A Song to Take the World Apart (15 page)

They echo in her mind after Lorelei has fallen silent.
Listen to me,
she told him.
Believe me, you asshole. From now on, you listen for me. And you believe me when I tell you what I feel.

The first real thing she sees after is Jackson like she always sees him, standing in front of her. Now, though, he's wide-eyed and shaken, and very white. He reaches out and touches her face with his fingertips, as if to check and see that she's real.

“What—” he asks. “What are you?”

“I'm—” Lorelei says, and doesn't know how to answer.

“You're so—” he says, and stops again, fumbling for the words. “You—I could
feel
—”

Jens's car pulls around the corner, and he leans over to open the door and yell out at her. “Come on, Lorelei, I'm supposed to meet Nik in, like, half an hour.” She pulls the door the rest of the way open, and slides into her seat.

For the first time since this whole mess started, she sang to someone on purpose. She let her voice loose, and let it tell someone what to do. Lorelei doesn't know what it means that she did it, or whether she'll be able to undo it, or whether she cares.

All she knows is that she loves it. She loves what she can do.

S
ECRETS HAVE THEIR OWN
specific weight in the human body, some unidentifiable but precise number of ounces, of pounds. Lorelei starts to feel all of the things she's not telling dragging on her like weights on her shoulders, or barnacles on the bottom of a boat. Letting go of that one phrase—
listen for me, believe me
—made her conscious of how much other stuff she's been carrying.

Jackson texts her a few times that afternoon:
can I see you
and
I need to talk to you.
She deletes the texts as fast as she can and tries to pretend she never read them. She calls Zoe, gets her for once, and arranges to meet up with her on the boardwalk, just to get herself out of the house for the rest of the day. At the last minute she leaves her phone inside when she goes. She doesn't want the distraction, or the reminder.

It's an especially chilly afternoon, with a storm threatening over the ocean. Zoe is wearing jeans and boots and an oversized windbreaker, her long hair pulled back into a neat bun. Lorelei has never been so grateful to see anyone in her life. Zoe's tall, slender form against the darkening sky seems like a beacon along a rocky shoreline, guiding her somewhere familiar and safe.

“I'm glad you called,” Zoe says when Lorelei reaches her. “I totally have news.”

“Good news?”

“I think so, anyway.” They start walking along the paved path that runs parallel to the shore. “I gave Daniel my phone number when we were leaving the Whiskey the other night,” Zoe admits. “Just to see. I didn't think he would call but he, um…he did. So we've been hanging out. Kind of a lot.” She is shining with pleasure.

Lorelei is happy for her, but also nervous in a way she can't quite parse. Chris has always been a known quantity but Daniel is alien, in addition to being older. He'll pull Zoe further away from her and their friendship. She was probably with him the other day, Lorelei realizes, while she waited for Zoe's text like an idiot.

“That's cool,” she says.

“You sound even less enthusiastic than Carina did.”

“She doesn't like him?”

Zoe waves a dismissive hand. “She doesn't know him.”

“I thought she introduced you guys?”

“I mean she, like, knows him, like, she knows his name and stuff. But she's just pulling older-sister bullshit:
be more careful, I know what's best for you,
whatever, whatever.”

“And you don't think she does?”

“Whose side are you on, exactly?”

“I mean,
I
just don't know him,” Lorelei clarifies. “And he's. You know. A senior.”

“Speaking of which, how are things with your older boyfriend?”

“Fine,” Lorelei says.

“Just fine?”

“Not
just
fine.” Lorelei looks out over the ocean. The sky and sea are tinted by the same gray darkness. “I don't know, I've never— I don't have anything to compare it to. But I'm happy, so.”

“You still going to band practices and stuff?”

There goes not thinking about Jackson. “Yeah.”

Lorelei doesn't realize that she's stopped walking until Zoe nudges her and asks, “What?”

She shakes Jackson out of her head. Nothing comes to take his place. “I don't know,” she says. “Chris wants me to sing with them, I guess.”

“That's kind of random? Because you don't really sing, do you?”

“Not really.” Lorelei searches for the right thing to say. She settles on “I think it's just his way of trying to let me be closer.”

“You guys seem like you're pretty close.”

Lorelei feels this for the dig it is: she disappeared into Chris's world before Zoe even met Daniel. No wonder Zoe's excited that someone is paying attention to her, and taking up her time.

“It's weird with his mom and everything,” she explains. “That's why we have to, like, sneak around, and hang out at school and stuff. I'm sorry about that, by the way. That I've been a little MIA.”

“It's whatever.”

