A Song to Take the World Apart (5 page)

She shoots Zoe a text while she's walking back to Chris and company.
Chris asked me to come to band practice to hang out (!!!) told J & N I was going over to yours hope that's okay.
She thinks Zoe will understand and forgive her for trying on a lie all by herself. Lorelei keeps hoping to bump into her on the walk, to squeeze her hand and maybe steal another swipe of lip gloss. But the sea of faces she passes through on the way seems blanker and more unfamiliar than ever.

Chris's smile, when she gets back, is warm and welcome. She reaches out a hand and he grabs it and pulls himself up. He doesn't let go while they walk. He keeps her close so they can talk a little bit, low and private. Jackson and Angela go on ahead and he lets them. Lorelei loves how open and easy he is with her, like he's known her all along.

T
HE
T
ROUBLE PRACTICES IN
a studio space Bean's parents rent for them. “He's a great drummer,” Chris explains, “and an even better rich kid.” It sounds fancy. Lorelei doesn't know what to expect, but when they get there, the building is just a bunch of big rooms on either side of an echoing concrete hallway. The walls are thick with insulation, and everything smells dry and empty and industrial.

They've personalized the studio by making it a mess: the floor is littered with tangled strands of Christmas lights that someone got tired of tacking to the walls, plus pages torn out of magazines, and plastic pieces from novelty toys. There's a bag of kazoos stashed in one corner. The air is sweet with a skunky smell Lorelei recognizes from the boardwalk as weed smoke. The walls are plastered with posters showing half-naked women lounging and half-naked men playing guitars.

Angela split off when they got to the parking lot, so it's just the three of them at the space. Bean drifts in a little while after. Lorelei sets herself up on one of the ancient armchairs, clearly a Goodwill salvage, and listens politely while the boys banter back and forth.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket and she pulls it out, grateful for the distraction. There are two texts: one from Zoe that just says,
DETAILS AT LUNCH TMRW PLEASE AND THANK U,
and one from Nik that reads,
Oma making schnitzel for dinner tonight, be home by 6.
She ignores Nik and sends Zoe
I'm sitting in a chair they haven't started playing yet I feel awkward help?

The response is almost instantaneous:
You're a bad bitch, girl. Just act like you're in charge.

Lorelei feels nothing like a bad bitch. She feels like a little girl hanging out with the big kids for the first time, painfully uncertain about what to do with her hands, arms, legs, and face. She imagines Carina here in her place but that's not so helpful, because Carina would be outside smoking a cigarette, or else joining in the banter about some band—whoever they're talking about, Lorelei doesn't recognize the name—but neither of those things is really an option. Instead, she feigns boredom, drapes her legs over the chair, and fiddles around uselessly on her phone.

It's a relief when they actually start practicing. This means playing through a whole song once, usually, and then breaking it down to its component parts, working out a bass line, a guitar riff, the precise staccato rhythm of a drum fill. It's a little like how Oma taught her to sew, Lorelei thinks—turning shirts inside out, checking the seams. She's starting to see the way The Trouble constructs sound.

They spend the last half hour working on a new song, something slow and driving. Chris presses up against a mic for a full-on croon. One unruly curl falls into his eyes, and he tosses it back, impatient. His mouth is warm and moving. Lorelei sits up straight in her chair. The energy of the sound comes in at the crown of her head and shakes her down to the soles of her feet.

“Shit,” Jackson says, eventually. “I gotta go in a minute. I didn't realize how late it was.”

Lorelei checks her phone: it's five-thirty, which means she's about to be in trouble.

“I wanna go through it once all together,” Chris says. They've been playing in fragments, going over the chorus, the bridge, a sketched-out second verse. He's still positioned in front of the microphone, unmoving. “I just want to hear it—the whole thing. Anyway, my ride won't be here for a minute. We've got time.”

“Just once,” Jackson agrees, tapping his fingers against the fretboard of his bass.

The song starts off slow and deliberate, the beat strong and undulating. Chris moves his hips in time with the music. He catches Lorelei's eye and gives her a long, slow smile. She feels a thrill deep in the pit of her stomach, but it's nothing like what happens when the first chorus kicks in. The guitar, bass, drums, and Chris's howling wail all come together to fill her up, and tumble over. It's too much, and not enough, and Lorelei's skin is so fever-hot she can't stand it a minute longer.

“I'm sorry,” she gasps. Chris stops playing. “I'm— It's just—too much—”

She bolts before she can think about it, out through the doors and down a long, dusty hallway, running the wrong way, not caring. She bursts through another set of doors and out onto an abandoned loading dock. She sits down on the concrete ledge and puts her face in her hands, trying to catch her breath.

