A Song to Take the World Apart by Zan Romanoff Page A

near Halloween, which means costumes. The band gets skeleton sweatshirts. On Friday, Lorelei goes with Chris after school to pick up palettes of face paint, and sits with him in the bathroom at the practice space while he coats his face in white and sweeps streaks of black along his bones: his nose and cheeks, and then across the swell of his mouth.
    She expects it to be harder for one or both of them, but he doesn’t look like death at all: it’s just Chris as a cartoon. He pulls some funny faces at his reflection, and then at her in the mirror. He forgets himself and kisses her, smudging them both with gray.
    She and Zoe spend Saturday scrounging up thrift store punk outfits: tight jeans with holes in the knees and safety-pinned tank tops. They rat their hair up into faux hawks. Lorelei narrows her eyes and practices making tough faces. “You’re such a marshmallow,” Zoe says. “You look like one of Carina’s angry troll dolls.”
    Lorelei frowns down at her outfit. “Is it dumb?” she asks. “Should I change?”
    “The point of Halloween is to be whoever you’re not,” Zoe replies philosophically. “I mean, you are definitely not a street punk.”
    Lorelei is nervous, but the drive there soothes her. Nik and Zoe are both good at distracting her. They might even be flirting with each other a little bit. She watches her reflection in the window flash by under each passing streetlight, and it looks—okay, she thinks. Not so crazy, now that she’s away from her little-girl bathroom at home.
    They park somewhere up in the steep, sloped hills above Sunset. Nik is wearing a tight black T-shirt and a pair of bunny ears taken from Lorelei’s old dress-up box. She’s surprised to find that he’s handsome enough to get away with something like that. He’s just her brother. But when Zoe looks at him, Lorelei can kind of imagine how other girls see him too.
    Carina drives over from UCLA to join them. She knows Bean even though he’s a year younger than she is, and she’s curious to hear the band play too. She meets them at the bottom of the hill. When they stumble down to her, she’s halfway through a clove, wreathed in its pale smoke. She isn’t dressed up, so she looks like she always does: tough, casual, careless.
    “Carina,” Lorelei says, “this is my brother Nik.”
    Nik and Carina have met once or twice before, but only ever in passing. It’s strange to see the two of them together. It feels like they
should
know each other already, just by osmosis.
    “Nice to meet you,” Carina says. She gives Nik a split-second once-over and then turns her attention to Lorelei. “I hear one of these dudes is your boyfriend now. Nice going.”
    “Uh,” Lorelei says. “Thanks?”
    Nik cocks his head at Lorelei. “Chris? I didn’t know he was your
boyfriend.
”
    “He’s—”
    “The show’s gonna start,” Zoe says before Nik can ask any more questions. “Let’s go inside, yeah?”
    Carina takes one last, long drag on her cigarette. The smell of her exhale is so thick and sweet that it makes Lorelei a little light-headed. “Sure,” she says. “Whatever.”
    Carina’s smoky scent envelops all four of them as they walk into the Whiskey, giving them an air of unquestionable, indifferent cool. Chris is already onstage. He’s tuning his guitar, haloed in white light, exactly where he belongs.
    “
That’s
my boyfriend,” Lorelei says, allowing herself one satisfied smile when Carina draws her breath in through her teeth. Someone else must have done his makeup tonight: the lines are slim and precise, stitches radiating out from around his lips, his dark eyes surrounded by a sea of black.
    “He certainly looks like trouble,” she says.
    Nik says, “You have no idea.”
    The two of them share a look over Lorelei’s head that has her instantly feeling five again, maybe twelve, definitely young and left out. So she leaves them behind and bounds up to the stage, leaning against its lip to look up at