“I guess if you and Daniel get serious, you'll be busier too.”

Zoe shrugs. “You'll have band practice,” she says without malice.

“No I won't.” If it comes out a little too fierce, Zoe doesn't seem to mind. “I mean, just, we can find other things to do together. And you and I can make time for each other. If you want.”

Zoe doesn't say anything in response, but she knocks a shoulder against Lorelei's again while they walk. Her arms are wrapped tightly around herself. She's folded in against the wind, but she straightens long enough to drift into Lorelei's space and then back into her own. “I've missed you,” she says quietly. “I don't want to be selfish or anything, but it sucks when you're not around.”

“I've missed you too,” Lorelei says. “I'm sorry. I know it's my fault.”

“It happens.” Zoe disentangles herself and shoves her hands in her pockets. She looks out philosophically at the bleak boardwalk in front of them. “But, you know. It would be nice if it didn't happen to us.”

L
ORELEI SPENDS THE WEEKEND
buried in the letters and finds piles and piles of nothing.

Chris called to apologize that night, but he does it again first thing at school on Monday. “I thought maybe Jackson would be able to work it out with you on his own,” he says. “Clearly not the case. He came back in all glassy-eyed and quiet, and I was like,
Oh shit!
I don't know why I thought he could behave himself. He was probably stoned or something.”

Lorelei shrugs. She doesn't want to talk about it any more than she has to. If Chris asks her about Jackson's strange behavior, she has no idea what she'll say.

“But it also made me realize,” Chris goes on, “that it's kind of crazy of me to ask you to sing with the whole band as, like, the first time you do it. Of course you're shy about that. And my mom's working late tonight. So I was thinking if you wanted to come over, maybe I'd play a little bit, or whatever. That it might be nice. And it would be just the two of us.”

The words
just the two of us
swallow the rest of the sentence.
Yes,
Lorelei thinks. She says, “Yeah.”

“Cool.”

Chris considers her for a moment. Then he touches her cheek with his fingertips and pulls her face toward his, cupping her jaw with his palm. He kisses her, and his other hand comes to rest at the back of her waist, low. He curls against her, pressing her tightly to him. The kiss sings with its own slow intention. Suddenly Lorelei understands all of what, exactly, she's just said yes to.

She texts Zoe,
SOS gonna need an emergency conference at lunch Chris wants me to COME OVER after school??
Followed by a bunch of X-mouthed, blushing emojis. She's just slipping her phone into her backpack, rooting through the main pocket to make sure she's got her workbook for first period, when Jackson appears at her side. He seems casual at first glance, but when she looks again, he's white-knuckled and thin-lipped, in the grip of something intense.

“You didn't answer my texts,” he says. “What's up with that?”

“Sorry,” Lorelei says. “Busy weekend.”

“That's
bullshit.
” He stops and she stops with him, too startled to realize that she should shake him off and keep going. “I saw Nik,” he says. “He said you were home, and that you saw Zoe but—”

“You asked him about me?”

“I had to,” he says, and then again: “You weren't answering my texts.”

“Where was Angela during all this?”

“Don't worry about Angela.”

The first bell rings and everyone seems pulled as if by gravity into their classrooms. It's just the two of them alone in the halls.

“I can't stop thinking about it,” Jackson says. One hand reaches out to grab Lorelei around the wrist. His fingers dig into the bones there, burning against her skin. “Sing for me again. Do it. Please. Do it now.”

“Here?” Lorelei looks around them frantically but the hallway is empty, echoing.

“We can go somewhere if you want,” he says. He tugs again, insistent. She pulls back against him and he rounds on her, furious light blazing in his eyes. His pupils have narrowed down to pinpricks. “Don't make this difficult,” he says. His voice is rough and awful, scraped and ugly. “Please, Lorelei, please. I have to hear it again. I just have to know what you're thinking, what you—”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, fine, I will. I promise. I will.” She was hoping to distract him, but his grip only tightens.

Lorelei doesn't know what she's frightened of, exactly, or what she thinks he'll do to her. She only knows that she doesn't want to be pulled against her will, forced to sing, or told what to do. She knows that Jackson isn't himself right now, not hardly, and that whatever she gives him will only fuel the fire that seems to be consuming him from inside. He's already ashen with need.

She can only see one way out of it, and her throat tightens at the thought.

She waits until they're pulling level with the classroom she's supposed to be in, first-period Spanish with Ms. Brady. He stops when she does. “I'll do it here,” she says. Jackson draws in too close for comfort. She starts to hum a melody, something sweet and broken. It's a song she sang to the waves.