The sun has just finished setting, and the marine layer is rolling in again. The day's last light has a surreal quality, an almost-green tint that makes her feel like she's much farther away from home than she's ever been, like she's deep underwater, and only just now noticing how hard it is to breathe.

She stays out there for five minutes, maybe, just long enough to get really, really embarrassed by what she's done, before Chris pushes through the doors and drops to a squat beside her.

“Are you okay?” he asks, putting a warm hand on her back. She leans into it.

“Fine,” she says. “Fine, sorry, I don't—I don't know what happened back there.”

“It's okay,” he says. He shifts to his knees, and, when she doesn't protest, swings himself around so that he's sitting at her side. “It's— Is it weird if it's a little cool?”

“Huh?”

“I just— No one's ever been moved by our music like that before.” He shrugs and smiles a dopey, lopsided grin.

“I thought you would think it was weird,” she admits. “Like, really weird.”

“Nah,” he says. He cocks his head to one side, angles his face toward hers and pauses, considering. “I have a feeling about you,” he says. “You're sensitive. Deep. I knew it when I saw you at the show. You look— You can tell on your face that the whole world affects you. That you're open to it in this really cool way.”

Lorelei considers the idea. Maybe it's true, and maybe that's what it is about her and the women in her family. Maybe they're all deep and sensitive, and delicate. Maybe it's the purity and clarity of her voice that's too much for anyone to hear. She touches the curve of her cheek and tries to let her expression be open, to look at Chris like he's looking at her: enthralled, entranced.

“I want you to sing with us,” he says. “It seems like you love music, and I want you to help us make it. I think it could be, like, really amazing.”

For the first time Lorelei understands instinctively exactly what Oma was trying to keep her from: wanting something so powerfully that saying no to it feels impossible. His face tilts toward hers and comes in close, closer, like they're magnetized, closer and closer, so close now, so close that—

He leans in and seals his mouth over hers.

Lorelei has never been kissed before. Chris's fingertips come, gentle, to the corner of her jaw, guiding her forward. He kisses her long and slow and sweet, easing her into it. She loves how it feels, his smile warm and moving against her lips.

He jerks back when the door bangs open behind them.
“Chris,”
Jackson says. “Your mom's here.”

“She's—shit—what?” Chris leaps to his feet. “She isn't supposed to be here. Greg said he'd give me a ride.”

“I don't know what happened to Greg,” Jackson says. “But she's here, and she's waiting, and she wants to know where the hell you are.”

“She's not inside, right?” Chris grabs Lorelei's shoulder and urges her up, pulling her back into the building with him almost as an afterthought.

“Bean's stalling her out front.”

“Oh, thank god, I— Lorelei—can you—I'm so sorry, but can you find another ride?” He's so sweet and desperate that she finds herself nodding slowly, watching him rush as he ducks back into the studio and throws his guitar into its case, a few stray papers into his backpack. He pauses next to her, just inside the doorway, and brushes an apologetic kiss across her forehead before scrambling out, down the hallway, and disappearing around a corner. Then it's just her and Jackson in the room.

He sighs and then smiles politely. “You'll be asking about that ride now, I expect,” he says.

Jackson doesn't even try to make conversation while he drives. The silence in the car wouldn't be so awful if Lorelei's brain wasn't chanting
Late, late, you are so late
at her as the tires turn. Guilt courses through her, keeping pace with her heartbeat. Her phone buzzes a few times from her backpack but she ignores it. It's just going to be Nik or Jens giving her crap, and it's not like she doesn't know.

Jackson keeps the radio on low, as if to make the quiet between them more pronounced.
I get it,
Lorelei wants to say.
You don't like me, you don't approve of me, you wish I—
But she doesn't know what he wants, and maybe that's the problem. She gets Chris not wanting to introduce her to his mom yet, but Jackson's coldness seems almost theatrical.

“Sorry about this,” she says eventually, just to fill up space. “I really didn't—”

Jackson keeps his eyes fixed on the road in front of them. “I know it's not your fault,” he says. “This is what being friends with Chris is like. You're not the first girl I've covered for him with his mom, and, like, no offense, but you probably won't be the last.”

Lorelei knows enough to say, “None taken.”

“Because this is gonna be the deal for you,” Jackson goes on. “If you think he's gonna, like, fall in love and get serious about you, you have another thing coming. He's never going to break her heart like that.”

“His…mom?”

Jackson's laugh is hollow. “You gonna answer that phone?”

“It's probably just Nik,” she says.

“Nick Fitzwell?”

“Nik Felson,” Lorelei says. “My brother.” She might be imagining the startled sharpness of Jackson's blink, the way his hands grip suddenly white on the wheel. A half second later, whatever it was is gone and his expression is vacant again.