A Song to Take the World Apart (21 page)

H
ENRY'S REASSURANCE DOESN'T LAST,
and when it wears off, Lorelei feels worse than ever. Does anyone love her? Has anyone, ever? Pushing Chris away starts to seem crazy, and she can't let herself think that way.

Lorelei doesn't have Oma's patience for letter writing. She and Hannah seem to have used longhand to enforce cooling-off periods, but Lorelei's had plenty of time to think this over. And anyway, enough already with old-fashioned letters, and half answers, and family myths and legends. She just wants something simple, and solid, and certain. For once.

She finds her great-aunt on Facebook. She has to pull Hannah's married name from the return address on her letters; there are fifteen results when she searches. Five of them live in Hamburg. Only one looks to be the right age. She's old enough that her profile isn't locked up tightly. Lorelei copies and pastes her email address into a blank window and stares at it, the plain black letters of it, for a long time.

If her translations make sense, Lorelei's letter says:

Dear Hannah,

I am your grandniece. I've been reading the letters between you and my grandmother, Silke. I think there's something you could tell me that I need to know. What am I? What does it mean that she told me never to sing?

Thank you.

Lorelei

L
ORELEI DOESN'T RECOGNIZE EITHER
of the boys at first. She and Zoe are sitting at Coffee Bean after school, plodding through homework, and when someone taps on Zoe's shoulder, Lorelei thinks he's going to ask them for the wi-fi password or something. Then Zoe gets up and throws her arms around him.

Right, Daniel. She said he might stop by.

She didn't say he was bringing a friend too.

“You remember Paul, right?” Daniel says. Lorelei doesn't. She tries to make her shrug look neutral. “From that show—The Trouble?”

“Oh,” Lorelei says. The blond one who wasn't Daniel. “Right, sure. Good to see you.”

“We're getting drinks,” Paul says. “You want anything?”

Lorelei says, “Tea, please. Chamomile.” She's already drained her chai, and she's buzzing with caffeine and sugar. She was counting on it to keep her awake through the long afternoon of doing boring work, but with Paul and Daniel here she's starting to feel a little twitchy.

She tries to hand Paul a couple of dollars, but he waves them away. “I've got it,” he says. Lorelei looks to Zoe to see if she should argue, but Zoe's face is turned against Daniel's shoulder. It makes her miss Chris so much she can barely stand it.

She nods at Paul. “Thanks.”

Lorelei opens her book again, but she keeps getting distracted by Zoe and Daniel talking, and the song playing over the speakers, and her pulse thumping in her ears. Of course this is Zoe's idea of how to fix things.

Paul is cute. He's got wide-set blue eyes and thick, sandy hair, broad shoulders, long arms. He's probably a nice boy, or nice enough.

Lorelei goes over to stand with him and wait. “I thought I could help you carry, at least,” she says.

“Oh yeah.” Paul nods. “Thanks.”

He doesn't say anything else.

“So you and Daniel go to school together?” Lorelei tries.

“Yeah,” he says. “And you and Zoe?”

“Yeah.”

What did she and Chris talk about, that first night? Nothing special. Lorelei remembers, distantly, that it seemed awkward, then, but it's hard to believe it was ever this awkward.

“Cool.”

Another agonizing minute of silence passes. Lorelei looks at the Polaroids of the store's regulars pinned to a bulletin board, at the floor, the girl making their drinks, the backs of her hands.

“What are you, uh, what were you working on?” Paul asks.

“English,” Lorelei says. “Doing some reading.”

“Chamomile tea and an iced coffee, for Paul,” the countergirl says.

Zoe comes up behind them. Daniel's next to her now, one arm still slung around her shoulders. “You want to get out of here?” she asks. “We were thinking about taking a walk.”

At least it will give Lorelei and Paul something to do while they try to talk. “Sure,” she says.

