A Song to Take the World Apart

by Zan Romanoff

  Paul hugs Lorelei and Carina hello. Does he hug Lorelei for a second longer? She isn’t sure, and she isn’t sure how much she cares.

  “You made it,” Daniel says. “And you brought decorations, as requested.”

  Zoe shoots Lorelei a private little look. She knows he’s being lame. She doesn’t call him on it, though.

  “Does that mean you brought the drinks?” she asks instead.

  As they make their way across the room, Lorelei becomes more self-conscious about her appearance with every step. Her hair is loose and wild around her face, and Carina daubed her mouth with hot-pink lipstick, something bright and a little harsh to roughen up her flowy white dress. The house is so stark and sophisticated, and all of Daniel’s friends seem to match.

  She allows herself one more glance in Chris’s direction, and immediately loses track of whatever Paul is saying to her. Chris is shaking a curl out of his eyes, adjusting the microphone stand, and her entire body aches like a poked bruise with the desire to be close to him again. He sees her too, and freezes. Lorelei makes herself look away before he can.

  The bar top is littered with bottles: big cheap plastic handles of vodka and whiskey, plus a random assortment of stuff that looks like it was pulled from a half-dozen liquor cabinets. There are liqueurs and fancy bitters and sodas, elegant in glass but dusty with age.

  “What do you want?” Paul asks. Lorelei wonders if this is what dating is like when you’re not in love: boys asking you what you want, and buying you drinks, or making you drinks, and then you talk until the drink runs out, and it’s time to kiss, or leave.

  She wonders when the music is going to start.

  “Whatever is fine,” she says, to cover the fact that she doesn’t know the answer to his question.

  Daniel pours himself whiskey on ice and makes Zoe something pale and clear and fizzy. He doesn’t ask her what she wants. She kisses his cheek and takes a long, slow sip. Paul reaches for the whiskey after Daniel puts it down.

  Carina is eyeing the array of bottles like she has plans for them. “This is a pretty fancy setup,” she says.

  “It’s my parents’,” Daniel says. “All of it.”

  “And they don’t care—”

  “They really don’t.”

  “Great.” Carina pulls down a couple of glasses. “Paul, quit that, she does not want a Jack and Coke. Lorelei, you trust me?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s fine with me,” Paul says. He dumps her drink into his cup and takes a long, deep swallow.

  Daniel and Zoe round up their drinks and wander away from the group, looking casual, even though Lorelei is pretty sure they’re heading for a dark corner to make out in. Carina looks back and forth from Lorelei to Paul. “So,” she says. “Paul. Did someone tell you that Lorelei’s ex is here?”

  “Carina!” Lorelei expects Paul to be embarrassed, or angry, but he just laughs.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Daniel warned me. Don’t worry. I’m not looking to get my ass kicked tonight.”

  “I don’t think Chris is the ass-kicking type,” Lorelei says.

  “Oh.” Paul misunderstands her. He slings an arm around her shoulders. “In that case.”

  Carina hands her a drink. She says, “Lorelei, if I leave you alone with this dude, will you stay out of trouble for, like, ten minutes? My friend Jamie is over there and I want to go say hi.”

  “I’ll be good,” Lorelei says. Paul’s arm tightens.

  She sneaks another helpless glance at Chris. His guitar is strung from its strap around his neck, but his hands are at his sides. He’s looking down at the floor, at nothing. Bean jostles him and he almost trips, dazed, before he starts to tune the strings again.

  I did that, Lorelei thinks. She doesn’t know how to feel about the idea that she has some power over him, still.

  “Can you believe this place?” Paul asks.

  Lorelei wriggles out from under his arm. It’s too weird trying to talk to someone whose face she can’t see.

  “It’s something,” she says.

  “Daniel’s parents bought it during the crash in ’09,” Paul says. “Some zillionaire had it built, and then he lost all of his money, couldn’t make the mortgage—” The story drifts out of focus as the music starts up again. It sounds like idle chords, just Chris strumming, but the notes start to hang together and Lorelei recognizes the curl of the song calling her, Chris reaching out across the room and speaking in a language only the two of them know.

