A Song to Take the World Apart (11 page)

Chris surges forward and kisses her breathless, his hands on her tightening like he's desperate to keep her. Lorelei has no intention of going anywhere. She wriggles her way toward him, one blind hand coming up to clutch at his ribs through his sweatshirt.

“This is crazy,” Chris says again, mumbling against her mouth. “You—you—”

“I what?” Lorelei does pull away just a little bit, uncertain. Her mouth is buzzing, humming, swollen.

“I couldn't stop thinking about you,” Chris says. He unwinds himself from her and leans his forehead against the curve of her seat. “When you were gone. I wanted to see you, and I kept thinking that I shouldn't. I'm the last thing you need to be thinking about right now. But it was like—like you were calling to me. Like I could hear something echoing. I don't know.” He sounds lonely, and lost, like he's somehow far away from her even though they are so close. “Sorry. I can stop being weird.”

Lorelei thinks she knows what he means, though. That was how she felt after she saw him in the hall that first time: like he was echoing in her, bouncing off her hollows, resounding again and again.

Chris shifts back so that he's facing forward again, not looking at her at all. “There's a coffee shop down the block. That's where we were going before I got distracted. If you want to.”

“Yeah, I could—yeah.”

The place is small and cozy. Chris is apparently a regular: the women working the counter greet him by name and get to work on his order. Lorelei asks for chamomile tea. When it comes, slopping at the edges of an enormous orange mug, it smells like Oma, like home.

Lorelei takes a deep breath of the sweet steam before she asks her question. “How did you handle it? Going to school with all of that happening with your dad, and everything?”

“I didn't have a choice.” Chris is unsentimental. “I just kind of muscled through it.”

“Oh.”

“You don't have to, though. I mean, whatever, I don't know, it's just…It's really hard. I don't think I understood how hard it was going to be.”

“Zoe said I was allowed to feel however the fuck I wanted,” Lorelei says. “When she was over, before.”

“Yeah.” Chris nods thoughtfully. “You can,” he says. “You should.”

He reaches for her again, but this time his touch is reassuring, just solid and warm. Lorelei leans into him and thinks,
So this is what having a boyfriend is like.
Here is someone who looked at her and saw what she needed. He'll help her put her life together again.

Chris presses his face into her hair. “It's so hard. But I'll take care of you,” he murmurs. “If, I mean. If you want me to.”

T
HERE'S ANOTHER
T
HE
T
ROUBLE
show. “You should come,” Chris says. They're spending the last minutes of their lunch period together, lying in the grass. It's been three weeks, and it never stops seeming magical to Lorelei that she can hang out with him whenever she wants. He smiles when he sees her. He makes room and time for her in his day. “It might be a little weird because of my mom and whatever, but I'd like it if you came.”

He laid out the rules for her over tea that Sunday night. He isn't allowed to date, so he can't make too much time for her, and can't bring her home, and doesn't want to meet her parents, either. Lorelei almost doesn't care—she can't imagine ever wanting anyone to meet her mother—but she minds it in moments like this, when the specter of Mrs. Paulson hovers over the little bits of time they're supposed to have for themselves.

The truth is that she'd be dying to go even if Chris wasn't playing. She's made her way through the first stack of Oma's letters and gotten midway through the second without finding another word about music; apparently Oma's reply was blistering enough to put Hannah off the subject. Lorelei's questions are still mostly unanswered, but she wants to get back into a room filled up by sound now that she knows what to expect from it. Maybe she'll find a way to sing something of her own—humming, even. A tiny test. An experiment. To see.

Hannah said you didn't have to treat it like a curse.

So Lorelei weighs her options and asks Nik for a ride to the show while they're supposed to be setting the table for dinner that night. He surprises her by not putting up a fight.

“I've never actually heard them play,” he says. “I'll come as long as Jens doesn't need the car.”

Lorelei didn't mean to ask him to accompany her, exactly, but she can't tell him that now. “What would Jens need the car for?”

“It's his car too,” Nik says, instead of answering. “Or he might want to come with.”

Great. Lorelei feels, not for the first time, that two is an excessive number of brothers.

Jens and Henry walk into the dining room, carrying plates of food.

Jens says, “Come where?”

“To see The Trouble on Saturday.”

“I have an enormous history test Monday,” Jens says. “I'm not going anywhere this weekend.”

“Does that mean you have a test on Monday too?” Henry asks Nik.

“I'm not in AP,” Nik says. “Mine's next week.”

Lorelei does have a test on Monday, but she and Henry haven't spoken directly to each other since the thing with the letter, so he doesn't know that. He doesn't ask her if she ought to be studying. A tiny piece of her is disappointed. Lorelei is still learning the contours of an Oma-less life. The freedom is a little bit dizzying. She doesn't want her brothers to watch over her, exactly, but she misses knowing someone else was keeping track.

