by Zan Romanoff
She could dress up if she wanted to. She has a closet full of nicer stuff, mostly the dresses her mom brings home from work, samples or factory rejects with uneven hemlines and missing buttons, problems Oma could fix in a few minutes. But Lorelei never puts them on. She doesn’t like the air of petty bribery that accompanies them, these things her mother gives her instead of affection and attention. They hang in her closet like artifacts on display.
Still, Lorelei borrows Zoe’s lip gloss after lunch on Monday. She’s glad she did when Chris lopes up next to her in the hall a couple of hours later, sleepy-eyed even though it’s well after noon. He nudges her with the tip of his shoulder as they fall into step. “Here you are,” he says. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“Here I am,” Lorelei agrees. Of course I’m here, she thinks. It’s two p.m. on a weekday and she’s walking from English to history, her last class of the day.
“It’s weird, right?” He walks so close at her side that their hands brush occasionally, his knuckles against the skin of her wrist. He keeps turning to look at her too, not even shy about it. “Seeing people in different contexts.” Lorelei flashes back to his mother in the dark club, serene and distant.
“I’ve seen you around before,” she admits. “I think of you as being, like, a creature of the halls.”
“A creature of the halls!” he repeats, delighted. “I mean, no, but that’s—that’s great, I like that, a creature of the halls.”
She doesn’t ask if he’s ever noticed her. Pretty blond girls are a dime a dozen at Venice and all across west Los Angeles. She’s part of the scenery here: there are palm trees and ocean views and blondes.
“Are you going to class?” she asks as he follows her around a turn.
“Nah,” he says. “Maybe that’s why you see me in the halls so often. That’s mostly where I am.”
“You don’t get in trouble?”
“I don’t.”
“How—”
“I’ve got a system.” His mouth turns sly. “I can show you, if you want.”
“Um.” Lorelei ducks her head. “That’s, uh, really cool of you.”
“But you’re going to class.”
They’ve pulled up outside the classroom door. Lorelei fiddles with the strap on her backpack and examines the bright blue polish chipping off her nails. She has never ditched in her life.
“Yeah.”
“S’cool.”
She twists her mouth to hide a smile of relief that he won’t try to convince her, and that he doesn’t care if she doesn’t want to be bad.
“Come find me after school, though, okay? My car’s in the shop, so Jackson’s supposed to drive me to practice, but he and Angela always have, like, at least a half hour of making out somewhere between last bell and us leaving, so I should be findable.” He raises an eyebrow at her and rises up onto his toes, drifting farther into her space. “Assuming you know where to look.”
I don’t, Lorelei wants to say, but she does, and he knows it. He turns on his heel and disappears down the hall.
She walks into class still flushed, her cheeks warm with high, bright color. Mrs. Whitlock asks her a question, and when she answers it, the attention of the room shifts her way. Boys lean over their desks toward her like flowers tilting toward sunlight. Some of the girls do too.
Lorelei notices it and she doesn’t. High school is always a sea of bodies reacting to one another, pushed and pulled by chemical change and a lot of loose talk. She never feels like she understands it completely. Anyway, everyone drifts back into place after a minute or two.
Lorelei’s mind is elsewhere. She’s pleased to have gotten the answer to Mrs. Whitlock’s question right, and that she’s had her turn in the spotlight already. She spends the rest of the period thinking about Chris.
As promised, he isn’t hard to find. Lorelei tries to look casual as she walks out, chatting with Taylor, who sits next to her in class, but as soon as they walk through the school’s front door, she spots him. He’s sitting on a bench with his guitar in his lap. Jackson and Angela are sitting next to him, and they are, in fact, making out, so she has to pause awkwardly in front of their trio.
“Oh,” Taylor says. “Um. Bye?”
“Yeah,” Lorelei says. “Bye!”
Taylor gives her a little side eye as she leaves, surprised at the company Lorelei is keeping. Not just seniors: seniors in a band.
Chris smiles up at her. “You found me!”
“I looked.”
“Sit.” Chris bumps a hip against Jackson, who scootches over and lets Angela crawl into his lap.
