by Zan Romanoff
“I’m done,” she says to Bean and Jackson. “I’m done,” she says again. “The song is over, let’s—”
“Keep singing,” Bean calls over the frantic beat. Everyone keeps moving in time with it. They’re caught up in a crazy, synced unison. No one can break away from it. There’s a compulsive regularity to their movements.
“Stop,” Lorelei cries out. “Stop, stop, stop.” The last stop comes out as a piercing shriek, high and thin and awful.
Bean drops his drumsticks. It takes a moment for the fuzz of the guitar and bass to fade from the amps.
The whole house descends into sudden, total silence.
No one moves. Everyone watches her. Lorelei is frozen to the spot, rigid with terror.
“Lorelei?” Zoe asks, soft and sweet.
It’s her voice that breaks the spell. Lorelei is shot through with adrenaline, and she turns and runs back up the stairs, to the room where she and Chris kissed—an hour ago, maybe, or in some other lifetime. She slams the door behind her and locks it for good measure. She thinks to herself over and over: What just happened?
And then: Oh my god, what have I done?
They come knocking. First it’s Jackson. “I told you,” he says. “I told you to just— Please, look, come back, okay? Everyone wants you to, Lorelei, please.”
Then it’s Bean, who she’s never known to plead. “I want to— Can we do that again, please, please, let’s, Lorelei—”
Then it’s Daniel, and then Carina. “Come on,” they all say. “Once more, just once more. I want to hear that again.” She ignores them, and presses her face into the soft mound of pillows. The guest room is as stark as the rest of the house. There’s nothing as human as a box of tissues to blow her nose with.
Zoe comes and sighs a little bit. “I don’t understand what’s going on,” she says. “I wish you would come out and have fun with everyone. You were amazing, L. Everyone wants you to come back and sing more. The party might go all night if you would just come out again.” It’s terrifying to hear her own words in each of their mouths. I don’t want this to ever end.
Chris comes last. He leans his body against the door and doesn’t say anything, and for a while she can’t be quite sure it’s him. Finally he speaks. “Hey, baby,” he says. He doesn’t sound so strange. He sounds almost normal, she tells herself. “I brought you some water.”
Lorelei is thirsty and tired. The first wave of adrenalized fear is gone, replaced by shaky numbness. She’s tired of trembling, and waiting.
She gets herself up, courage in hand. We were always already in love, she tells herself before she opens the door.
He doesn’t look like a zombie. Not at first, anyway. But when she gets closer, the signs are all there, unmistakable: his smile is a little too wide and his pupils are a little too large. He sits on the bed and lets her sniffle and sip the water for a while before he starts kissing her temples, her cheeks, the corners of her mouth.
“Hey,” Lorelei says, “hey, hey,” but he keeps kissing her, running his hands over her fretfully, like he just can’t quite get enough contact.
“You sounded amazing,” he murmurs. The words are so sweet and intimate, whispered close against her skin. They turn Lorelei’s blood to ice. Glaciers form in her stomach, their edges jagged. “Why don’t you sing like that all the time?”
“I don’t know,” she says, forcing a laugh. “I’m not sure I liked it that much, actually.”
“You’re so good, though.” Chris pulls away enough to look at her. “You made me feel things, Lorelei. It was like, all of a sudden everything got very clear, you know? I listened to you and thought, okay, okay, this girl is— I love you. I can take care of you. I can make sure you aren’t ever lonely, or alone.”
Lorelei closes her eyes. This is what I wanted, she reminds herself. It doesn’t feel like a victory, though. Instead, it seems tainted and ugly. She thought she could work it subtly. She was wrong. Her voice is a sledgehammer, and now she’s sitting in a room full of what it shattered.
“Are you sure about that?” she asks. She wonders if she could use her voice to undo it, but that seems like an obviously bad idea, using magic she doesn’t understand to fix magic she doesn’t understand.