In the shuffle of leaving, the boys pull ahead and Zoe drops back while the two of them shove books into their backpacks. “You don't have to fall in love with him, or anything,” she says. “I just wanted you to remember that there are other guys out there. I probably should have warned you.”

“It's whatever,” Lorelei says. “He's nice.”

“He's one of Daniel's best friends.” Zoe worries at the zipper on her backpack. “I don't know. You've been so sad, lately, and distracted. I wanted— I'm sorry if this wasn't right.”

“I just feel like such a weirdo,” Lorelei says. “Like, I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't want to make you look bad, or make things awkward. That's all.”

“Don't worry about me, man. And seriously, you don't have to fall in love with Paul. We're just going to go up to Wolves in Winter,” she says. “Daniel wants to buy something to wear to his birthday party.”

Lorelei knows the store; it's teensy and fancy and expensive, with bare wooden floors and five identical white shirts hung from antlers on the walls.

“You can stay if you'd rather. I can say you're getting work done.”

“Nah,” Lorelei says. “It's cool. I'm cool.”

“Cool.” Zoe grins and throws her backpack over her shoulder. She practically skips out the door to Daniel's side, and Lorelei goes up to meet Paul.

The walk is a little better, a little easier. He's trying, and she's trying. They discuss her English reading, and then whether they like to read. Paul plays water polo; he gets carsick on the buses to and from meets, and then he gets home exhausted, and his grades are shitty but polo is going to get him into college, probably, so whatever. He's just as nice as he looks. Lorelei can't help liking him a little bit.

He doesn't compare to Chris, though.

After a couple of blocks their conversation hits a lull. Paul takes advantage of it, and changes the subject.

“I don't know if this is weird to say. Daniel mentioned that you'd just broken up with someone.”

“Oh,” Lorelei says. “Yeah.”

“Me too. I think they thought they were doing both of us a favor.”

“Yeah.”

“I just wanted to say— I don't know. I just wanted to get it out there. That that's, like, the situation.”

Lorelei has been glancing at shops as they pass by: fancy thrift stores, little boutiques, a juice place, another coffee place, a café. She sees an awning up the block that she recognizes but can't place. It looks familiar, and inviting, fabric glowing crimson in the afternoon sun.

“I appreciate that,” Lorelei says. “I feel like—maybe it makes things less awkward?”

Paul nods. The sunlight gilds the edges of his features, turning them sharp and bright.

“Can you read that sign up there?” Lorelei asks. “The one on the red awning?”

“House of…Spirits?”

Of course. This was one of the first places Carina took them when she got her driver's license: on a field trip to buy a pack of tarot cards. She did readings for Zoe and Lorelei under a bedsheet tent in her room. Somehow their futures were always full of dark, mysteriously handsome strangers.

“I kind of want to go in there,” Lorelei says. They're close enough, now, that she can read the sign on her own. It's funny how distinctly she remembers coming here, how her world was transformed just by knowing an older girl with a car.

“Are you a Wiccan? Daniel definitely didn't mention that.”

“Ha. No. I might get a birthday present for…my mom,” Lorelei says. What a lie. “She likes that kind of thing.”

“Want me to flag those guys down?”

“Nah,” Lorelei says. “You should go ahead. I have to get back to school to meet my brother soon, anyway. When he's done with soccer practice. He's giving me a ride.”

“Oh. Cool.”

“Yeah.”

Paul's hands are shoved in his jeans pockets. He moves like he's going to pull them out, to hug her or shake her hand or something, and then doesn't.

“It was nice to meet you,” Lorelei says. “Seriously. Even if it was a little weird.”

“You too,” Paul says. “Maybe I'll see you around?”

“Maybe,” Lorelei says.

“I would like that,” Paul tells her.

Lorelei smiles, and slips into the shop.

Inside House of Spirits, the curtains are drawn against the afternoon's glare, and the air smells like sage and lavender. It's cozy but not claustrophobic. Lorelei likes it immediately.

