A Song to Take the World Apart (24 page)

D
ANIEL'S PARENTS' HOUSE IS
enormous, a supermodern fortress spiked high on one of the bluffs in the Pacific Palisades. The driveway is already full, so they have to park blocks away and then hike up in their high-heeled shoes.

Carina stops them at the top to brush some of Lorelei's hair from her face and hand around a compact for a quick makeup check. Zoe is nervous and twitchy. She glances at her phone over and over again, even though they're basically at Daniel's front door.

It's a cold night but they're all wearing dresses anyway, bare-legged and shivering in thin jackets. The wind is raw with chill and dank with brine blowing in from the ocean below. The air smells like her last conversation with Chris, and those last little hopeful moments. Lorelei wonders if he's already here.

Zoe punches in the gate code and turns around to link her arm through Lorelei's. Together they step over the low metal track as the gate pulls back. Lorelei spots Chris's battered Mercedes up the drive.

“You ready?” Zoe asks. She doesn't slow her pace.

“Ready enough, I guess,” Lorelei says.

Inside, the band is setting up on an enclosed patio at the far end of the living room. The glass reflects the interior lights, making the boys look like miniature figures in a crystal jewel box. The house is very stark, all concrete and glass. Sound echoes wincingly off every surface. Bean and Jackson appear to be talking about hanging rugs before they perform. Jackson turns to gesture at the space, and for a second his gaze locks with Lorelei's. He looks down, frowning. Chris has his back to her and he doesn't turn. Lorelei forces herself to look away. The room is punctuated by cactus plants with flowers blooming at the end of their twisted, spiky arms.

The girls are shedding their jackets, still shivering even though it's warm inside, when Daniel and Paul swoop down on them. Now Lorelei recognizes how handsome Daniel is, in his proper context, with his sharp jaw and careful stubble. He's wearing black pants and a white button-down with a skinny black tie and a gold tie clip. Zoe's dress is a Goodwill find, short and tight and covered in gold sequins. Her skin is tawny and her lips and cheeks are sweet, glossy pink. She looks so lively next to him: very fresh, very young. He wraps an arm around her waist and kisses the top of her head. It's a move that says to everyone in the room:
We belong together,
or maybe,
She belongs to me.

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.”