Lorelei is no stranger to PDA. She’s not innocent, not exactly. She’s seen movies, educational screenings put on by Carina in the Soroushes’ living room late at night. But she’s never been this close to live making out before, the wet slurps of mouths and tongues, even their breath getting sloppy and loud. She watches Angela’s hand disappear up the front of Jackson’s shirt as she folds herself into the space next to Chris.
“Sorry about them,” he says. “J’s parents are super strict, and Angela’s folks are…Jehovah’s Witnesses?”
“Regular old evangelicals.” Angela pulls away long enough to correct Chris. Jackson is still kissing her neck.
“Anyway. Not into, uh, alone time for these two.” He waggles his eyebrows indelicately at her. “So they get it where they can.”
“I don’t mind,” Lorelei says. “What are you playing?”
“No-thing.” Chris strums a few big, loose chords. She watches his callused fingers working the strings, and her own fingertips itch. She can’t tell whether she wants to touch him or the guitar, each of them smooth and shining in the sunlight. “I was trying to, like, make something up, but it all just sounds goofy.”
“Sounded all right to me.”
“I mean, it doesn’t sound bad,” he says. He plucks stray notes while he talks. Lorelei envies the ease of his body making music without him noticing. “It just doesn’t sound like a song yet, you know? I can make sound, but I’m having trouble making music. I was thinking about you, actually. I’ve been thinking about you singing with me.”
They’re sitting in warm September sunlight, but Lorelei can’t help her shiver.
“Shuuuut uuuup,” Jackson groans. He disengages himself from Angela and swivels around to address Chris directly. “Can this artistic bullshit, please, dude, I am begging you.” He notices Lorelei for the first time and tilts his head in her direction. “Don’t listen to him, little freshman,” he says. “Chris is one hundred percent full of shit.”
Before Lorelei has time to correct him—she’s a sophomore—Chris cuffs him on the shoulder and Jackson shoves him back. They’re clumsy and familiar with each other, tumbling off the bench so they can wrestle on the grass.
This leaves Angela and Lorelei sitting at opposite ends of the bench, watching. Angela very deliberately straightens out her skirt and her tank top, runs her fingers through her hair, and checks her makeup in a silver heart-shaped compact mirror. She doesn’t look at Lorelei. “Boys,” she says eventually. “Boys.”
Jackson has Chris haphazardly pinned. He beams up at Angela. “Look what I did for you, baby,” he says. “I caught you a Chris.”
“Not interested.”
Jackson knees Chris in the thigh and scrambles back up to the bench. “Didn’t catch your name,” he says to Lorelei as Angela resituates herself, draping her legs over his.
“Lorelei.”
“Lorelei. Cool. Jackson. And this is Angela.”
“Angela,” Angela affirms. Then she nips at Jackson’s earlobe.
“So how do you two know each other?”
“Lorelei came to the show on Saturday,” Chris says. “We started chatting. Turns out she goes to Venice too. Obviously.”
“Oh, right,” Jackson says. “You said. I remember now. You coming to watch us practice?”
Lorelei shakes her head. Her brothers are probably already waiting for her in the parking lot.
She should go now before they start to wonder, or, worse, look for her.
“I should go, actually,” she says. “Gotta find my ride.”
“I can get you a ride home after,” Chris offers. “If that’s the issue.”
“Oh.”
All of yesterday’s weird, ominous warnings swirl up in her head: the story of Oma singing and being silenced, and the emptiness of her father’s glassy, exhausted eyes. But then she looks at Chris, sunny, smiling, normal and happy, and it seems impossible that anything about this could be dangerous. He’s just trying to pull her into his world of band practice and hanging out, catching rides, maybe even eventually making out on a bench somewhere too.
Screw it, Lorelei thinks.
“If it’s not gonna be a problem?” she says. Chris shakes his head emphatically. “Let me just go tell my— I’ll be right back.”
She finds Jens and Nik waiting impatiently and tells them that she’s going over to Zoe’s. Someone will drop her off at home later. She’s never lied to them like this before, but it’s easy to make her voice come out steady and even. Of course they believe her. Where else would she be going?
“Tell Oma,” she says. “And Mom and Dad, I guess.”
