A Song to Take the World Apart (2 page)

She didn't recognize the gentle lick of warmth in her belly as want. She only knew that it was unfamiliar, the way the sensation lit her up. That was the day she discovered why they call it longing: because desire is full of distance and unfilled space. She felt like the empty center of the guitar, waiting for someone to pluck a string and fill her up with sound.

T
HE
R
OXY'S SINGLE ROOM
is dim and crowded, with prerecorded music blaring from crappy speakers. Lorelei's ears prick toward it, but the sound is so bad there's no way to distinguish any kind of melody. The air is at least half echo and static. It's just the thump of beat and bass that she picks up on, backbone sounds like a spine to the noisy chaos.

She checks the impulse to slam her hands over her ears. It's never made sense to her, the way people play music to fill in quiet and then ignore it—as if anyone could ignore it. But then not everyone grew up the way she did, accustomed to long stretches of domestic silence, in a house where no one ever plays music or even talks much at all.

She and Zoe spend their first drink tickets on Cokes and suck them down quickly. Lorelei is starting to sweat in her borrowed jacket in the humid room. The space already seems impossibly full, and it's packed even tighter as they move up toward the front. They're just wriggling through a bunch of disorganized bodies until something shifts, and there's a stir that is the mass becoming a crowd, moving in unison.

When Lorelei looks up, the band is making its way onstage.

Chris, lead singer, lead guitarist, is front and center. He's wearing tight black jeans and a faded black T-shirt with a pink and green
D.A.R.E.
logo peeling patchily off the front. His hair is still growing out from its September trim, and his tan is turning milkier, more golden, but he's still just as heart-stopping as he was the first time she saw him.

The boyishness of his curls sets him apart from the other band members, who are all blandly good-looking, with spiky hair and blank, bored eyes. Lorelei recognizes the bassist, Jackson, from school, but the guy behind the drum kit is unfamiliar.

Lorelei catches Chris's eye and panics, looks away.

“It's not weird that we're here, right?” she says to Zoe. “Like. Pathetic. Or something.”

“You worry too much,” Zoe says.

Lorelei doesn't know whether to believe her or not. She's so far out of her depth that she has no way of guessing whether Zoe is also out of hers. The house Lorelei grew up in isn't just devoid of music: it's quiet in a way she's only just beginning to understand, covered by a hard-edged daily silence that sits over a deeper absence, something she's not yet able to name. The crowd moves like a crowd. She isn't sure yet whether she belongs inside it.

But then the music starts.

Lorelei is glad that it's too loud to talk, too loud to do anything but dance. She probably wouldn't be able to say anything anyway. She has no words for the sound of the music and the way it makes her feel.

Later, Chris will tell her what he calls it: California skate-rock, ska-inflected, maybe a little bit punk. She'll learn to recognize the bands that influenced them, Green Day and Sublime, those godfathers of their lazy LA vibe. She'll learn how to talk about music the way that people do, which is in proper nouns, without ever trying to describe the luminous, impossible fact of actual sound.

That night what Lorelei responds to is the bright, high wail of a horn playing when a boy from the marching band steps in to add a trumpet blast or two, the fuzz of the guitar, and the clear kick and thrust of the drummer's beat. She's never been surrounded by so much at once before, listening to a song someone made up because he felt like it.

Her skin prickles and burns, and gets tight and dry over her bones. Her throat wells up with choked-back notes. Her body wants to open itself up from the center, turn itself inside out to touch everything at once. The thrum of her pulse falls into the rhythm of each song, like her body recognizes the beat.

Chris stands tall in the spotlight. He sweats and spits and swaggers. The press of bodies all around her crowds Lorelei too closely, and she wants to jump up next to him and take up space the way he does. Chris and the band demand things: the stage floor, and the people to watch them, and the very air in the room, which they fill to bursting with the vibrations of their voices.

Lorelei is small. She's been small. The music makes her want to be bigger.

She's dizzy and light-headed afterward, when they finally stop, bereft in the sudden hugeness of the silence.

“Oh man, I can't hear
shit,
” Zoe says, beaming, sticking a pinkie right in her ear.

Lorelei almost can't understand her. She's still listening for the last echo of the last song, trying to get the melody back in her mind.

A few minutes and a second cold Coke bring Lorelei back to herself. Now that she's used to the noise and the people, she can start to pick out groups of her classmates in the crowd. A handful of tables crammed into a corner on the far side of the room seems to be the gathering spot: she recognizes Jackson the bassist's girlfriend, Angela, and her crew of friends. They're all draped on each other, laughing and drinking from dark glass bottles with the labels peeled off.