  Paul sways in closer to her. His breath is sharp with whiskey, and he’s telling her a story about ruin with a smile on his face. Lorelei wonders about the man who built this palace, who picked out the hilltop and the stones and the glass. She wonders if he ever got to live here, and look out over the ocean at storms rolling in and snarling against the shore below. He probably thought they would never reach him. She imagines the betrayal he felt when they did.

  She doesn’t want power that comes from jealousy or anger. She doesn’t want Chris’s mouth to look hard and flat, and his fingers to trip over the strings when he tries to play. Lorelei looks at Paul and doesn’t recognize him. She couldn’t pick him out in a crowd.

  All this time, she’s been telling herself that it was singing and then not singing that ruined her mother, and her grandmother. But maybe it was loving, and not loving. Lorelei can imagine all too well how it would be if she stayed here, and made polite conversation, and let this stranger kiss her. It would be fine. She wouldn’t hate it. But it would dull down the best parts of her, sanding away her brightness and her edges until she was too tired to know the difference.

  “I’m sorry,” Lorelei says. She cuts Paul off in the middle of a sentence. “I think I have to go talk to Chris. My ex. For a minute.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea? Sometimes booze makes things—”

  “Yeah. I’m sure. I’m good. Thank you.”

  Paul heaves a tired sigh. “You’ll regret it,” he says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You can get back together with him,” he says. “But you’ll just end up splitting again.”

  “You don’t know him. You don’t know me!”

  “I know how it is,” Paul says. “I’m in the middle of this shit too, remember? That was supposed to be the point of us. That we’d keep each other from making these kinds of stupid decisions.”

  “I don’t want to be a distraction,” Lorelei says. “I don’t want to pretend not to want something anymore.”

  “Even if it’s just going to break your heart all over again?”

  Lorelei walked out on Chris so that he wouldn’t break her heart, and she wouldn’t take control of his. But they deserve a chance to run it all the way into the ground together—or to find a way to make it work. She knows what she is, at least. Her mother never did.

  “Yeah,” Lorelei says. “Sorry. Don’t be mad at Zoe, or Daniel.”

  “I just think you’re being stupid,” Paul says.

  Lorelei shrugs him off.

  Letting herself be stupid feels like a privilege. Where have smartness and self-control ever gotten her?

  Chris sees her coming, and comes to meet her.

  “Hey,” she says. “I just, um, I just wanted to say hi. Since we’re both here. Or whatever.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Hey. Hi. How, um, how are you, I guess?”

  “Fine.” Lorelei has said the word so many times in the last few months that it’s lost any meaning it ever had. Fine means lost and sad and grieving, and falling in and out of love, and singing at the seashore, and the glimmer of Zoe’s dress tonight, bright against all the dark things in Lorelei’s head. Being with Chris called out her lightness and all the best parts of her. He was the answer then, and he’s the answer now. He always has been. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” he says. The catch of his gaze on hers makes her think that he means it exactly the way she does: fine and not fine. They’re both too full with feeling to try to put it into words. “Do
you, um—we could—talk, a little bit, if you want, upstairs.”

  “Sure.”

  He walks behind her on the staircase and across the landing at the top, one hand hovering lightly just above the small of her back to guide her. They head to a guest room littered with the band’s stuff, guitar cases and stray pieces of sheet music and a three-quarters-full bottle of vodka on the bed.

  Chris closes the door behind them. He looks at her for a long, searching moment and then seizes her face and kisses her, too hard, too much teeth and pressure and desperation. Lorelei clings to him all the same, though, winding her arms around him fiercely.

  “I can’t do this,” he whispers against the skin of her neck. “I thought I could stop but I can’t, I can’t stop thinking about you. It’s like you’re stuck in my head or something, Lorelei. Oh my god, what am I doing?”

  She strokes his hair and holds him, his long body bent down to encircle hers.

  “Does that mean—” she asks, and doesn’t finish the sentence.

  Chris lets go of her and slumps down onto the bed. Lorelei doesn’t join him. The wave of her joy starts to fall away.