The show falls near Halloween, which means costumes. The band gets skeleton sweatshirts. On Friday, Lorelei goes with Chris after school to pick up palettes of face paint, and sits with him in the bathroom at the practice space while he coats his face in white and sweeps streaks of black along his bones: his nose and cheeks, and then across the swell of his mouth.

She expects it to be harder for one or both of them, but he doesn't look like death at all: it's just Chris as a cartoon. He pulls some funny faces at his reflection, and then at her in the mirror. He forgets himself and kisses her, smudging them both with gray.

She and Zoe spend Saturday scrounging up thrift store punk outfits: tight jeans with holes in the knees and safety-pinned tank tops. They rat their hair up into faux hawks. Lorelei narrows her eyes and practices making tough faces. “You're such a marshmallow,” Zoe says. “You look like one of Carina's angry troll dolls.”

Lorelei frowns down at her outfit. “Is it dumb?” she asks. “Should I change?”

“The point of Halloween is to be whoever you're not,” Zoe replies philosophically. “I mean, you are definitely not a street punk.”

Lorelei is nervous, but the drive there soothes her. Nik and Zoe are both good at distracting her. They might even be flirting with each other a little bit. She watches her reflection in the window flash by under each passing streetlight, and it looks—okay, she thinks. Not so crazy, now that she's away from her little-girl bathroom at home.

They park somewhere up in the steep, sloped hills above Sunset. Nik is wearing a tight black T-shirt and a pair of bunny ears taken from Lorelei's old dress-up box. She's surprised to find that he's handsome enough to get away with something like that. He's just her brother. But when Zoe looks at him, Lorelei can kind of imagine how other girls see him too.

Carina drives over from UCLA to join them. She knows Bean even though he's a year younger than she is, and she's curious to hear the band play too. She meets them at the bottom of the hill. When they stumble down to her, she's halfway through a clove, wreathed in its pale smoke. She isn't dressed up, so she looks like she always does: tough, casual, careless.

“Carina,” Lorelei says, “this is my brother Nik.”

Nik and Carina have met once or twice before, but only ever in passing. It's strange to see the two of them together. It feels like they
should
know each other already, just by osmosis.

“Nice to meet you,” Carina says. She gives Nik a split-second once-over and then turns her attention to Lorelei. “I hear one of these dudes is your boyfriend now. Nice going.”

“Uh,” Lorelei says. “Thanks?”

Nik cocks his head at Lorelei. “Chris? I didn't know he was your
boyfriend.
”

“He's—”

“The show's gonna start,” Zoe says before Nik can ask any more questions. “Let's go inside, yeah?”

Carina takes one last, long drag on her cigarette. The smell of her exhale is so thick and sweet that it makes Lorelei a little light-headed. “Sure,” she says. “Whatever.”

Carina's smoky scent envelops all four of them as they walk into the Whiskey, giving them an air of unquestionable, indifferent cool. Chris is already onstage. He's tuning his guitar, haloed in white light, exactly where he belongs.

“
That's
my boyfriend,” Lorelei says, allowing herself one satisfied smile when Carina draws her breath in through her teeth. Someone else must have done his makeup tonight: the lines are slim and precise, stitches radiating out from around his lips, his dark eyes surrounded by a sea of black.

“He certainly looks like trouble,” she says.

Nik says, “You have no idea.”

The two of them share a look over Lorelei's head that has her instantly feeling five again, maybe twelve, definitely young and left out. So she leaves them behind and bounds up to the stage, leaning against its lip to look up at Chris. “Hey, baby,” she says. Chris smiles back and then freezes.

“Hey,” he says. “Shit, we, uh— Remember, we talked about this? My mom?”

Mrs. Paulson is once again stationed at the back of the room. She's as silent and watchful as ever.

They did talk about this, about how she would be there, how Lorelei shouldn't do exactly what she's doing. “Sorry,” she says.

“Nah,” he replies. Chris flicks his hair out of his eyes, his little habitual gesture. It's familiar, endearing, and it soothes the hot lick of shame Lorelei feels. “I'm glad you want to. But. Later, maybe?”

“Find me,” she says. “I'll be around.” She tries to walk back to the rest of the group with some measure of confidence and cool.

“Not in front of the Mrs.,” Nik says. He looks at Chris's mother. His gaze lingers on the group of kids around her and then flicks up to the stage where the boys are finishing their sound check. He used to hang out with some of them, Lorelei remembers. Jackson, soccer, all of that. She wonders if he's embarrassed to be seen with his little sister.