“Of course I’m sure,” he says. He cups a hand against her cheek. His skin is rough with calluses. Lorelei takes his hand between her own palms and skims her fingertips over the raised patches. These are marks he’s made on himself over the course of hours and years. He’s worked his hands into shape so that they can bend strings to make music, so he can make the music he loves without the music causing him pain.
Chris says, “I was never sure before. That’s why— I’m so sorry that I lied.”
“You lied.” Time stands very, very still. “About what?”
“About my mom.” Chris is reckless with the need to confess to her. Lorelei wishes she could make him stop. “She’s never made a rule about dating, really. But I always felt so awful. And it was easier to explain it if it was her fault. It was easier to let you believe that—but it doesn’t matter, because I love you too much for it to matter, and I know that now.”
“She said she never wanted to see me again.”
Chris cocks his head and looks at her. “She was pissed that she’d talked to you like that,” he says. “Gotten emotional. Told you those stories. And I mean, I wouldn’t have made up the rule if she wasn’t so lonely. If she didn’t need me to stay around.”
“But it was never her rule.” Reality is a slow, cold thing. “You made it up, because it was easier.”
“Because I love her,” Chris says. “I didn’t know how to be there for the two of you at once.” He grabs her hands and holds them in his own. “I was so confused,” he goes on. “I didn’t know what I wanted, and I felt horrible, Lorelei, about you, and about Mom. About everything. But it’s so clear now. It’s like—like everything that wasn’t you just faded away from me. That’s how I felt when I met you, when I heard you sing the first time. It was like you woke me up, like you—”
“When did I sing to you?” The cold in Lorelei’s belly seeps softly outward, wrapping tendrils around her shoulders, elbows, and knees. It locks her joints into place. “When, Chris, when—”
“You finished my song,” he says. “You don’t remember? That night at the show, on the street, you sang that last line, and I—”
Oh lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? Of course she sang to him, that one little phrase, that tossed-off nothing. She didn’t even realize he heard her; she certainly didn’t think he could have caught anything from it if she did. She wasn’t thinking about anything at all in the moment.
But he found her at school on Monday and walked too close, asked too insistently. She thought it was just her. She thought maybe he just saw her, maybe he just loved her, and that was all. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t have. He didn’t love her enough not to lie to her: she gave him a taste, and it was too much and not enough.
The room spins. Lorelei is sick and shaking and everything is moving around her, so much color, so much light, Chris touching her, touching her, saying things, she can’t, she can’t, he’s been under her spell every minute, and she can’t—
“I have to go,” Lorelei says. “Can you find Zoe and Carina for me? Can you tell them we have to go right now?”
ZOE AND CARINA DON’T understand. “Could you just—” Carina starts as they’re buckling themselves into the car. Zoe socks her in the arm to keep her from finishing the question. Lorelei is in the backseat by herself, still shivering.
“I’m sorry,” Zoe says. Lorelei asked them not to talk about it, and they’re trying. “But, like, I almost can’t even believe that was you, Lorelei. I can’t believe you don’t, like, sing all the time.”
Carina says, “You just sounded great, that’s all. I was only going to say if you wanted to, you could. You should. I don’t know. Yeah. Okay, Zoe?”
“I’m sorry you’re feeling weird, L,” Zoe says. S
he reaches back to touch Lorelei’s knee. “But it might make you feel better? To sing a little more?”
Lorelei wants to scream. Stop talking about it, she wants to yell, but it’s useless, clearly: they’re trying, and they can’t seem to let it go. Her phone buzzes again and again in her purse, with texts from Jackson, Paul, Angela, Chris. Come back. She imagines all of them milling around uselessly, in that beautiful house so high above the city, trying to find the rhythm they’re looking for. Something to hold them all in place again.
She can feel it, now, in the beat of her heart, the steady pulse that powers her. She could unravel herself and tie them all up again. I won’t do it, Lorelei promises, and then remembers all of the promises she’s made and broken since school started in September. She’s not nearly as good as she’s always thought she was. Oma and her mother were both right about one thing: She didn’t want to know. Not really.
The rest of the ride back to Venice is quiet. As they pull up in front of Lorelei’s house, Zoe asks, “You’re sure you don’t want to sleep over?”