  “Where’s your mom?” she asks. “I thought she always came to see you play.”

  “I didn’t invite her to the house party that’s paying us in booze,” Chris says. “I’m pretty good, but I’m not that honest.”

  “So there are some things you’ll lie about. Just not me.”

  “It’s not only the lying,” Chris says. “Trust me, I don’t want to put you through…anything.”

  “Nik told me about Lisa.”

  “Of course he did. I mean, it sucked for her too, you know. Lying and sneaking around and—”

  “I’m not her, though.”

  “Of course you’re not.” Chris sits up and gestures to Lorelei. “Come here,” he says.

  “No.”

  “I can’t abandon her,” he says. “I can’t—”

  “So don’t abandon her. Make time for both of us. You could do it if she knew.”

  “I can’t tell her.”

  “What do you think she’ll do to you? Kick you out of the house? If she loves you, she’ll give in eventually.”

  “I don’t want her to give in, though,” Chris says. “I don’t want to hurt her and I don’t want to hurt you. And I love you too much to lie about you, but I love you too much to just forget about you. Can you see, Lorelei, how much this sucks for me?”

  Oma knew what she was when she made her choice to keep silent. Petra didn’t when she sang to Henry and pulled him down with her, to live under her spell. Lorelei knows who she is, and what she’s capable of. She’s not going to keep quiet and she’s not going to walk away, or let Chris walk away. Not without a fight.

  “Do you believe that I love you?” she asks.

  Chris nods.

  “I want us to sing together,” she says. “Just once. The duet. Like we talked about.” She’ll tell him how she feels—really tell him—and let him make up his own mind.

  “God, I would love that,” Chris says, and kisses her again.

  Lorelei marches downstairs and makes herself another drink before she can think better of what she’s just put into motion.

  The alcohol keeps agreeing with her decision. It’s a very rough approximation of whatever Carina mixed her earlier—too sweet, almost sticky—but it doesn’t matter, really. Zoe is hanging on Daniel’s arm in the center of a small, sparkling group, and Carina is sitting on a low couch, smoking out an open window. Angela and Jackson are wrapped around one another in the kitchen, laughing.

  Paul is sitting in the center of a group of guys, and even though she’s never cared about him, not really, the way he avoids looking at her stings.

  Lorelei knows she doesn’t belong anywhere in this sharp-cornered room. When she tries to look outside, she just sees her own face reflected back and forth in the windows, superimposed over the dark stretch of ocean below. She’ll get Chris back and they’ll leave the minute his set ends. They’ll get in a car and drive somewhere together, singing along to the radio, holding hands the whole way home.

  Chris comes back downstairs a few minutes after she does, and The Trouble starts tuning up in earnest. Zoe sees Lorelei and breaks away from Daniel to come stand with her. “Sorry,” she says. Her breath is astringent with citrus and vodka. Lorelei watches her pour herself another drink, the shine of the liquid mixing sluggishly with the quarter inch of melted ice in the bottom of the glass. “Did I totally abandon you?”

  “Nah.” Lorelei regrets the second drink; she wishes one of them was clear-headed. “I went to talk to Chris, actually.”

  “Talk,” Zoe says. She runs her fingers through Lorelei’s tousled curls. “I’m so sure.”

  “We’re going to sing together. Like we talked about before we broke up.”

  “Oh, I’m so excited!” Tipsiness makes Zoe’s face mobile and childlike. “I’ve never heard you sing before!”

  “I mean, it probably won’t be that great.”

  “It will, though.” Zoe regards Lorelei very seriously. “It will be great, because you are so great. The greatest, really.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Lorelei says, trying to make it a joke. “I’m pretty sure Paul doesn’t think so.”

  Zoe will not be swayed. “Whatever to Paul. Seriously, Lorelei. You are the greatest and best, and I’m just…I wanted to say, all I want is for you to be happy. I think it’s amazing that we’re friends.”

  “I think so too,” Lorelei says.

  “I love you,” Zoe tells her.

  “I love you too,” Lorelei says.