“Sure,” Jens says. He’s sitting in the driver’s seat, already turning the keys in the ignition. “Hey, Nik, this means we can—”
The rest of his suggestion is lost as the engine roars to life and the twins start to roll their windows up. Lorelei sees, though, the suspicious look that Nik gives her as they pull out of the lot, the frown that formed at the corners of his mouth when he listened to her lie.
She shoots Zoe a text while she’s walking back to Chris and company. Chris asked me to come to band practice to hang out (!!!) told J & N I was going over to yours hope that’s okay. She thinks Zoe will understand and forgive her for trying on a lie all by herself. Lorelei keeps hoping to bump into her on the walk, to squeeze her hand and maybe steal another swipe of lip gloss. But the sea of faces she passes through on the way seems blanker and more unfamiliar than ever.
Chris’s smile, when she gets back, is warm and welcome. She reaches out a hand and he grabs it and pulls himself up. He doesn’t let go while they walk. He keeps her close so they can talk a little bit, low and private. Jackson and Angela go on ahead and he lets them. Lorelei loves how open and easy he is with her, like he’s known her all along.
THE TROUBLE PRACTICES IN a studio space Bean’s parents rent for them. “He’s a great drummer,” Chris explains, “and an even better rich kid.” It sounds fancy. Lorelei doesn’t know what to expect, but when they get there, the building is just a bunch of big rooms on either side of an echoing concrete hallway. The walls are thick with insulation, and everything smells dry and empty and industrial.
They’ve personalized the studio by making it a mess: the floor is littered with tangled strands of Christmas lights that someone got tired of tacking to the walls, plus pages torn out of magazines, and plastic pieces from novelty toys. There’s a bag of kazoos stashed in one corner. The air is sweet with a skunky smell Lorelei recognizes from the boardwalk as weed smoke. The walls are plastered with posters showing half-naked women lounging and half-naked men playing guitars.
Angela split off when they got to the parking lot, so it’s just the three of them at the space. Bean drifts in a little while after. Lorelei sets herself up on one of the ancient armchairs, clearly a Goodwill salvage, and listens politely while the boys banter back and forth.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket and she pulls it out, grateful for the distraction. There are two texts: one from Zoe that just says, DETAILS AT LUNCH TMRW PLEASE AND THANK U, and one from Nik that reads, Oma making schnitzel for dinner tonight, be home by 6. She ignores Nik and sends Zoe I’m sitting in a chair they haven’t started playing yet I feel awkward help?
The response is almost instantaneous: You’re a bad bitch, girl. Just act like you’re in charge.
Lorelei feels nothing like a bad bitch. She feels like a little girl hanging out with the big kids for the first time, painfully uncertain about what to do with her hands, arms, legs, and face. She imagines Carina here in her place but that’s not so helpful, because Carina would be outside smoking a cigarette, or else joining in the banter about some band—whoever they’re talking about, Lorelei doesn’t recognize the name—but neither of those things is really an option. Instead, she feigns boredom, drapes her legs over the chair, and fiddles around uselessly on her phone.
It’s a relief when they actually start practicing. This means playing through a whole song once, usually, and then breaking it down to its component parts, working out a bass line, a guitar riff, the precise staccato rhythm of a drum fill. It’s a little like how Oma taught her to sew, Lorelei thinks—turning shirts inside out, checking the seams. She’s starting to see the way The Trouble constructs sound.
They spend the last half hour working on a new song, something slow and driving. Chris presses up against a mic for a full-on croon. One unruly curl falls into his eyes, and he tosses it back, impatient. His mouth is warm and moving. Lorelei sits up straight in her chair. The energy of the sound comes in at the crown of her head and shakes her down to the soles of her feet.
“Shit,” Jackson says, eventually. “I gotta go in a minute. I didn’t realize how late it was.”
Lorelei checks her phone: it’s five-thirty, which means she’s about to be in trouble.
“I wanna go through it once all together,” Chris says. They’ve been playing in fragments, going over the chorus, the bridge, a sketched-out second verse. He’s still positioned in front of the microphone, unmoving. “I just want to hear it—the whole thing. Anyway, my ride won’t be here for a minute. We’ve got time.”
