad she wore it. The pool of fabric around her makes Zoe feel present, somehow. It reminds her that there are other people left in the world. She doesn’t let herself remember that she hasn’t heard from Zoe since the party.
Chris walks her to the front door. He doesn’t move to hug her goodbye.
“I’m sorry,” Lorelei says again, like it matters.
“Me too,” Chris says.
He closes the door carefully. Lorelei listens to the lock clicking into place. There are other people in the world, of course, and there are people who love her, but staring at the blank wood and listening to the silence behind it, she finds it’s hard to make herself care.
ON MONDAY LORELEI SKIPS SCHOOL. She rides with Jens and Nik, but the minute they get onto campus she starts to feel sick to her stomach. She loses herself in the crowd of students when they near the buildings, and slips back toward the parking lot as soon as she can. She steps off campus, and disappears.
At first she just walks around and watches cars on the street and all the other people who are also wandering around. What is it, exactly, that everyone else does all day?
She distracts herself with the usual things: catching up on homework, pretending to go shopping, thumbing through Facebook on her phone. She visits a coffee shop, and then a juice shop, and then the library. The world is the same as it’s always been: boring, and too busy for her. By four p.m. she’s unbearably lonely.
Happy hour is just getting started when she ducks into a restaurant filled with drunks saying good morning to each other at the bar. Lorelei takes a little two-seater along the wall and orders a sandwich. She pulls her English book out to read while she eats.
As she’s finishing up, one of the men at the bar makes his way over. He’s not stumbling, not yet, but his big hand grips a double shot of whiskey so cheap Lorelei can smell the fumes from across the table. He’s well-kept but his eyes are bloodshot and there’s a soft tremble to him, an unsteadiness that lives under his skin.
He says, “You look like you could use company.”
“Not really.” Lorelei doesn’t have to fake indifference. She just doesn’t care anymore. Let him try to talk to her.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“If I should, shouldn’t you be leaving me alone?” Lorelei is proud of herself for channeling Zoe so effectively. She looks pointedly at the glass in his hand.
“There are a lot of creeps in this place. I should know. I spend a lot of time here.”
“I’m sure.”
He leans across the table. “You’re a very pretty girl,” he says. “You should be careful.”
Something ugly rushes up in Lorelei. She is a pretty girl, with a pretty voice, and she’s never allowed to use it again. She’s going to have to put away the most beautiful and unusual part of herself because she doesn’t know how to wield it, because she let it get the best of her. And no one will ever know it. No one will ever know her.
No one should want to.
“Maybe you should be careful,” Lorelei says. She smiles. There’s a song playing at midvolume through the bar’s speakers. Deliberately, she starts to hum along. She weaves the melody through with the thinnest strand of compulsion, pulling him to her and braiding him up. His eyes get glassier and his pupils
swell. “Don’t you think?”
“Very pretty,” he repeats. Lorelei doesn’t even know what she’s doing with him, only that she’s doing it, siphoning off the dark feelings inside her because they’re too much to contain anymore.
“I’m ugly,” Lorelei says. “I’m horrible.”
“Okay.” He puts the glass down on the table, finally. Her pull is stronger than its thrall. Lorelei’s fingers twitch toward it but she doesn’t pick it up. She doesn’t need it now.
“Tell me how awful I am,” she says.
“You’re awful,” he says. “Like that?” When he says it, she can hear the nastiness in her tune reflected back at her, cruel and delicious. “Like that?” he asks, again. Lorelei hums a little more.
“Awful,” he repeats. “No one’s ever going to love you, you know. No one could ever love a girl like you. What are you?” He leans forward across the table. “Do you even know?”
A server catches sight of what’s going on: the pretty little girl and the big drunk man. He hurries over to stop it. “Everything all right here?” he asks. His eyes dart frantically between Lorelei and the man, and Lorelei and the glass of whiskey on the table. “Can I get you guys anything else?”
Lorelei hums and hums, until his jaw slackens too. “I’m leaving now,” she says. “You’ll cover my meal, right?” They both nod dumbly. “And forget me,” she says. “Like I was never even here.” She sings along to the words of the song as she leaves, and watches in the long mirror at the bar as every head turns to follow her out.
It’s a little weird, singing her way into places, but it works. There’s a row of open-air bars along the beach that Lorelei can slip into from the sidewalk, and if anyone notices her, she has ways of dealing with that.
She’s as young and vulnerable as she’s ever been, but now she’s untouchable too, surrounded by an invisible column of song. The freedom and power lick up her spine. The feeling is intoxicating.