He slackens into it, body loosening, his hand finally falling away from her wrist. His pupils swell in pleasure. His mouth dilates into a soft rounded O
.

“Listen to you,” he murmurs. Lorelei hears the echo of her own words:
listen to me, listen to me.
The sharp humiliation that follows comes out in the sound, and Jackson jerks back like he's been burned. Lorelei takes the opportunity to wrench the door open and trip into her classroom, slamming it shut behind her.

Maybe it worked, and he'll believe that all she wants is for this to stop happening.

Every head in the room turns her way. She barely notices. She's still buzzing with the aftermath of the song and the pull of Jackson's attention, and the weight of the thing she could feel between them: her mind at the edges of his.

She finds her seat and spends the rest of the period in a dull-eyed daze.

Jackson isn't waiting for her when class ends.

Lorelei usually eats lunch with Chris. Today she's glad to have somewhere else to be, since she doesn't want to deal with him and Jackson and the complicated mess she's been making out of her life. She texts him,
eating w Zoe, see you after school?

The morning's twitchy, nervous energy recedes as soon as she sits down at Zoe's side. She feels like the shore being bared as the tide pulls away from it: only so many miles of soft, flat sand. The other girls sitting with them keep up their usual chatter. Lorelei drifts further toward calm on the familiar sounds.

It's only near the end of the period, when Zoe elbows her and gives her a knowing grin, that she really remembers why she's there in the first place. They slide down to the end of the bench for some privacy. “Are you freaking out?” Zoe asks. “Honestly, I would be freaking out.”

“It's sort of about the singing thing, actually,” Lorelei says. “He wants to play for me. And have us try it out alone.”

“Right. Instead of playing for you in the nice practice space they also have available.”

“It's a big deal that he invited me over at all,” Lorelei reminds her. “You know. With his mom and everything.”

Zoe regards her gravely, and tucks an errant strand of hair behind Lorelei's ear. Lorelei has been meaning to get it cut, but she's been so busy lately that she keeps forgetting. It's gotten a little wild, actually. When she wears it loose, she comes home at night to find it hopelessly tangled, no matter how carefully she brushes it smooth each morning. Chris says he likes the way it frames her face:
like ocean spume,
he said, and then laughed at himself.
You know, the white part, the spray.

It's very different, the abstract idea that she's pretty and the way it feels when he traces the curve of her cheek and tells her so.

“You know what you're doing, though, right?” Zoe says. “You want to be with him, really.”

“I do.”

“Because you know you don't owe him anything. Not just because he's making an effort. Not ever.”

“Yeah.” Lorelei looks down the long bench to the rest of their friends, mostly pretty, serious girls. They're gossiping and laughing, a few bent over late homework. Things felt safer in so many ways when she sat here every day, and ate in quiet while they talked.

With Chris everything is terrifying because it's new. And it's that fear that's made sharp corners between her and Jackson and Nik and Angela, between her and everyone else in her life. She's never loved someone and had to expect to lose them before. She's realistic about where Chris will be headed next fall: to college, probably, which even if it's in-state will be a different world. She can't expect he'll try to take her with him.

She's never been alone in a house with a boy who wanted to kiss her before. She's never sung with anyone, either, and she's not sure she'll be able to, even though she wants to so badly it burns. But she can't say that to Zoe.

“I don't think I'm afraid because I don't want to,” she says instead. “I think I just…don't know what to expect.”

“I'm looking forward to your report back,” Zoe says. The same hand that smoothed Lorelei's hair comes up to hover in the air between them for a moment, and then falls back down. “Your first reports from the, ah, unexplored territories.”

There's no excuse for them to touch but Lorelei leans against Zoe's shoulder anyway. Touching Chris always feels complicated, explosive. Zoe's warmth at her side feels like animal comfort, like home.

“Do you think you will? With Daniel?”

“Who knows?” Zoe says. “I wouldn't rule it out, I guess.”

“It's up to you,” Lorelei says. “I mean, obviously, it's fine with me, if you do. Whatever you do with him. I trust you.”

“I'm glad.” Zoe really does sound relieved. Lorelei wonders exactly how much crap Carina's been giving her, and resolves to be better about the whole thing. Zoe deserves it.

The bell rings. The sound is so shrill and sudden that Lorelei flinches. All of the morning's fears rush over her again. She wants to cover her ears to keep everything out. Instead, she forces her breath to slow before standing and swinging her backpack up onto her shoulder. Zoe, still seated, looks up at her. “Be safe, Lorelei,” she says.

“You too,” Lorelei says. “Okay, Zo? You too.”