  Zoe wouldn’t love her if she knew, maybe, but then, she doesn’t have to. No one does. If it works right, all it’s going to do is open a door. Lorelei’s family is good at singing, but better at keeping secrets, and she’s her mother’s daughter, and her grandmother’s too.

  By the time she’s called on to perform, she’s had plenty of opportunity to get nervous again. The Trouble seems to blow through their set with unusually polished ease, and Daniel’s drunk hipster friends dance around happily, whooping and hollering between songs. Lorelei sees some of the girls eye Chris with interest, watching his shaggy hair and full, bright smile, the way he gets close to the mic and cups it in one long-fingered hand as he sings.

  When it’s time, he invites her up with a nod of his head. “This is Lorelei,” he says to the crowd. “Everyone say, ‘Hi, Lorelei.’ ”

  “Hi, Lorelei!” Zoe’s voice is loudest of all.

  Chris puts his arm around her. He’s warm and solid, the surest thing.

  I love you, Lorelei thinks. I love you, and I need you to be brave for me.

  Her nerves disappear the minute the beat kicks in. It’s the same slow, driving build that caught her that day in their practice space. Chris takes the first verse slower than she’s ever heard it and he looks at her while he sings. It’s so clear, in that moment: Whatever there is between the two of them is palpable, and powerful. It’s too big for Lorelei to deny any longer.

  She comes in on the chorus. She meant to sing it a little on the low side, the safe side. She knew what she was doing with Jackson, but she’s never tried singing in front of a crowd before—not on purpose, anyway—and she’s not sure whether her siren powers will work on just Chris or if there will be collateral damage. So she looks at him. She thinks only of him.

  When she starts to sing, though, sound pours out of her. It’s like opening a valve or tapping a vein: Lorelei wails under the pressure of so much at once, sound and feeling exploding from behind a broken dam. The spaces within her that seemed to be hollow were in fact full of longing. Now months of desperate craving are laid bare for the world to hear. I love you becomes I need you, and I need you to be brave becomes I need you, I need you, I need you to save me, I’m so scared of losing you, of being on my own, of having no one to take care of me. I need you. I need I need I need I need I need I need you.

  Lorelei’s knee
s buckle as the chorus ends. She sways, almost stumbles, but keeps her feet.

  Chris starts the second verse, but his voice is mechanical and flat. His eyes are locked on hers; if she didn’t need the song to keep going, he would cut it off and let it drop. On the second chorus he steps away from the microphone, handing it over to her.

  Lorelei thinks she should be scared but she isn’t. The first chorus was a little messy, but she’ll clean it up now. The second time is like the second drink: so much easier to swallow. She sings out as sweet and serious as she can, the same words again, again.

  She hears someone calling her name faintly. Zoe is saying Lorelei, waving and smiling, dancing in Daniel’s arms. Even Paul is dancing, not frowning or avoiding her anymore.

  Lorelei looks out at Zoe and loves her. She looks at Carina and loves her. She loves Daniel for making this happen, and she loves all of his dumb, rich friends.

  Lorelei wants to stay like this forever. She never wants it to end.

  The bond between her and Chris has been twisting and fraying, sparking like electrical wire. Lorelei feels the moment when she loses control, and it snaps and then spreads: she can feel herself catching them up in turn, everybody in the room coming under some version of the spell, and it’s not love, that’s not it, they’re just—dancing, and smiling, glassy-eyed, like they can’t stop. Lorelei surges forward, trying to rush her way to the end of the song.

  But even she is caught up now. The floodgates are open, and the sound she’s kept locked in the back of her throat is unleashed. It roars through her, a force all its own. There is no stopping it until it’s done with her. Jackson and Bean and Chris keep playing. She makes it through the chorus once more, just once. All of the room’s attention is focused on her. She’s at the center of everything.

  Lorelei closes her eyes and wrenches herself out of the song with all the strength she has. The boys keep playing.

  “Come on,” someone calls out. “Keep singing!”

  “Keep singing,” Chris says. He leans against her too heavily. “Please, Lorelei—”