The boys are starting to load out, pulling equipment offstage, but they pause to say hi to those girls. Jackson tugs Angela off her feet and spins her around in a circle. Lorelei looks at Chris again and tries to look like she's not looking. He moves around easily, like he's used to this chaos. There are so many girls so much closer to his orbit.

He greets them all evenly, though, weaving his way through them like he has somewhere else to be. Lorelei watches Chris as he comes up behind one of the chairs at the far side of the group.

A middle-aged woman is sitting in it, her ankles neatly crossed and her handbag in her lap. Her dark hair is pulled back from her face, which is bare. Lorelei must have seen her and managed not to notice, before. The woman doesn't look like she wants to be noticed. There's something shrunken about her, trembling, like she's only barely clutching herself together.

Chris drops a kiss on the top of her forehead. For one wild, hysterical second Lorelei thinks,
That cannot be his girlfriend,
and then it comes to her, sharp and clear: that's his
mother,
at his gig, his
mother
is here, keeping an eye on him.

The upside of having two overworked parents and being raised by her no-nonsense grandmother is that no one has ever shadowed Lorelei. No one hung around to make sure she felt okay on playdates or sleepovers, or on the first day of school. Lately she watches other girls get pink and flustered when their parents show up on campus or drop them off at parties. It's funny to see her friends trying to navigate between the well-behaved girls they've always been and the independence they're just starting to claim. It's like watching the tide pulling away from the shore only to come rushing right back.

Lorelei has never felt that particular pull. Her mother let her go when she was a baby, first to Oma, and then, later, to the school system and her classmates' parents. She's always been able to separate herself from her family.

Chris's mother stands and smiles at him, and for just a moment it undoes the primness of her face. She wraps her arms around his broad shoulders and musses his hair. He smiles back, radiant. Lorelei looks away from them. It seems private. When she turns back, Mrs. Paulson is shouldering her way through the crowd, and her mouth is set in a long, firm line again, and Chris is looking past her. This time, Lorelei meets his gaze without being able to stop herself.

It takes a few minutes before he finds a way to drift over. He makes it look casual.

“I feel like I know you,” he says.

It's just a line. Lorelei is disappointed to realize that he doesn't remember her, but why would he? It was five minutes, one time. She pretends like she doesn't remember him, either, and tries to play it cool.

“I know,” she says.

“Do you, um, do you go to Venice?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I'm a sophomore.”

“Cool.” Chris rocks back on his heels and smiles at her. “I'm a senior there. What did you think of the show?”

“It was
great,
” Lorelei says. She wonders if she's being too enthusiastic, and bites down hard on her lower lip to keep it from trembling, or from smiling too widely. “I mean, you know. You guys sounded—um—really good.”

“Good or great?”

Zoe elbows her in the ribs. “I'm Zoe, by the way,” she says.

“Lorelei,” Lorelei offers.

“Laurie?”

“Lorelei,”
she says again. She can hear her voice getting lost in the room.

“Okay,” he says. She isn't sure he's gotten it at all. “Chris.”

“Cool,” Zoe says. “I'm gonna get one more drink—you guys want anything?”

“Nah.” Chris holds up a water bottle. “I'm cool.”

“Uh, me too,” Lorelei agrees. Panic lances through her, and she frowns hard at Zoe's retreating back. She has no idea what to say to Chris, how to talk to boys or how to talk about music, and she can't talk about
school.

“Have you seen us play before?”

“No,” Lorelei admits.

“Probably for the best. We're, uh, well…This is for sure our best show to date. Bean—our drummer—he's new, he's great.”

“Yeah,” Lorelei agrees. “Where did you guys pick him up?”

“Harvard-Westlake, if you can believe it.” Chris shakes his head. That makes Bean a private-school kid, an alien from the other side of the city. Lorelei has only just learned to recognize the names of these places, which uproot people from their neighborhoods and gather them into little rich-kid knots. “But he's talented, so whatever.”

“Yeah.”

There's a silence. Lorelei feels the gap in their conversation like a physical thing.

“You guys gotta head out soon? Catching a ride?” Chris asks. Lorelei flushes and then flushes harder, embarrassed, even though she knows that it's invisible, under her makeup, in the blue and purple light. It's so careful,
catching a ride,
so that neither of them has to admit that someone's parents will be picking her up.