In the main room there's a cash register, staffed by a very normal-looking girl reading a paperback. The walls are lined with bookshelves, and small tables are stocked with colorful scarves and bundles of dried herbs. To her left is an open doorway, and something bright just beyond it catches the corner of her eye. Lorelei smiles hello at the shopgirl and then turns to follow the brightness.

The smaller room is filled with crystals. There's no curtain here, so the late-afternoon sun cuts in brightly, slipping through the slender pillars of selenite in the window and tinting them pale gold. Lorelei only knows they're selenite because of the hand-lettered signs that say so:
A very good psychic stone, meant for healing and cleansing—clarifies your aura and purifies the energy around you—will help other stones work to their full potential—beautiful and a little fragile!!!! Please ask for assistance.

The rest of the room is just tables and cases and stacks of loose stones. Some of them have been shaped and most of them have been polished, but a few are rough-hewn. Lorelei runs her fingers across quartz, turquoise, lapis, and jade, whose names she knows, and then the ridges and curves of the stones she doesn't recognize. There are tiny barbed spurs of red coral laid carefully in boxes, on pillows of gauze.

The coral is blood-bright in the sunshine, lively even in the stark white beds.
Creativity, passion, energy, and love—red coral can be used to stimulate the body and mind and make your whole life sing!
the sign says. It seems like a stupid thing to trust, but Lorelei picks up one of the little boxes, anyway. It's only three dollars. She might as well.

The girl at the counter has clearly been stuck inside all day without company. “Ooooh,” she says. “I love these!
So
pretty. My boyfriend is a scuba diver—I mean, not, like, professionally, but anyway, he went on a trip last year and I really wanted him to get me some coral—stuff is so much more powerful when it's hand-harvested, you know, when it's something that's
yours
and not, just, like, an object of commerce—but, duh, coral is protected, which I kind of knew, actually. Because it's alive. So he didn't get me any.”

Lorelei doesn't know what to say to this speech. “That's nice,” she tries, and winces at herself. “I mean, it's nice that it's alive. It's cool that things aren't always what they look like.”

“Everything in the world has its own energy,” the girl says seriously. “Which sounds super hippie-dippy, but if you think about it, it actually is kind of true. Since we're all made up of the same stuff—atoms and molecules—and they all vibrate, in some way? Like, the little tiny things that are me now will be dirt, someday, and then maybe part of grass that a bird eats, and whatever. And they'll still be vibrating! So they have their own lives, you know? Everything is everything, basically.” She giggles at herself, and repeats the phrase in an exaggeration of her loose surfer accent: “Everything is, like, eeeeverythiiiiing.”

It's a much more physical explanation of reality than Lorelei expected from someone reading
Know Your Stars, Know Your Soul.
“So do you believe in, like”—Lorelei can't help dropping her voice on the word—“magic?”

The girl looks at Lorelei, and Lorelei watches the gears turning in her head. She's at work; of course she's trying to figure out what will help her make a sale.

“Sort of,” she says finally. “Energy again. If coral is alive when it looks like rock, and the molecules that are in me will someday be in coral, or seaweed, or sand—that's like magic, in its way.”

“So what's all of this stuff good for? If everything is everything, and it's all…already…there?” Lorelei can't tell if she sounds stupid or the conversation does.

“We can use what's in these crystals, and our herbs, and oils, to help change how our energy flows. It's not about turning one thing into another, or pulling rabbits out of hats or whatever. You focus on the stuff you want, and that brings it into your life. Y'know, like, people tell you to think positive?
The Secret
? This is just that plus some. That's how I explain it, anyway.”

Lorelei sags with disappointment. She wanted so badly for the girl to just say
Yes,
and then she could say
Have you ever heard of,
and the girl would say
Yes, of course, absolutely,
and tell her what to buy or wear or rub on her temples. But even this deep in California pseudospiritualism there's no record of a curse or a spell or a creature like her, or room for one to exist.