“Nah,” Lorelei says. “Thanks, no, I’m cool. I’ll call you tomorrow—”
“You should,” Zoe says. “I want you to—” But the rest of the sentence is lost.
Lorelei slams the car door behind her and almost runs up the steps to the house. She closes the door and slumps against it, breathing hard. She should feel safe, now, but she doesn’t, really. She carries her own danger around with her. Destruction is always lying in wait, under her skin and at the back of her throat. Her own breath is ready and waiting to take her world apart.
LORELEI WAKES UP HUNGRY. Her stomach is clenched against emptiness, and her head hurts. With her eyes still closed, she thinks, I want chicken soup. Oma’s is thick and rich and garlicky, and perfect for when she’s feeling a little bit off. She thinks, When was the last time Oma made soup, anyway? before she remembers that Oma hasn’t made soup in a while now, and loss comes crashing through her all over again.
When it’s done with her, the coldness in her bones tightens and resolves itself, and she remembers the night before.
Her first sleepy desire for something warm and comforting curdles in her stomach. Her sheets are twisted, looped and knotted around an ankle, a wrist. She kicks herself free and sits up, pushing the tangle of hair off her face. She went to bed in last night’s makeup, and her pillowcase is smeared with it, black and pink. What a mess.
Nik is downstairs, sitting at the dining room table with a textbook in front of him and a bowl of half-eaten oatmeal at his side. “Hey,” he says when she passes by. He barely looks up from his work. “We’re on our own this morning—Mom and Dad took Jens on a tour of UCLA.”
“How’d you get out of that one?”
“Didn’t apply. I’m not staying in California for college,” Nik says. “They know that.”
“You think Jens will?”
“I think Jens finds a lot of ways to avoid saying no to stuff.”
In the kitchen, Lorelei opens the fridge and the freezer, but there’s no magical leftover soup to be had. Nik is saying something in the other room, but his voice is muffled and she can’t quite make it out. She slams both doors closed again and roots through the cabinets for a while before giving up.
She goes back into the dining room and asks Nik, “What did you say?”
“I asked what you were up to.”
“Um. Nothing. I wanted soup but there isn’t any. I might go out and get some in a minute.”
“How was the thing last night?” Nik asks.
Lorelei freezes. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“Jackson texted me something—I think he was drunk. Anyway, he said you sang?”
She nods.
“He wasn’t making any sense,” Nik says. “But he was superexcited about whatever you did.”
Lorelei can’t quite get her face to look normal. This time Nik does notice; he frowns, shuts his book, and turns his full attention to her.
“Meanwhile, I was here making myself miserable,” he says. His smile is crooked. “Breakups suck.”
They do, of course. Lorelei hopes she didn’t do the wrong thing, interfering with Nik and Jackson. She doesn’t want to add another name to the list of lives she’s screwed up this year. Considering all of them—going through them one by one—slices through the flimsy barricades she’s been trying to keep up between herself and what she did last night. There’s no denying that she screwed up then.
Nik sits while she thinks, open and patient. His tenderness is sandpaper against her skin. It’s unbearable to think of him loving her when she’s so recently learned how to hate herself.
The crying happens so suddenly and thoroughly that it takes her by surprise. Lorelei puts her head in her hands and cries dry, ugly sobs that wrack her chest and make her shoulders heave and her lungs spasm. There are so many kinds of crying, she has discovered in these last few months. This feels compulsive, almost physically necessary, like vomiting: a way to get something poisonous out of her body.
After a little while Nik puts a tentative hand on her back. “C’mon,” he says. “Whatever happened can’t have been that bad.”
Lorelei lifts her head enough to shake it once, hard.
“You think it’s worse than anything I’ve seen?”
She can leave her head on the table and shrug.
“Seriously, L, do you really need to hear it? About what I did?”
Lorelei doesn’t say anything.
“Yeah,” Nik says. “Okay. I can tell you that story, if that’s what it will take for you to believe me. But you have to sit up and look at me while I do it.”