“Just once,” Jackson agrees, tapping his fingers against the fretboard of his bass.
The song starts off slow and deliberate, the beat strong and undulating. Chris moves his hips in time with the music. He catches Lorelei’s eye and gives her a long, slow smile. She feels a thrill deep in the pit of her stomach, but it’s nothing like what happens when the first chorus kicks in. The guitar, bass, drums, and Chris’s howling wail all come together to fill her up, and tumble over. It’s too much, and not enough, and Lorelei’s skin is so fever-hot she can’t stand it a minute longer.
“I’m sorry,” she gasps. Chris stops playing. “I’m— It’s just—too much—”
She bolts before she can think about it, out through the doors and down a long, dusty hallway, running the wrong way, not caring. She bursts through another set of doors and out onto an abandoned loading dock. She sits down on the concrete ledge and puts her face in her hands, trying to catch her breath.
The sun has just finished setting, and the marine layer is rolling in again. The day’s last light has a surreal quality, an almost-green tint that makes her feel like she’s much farther away from home than she’s ever been, like she’s deep underwater, and only just now noticing how hard it is to breathe.
She stays out there for five minutes, maybe, just long enough to get really, really embarrassed by what she’s done, before Chris pushes through the doors and drops to a squat beside her.
“Are you okay?” he asks, putting a warm hand on her back. She leans into it.
“Fine,” she says. “Fine, sorry, I don’t—I don’t know what happened back there.”
“It’s okay,” he says. He shifts to his knees, and, when she doesn’t protest, swings himself around so that he’s sitting at her side. “It’s— Is it weird if it’s a little cool?”
“Huh?”
“I just— No one’s ever been moved by our music like that before.” He shrugs and smiles a dopey, lopsided grin.
“I thought you would think it was weird,” she admits. “Like, really weird.”
“Nah,” he says. He cocks his head to one side, angles his face toward hers and pauses, considering. “I have a feeling about you,” he says. “You’re sensitive. Deep. I knew it when I saw you at the show. Yo
u look— You can tell on your face that the whole world affects you. That you’re open to it in this really cool way.”
Lorelei considers the idea. Maybe it’s true, and maybe that’s what it is about her and the women in her family. Maybe they’re all deep and sensitive, and delicate. Maybe it’s the purity and clarity of her voice that’s too much for anyone to hear. She touches the curve of her cheek and tries to let her expression be open, to look at Chris like he’s looking at her: enthralled, entranced.
“I want you to sing with us,” he says. “It seems like you love music, and I want you to help us make it. I think it could be, like, really amazing.”
For the first time Lorelei understands instinctively exactly what Oma was trying to keep her from: wanting something so powerfully that saying no to it feels impossible. His face tilts toward hers and comes in close, closer, like they’re magnetized, closer and closer, so close now, so close that—
He leans in and seals his mouth over hers.
Lorelei has never been kissed before. Chris’s fingertips come, gentle, to the corner of her jaw, guiding her forward. He kisses her long and slow and sweet, easing her into it. She loves how it feels, his smile warm and moving against her lips.
He jerks back when the door bangs open behind them. “Chris,” Jackson says. “Your mom’s here.”
“She’s—shit—what?” Chris leaps to his feet. “She isn’t supposed to be here. Greg said he’d give me a ride.”
“I don’t know what happened to Greg,” Jackson says. “But she’s here, and she’s waiting, and she wants to know where the hell you are.”
“She’s not inside, right?” Chris grabs Lorelei’s shoulder and urges her up, pulling her back into the building with him almost as an afterthought.
“Bean’s stalling her out front.”
“Oh, thank god, I— Lorelei—can you—I’m so sorry, but can you find another ride?” He’s so sweet and desperate that she finds herself nodding slowly, watching him rush as he ducks back into the studio and throws his guitar into its case, a few stray papers into his backpack. He pauses next to her, just inside the doorway, and brushes an apologetic kiss across her forehead before scrambling out, down the hallway, and disappearing around a corner. Then it’s just her and Jackson in the room.