Curiosity needles her into obeying. Her face is streaked with salt and snot, and she feels ugly and puffy. She wipes her nose defiantly on the back of one hand.
“It’s Chris’s fault, actually,” Nik says. “When he disappeared, when his dad got sick, Jackson started driving me home after soccer and stuff, you know? That’s when we started talking, really talking, and I—”
“Are you gay?” Lorelei asks. Her nose is stuffed up, and her voice is flat and nasally. “I mean, have you, like, always been gay, or whatever? It’s fine, I don’t care either way. I just wanted to understand. I guess.”
Nik shrugs uncomfortably. “I don’t know about all of that,” he says. “I’m not sure.”
“But have you always? With guys?”
“Jackson was the first,” Nik says. “Not the first one I thought about, but the first one anything happened with.”
“Before Angela?”
“Before Angela.” Something tightens around his eyes and mouth as he says the name. Lorelei feels awful all over again. She definitely shouldn’t be in the middle of any of this.
“Jackson told me about it, kind of,” she says. “After I saw you guys. That you used to hook up, and you stopped, and then, you know. Halloween.” She won’t let on yet that she knows that it kept on happening after.
“And then Halloween,” Nik agrees. “That part is your fault.”
“How is it my fault?”
“Well, I can’t bear it being my fault,” Nik says cheerfully. “And you make sense, in a way.”
“Did you ever think he was going to break up with Angela?”
“No.”
“So you just—”
“I didn’t think about it at all,” Nik says. “I just wanted. I missed him. It was so much easier to say yes, when he asked.”
“Love is a trap,” Lorelei says, recalling that conversation in the kitchen and the hundreds of complicated things she didn’t know when they had it. She ignored what he was saying, then, because ignoring it was easy when she didn’t know it was true.
“Love’s a goddamn mess,” Nik says. “I fucked it up pretty good, anyway.”
Lorelei sighs. Nik gives her the corner of a smile.
“He wanted to go public. Before Angela. He wanted us to be together for real, and I was scared. I was the one who said no.” He shakes his head. “I
t’s, um, it’s something I decided, and that’s taken me a long time to admit even to myself. We could have been together. And I could have said no, when he asked, when he was with someone else. So really, L, whatever happened, whatever you did or think you did—it’s not the worst thing in the world, I promise. Everyone has their own personal catastrophe story.”
Lorelei starts to shake all over, like the first rumblings of a big, bad quake. Nik hurt Jackson and Angela, but mostly he went after himself. Her mistakes were aimed outward, at everyone around her. That is different. It’s worse. “You got scared,” she repeats.
“Yeah,” he says. “Now are you ready to tell me what this is all about?”
“I did something to Chris. I put him under a love spell, kind of,” Lorelei says, all in a rush.
Nik has the courtesy not to laugh.
“Oma told me not to sing when I was little,” Lorelei starts. “And again, recently. And then after she died, Mom told me it was because of a curse, which seemed crazy, but I got in touch with Hannah—our great-aunt—and she said—look, I know this is insane—she said we’re all sirens. Me and Mom and Oma and her. I’m a siren. And last night I sang to Chris.”
“Lorelei.” Nik reaches out for her. She puts her hands on the table, but they won’t stop shaking. Her nails clatter frantically against the glossy wood.
“I know it sounds crazy. I don’t know how to prove it to you, okay, but it’s true. It’s totally true.”
“I believe that you believe it,” Nik says carefully. “Is that enough? For now?”
“You should have seen them last night, Nik. It really— It was like they were possessed.”
“And you’re sure you weren’t seeing stuff? You know, confirmation bias, just because Oma and Mom told you to expect it?”
“Read me Jackson’s texts,” Lorelei says.
Nik fishes out his phone and scrolls to find what he wants.
“Lorelei sang tonight and totally killed it,” he reads. “I mean, there are some autocorrect mishaps, but it’s close. Anyway, then there’s another one that says, She went home but she should come back. Tell Lorelei to come back.” He pauses. “I just kind of, um, assumed he was drunk.”