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

Chris. “Hey, baby,” she says. Chris smiles back and then freezes.
    “Hey,” he says. “Shit, we, uh— Remember, we talked about this? My mom?”
    Mrs. Paulson is once again stationed at the back of the room. She’s as silent and watchful as ever.
    They did talk about this, about how she would be there, how Lorelei shouldn’t do exactly what she’s doing. “Sorry,” she says.
    “Nah,” he replies. Chris flicks his hair out of his eyes, his little habitual gesture. It’s familiar, endearing, and it soothes the hot lick of shame Lorelei feels. “I’m glad you want to. But. Later, maybe?”
    “Find me,” she says. “I’ll be around.” She tries to walk back to the rest of the group with some measure of confidence and cool.
    “Not in front of the Mrs.,” Nik says. He looks at Chris’s mother. His gaze lingers on the group of kids around her and then flicks up to the stage where the boys are finishing their sound check. He used to hang out with some of them, Lorelei remembers. Jackson, soccer, all of that. She wonders if he’s embarrassed to be seen with his little sister.
    Nik says, “Carina’s at the bar trying to round up a beer or two. I won’t tell if you want to have some sips.”

    There are a couple of guys at the bar who Carina knows. They’re Chris and Nik’s age, seniors at a different Valley private school than the one Bean goes to. They’re badly groomed and neatly dressed, the stubble covering their chins marking them definitively as older than Lorelei’s smooth-skinned classmates. Carina introduces them all around—the dark-haired one is Daniel, and his friend, a blond, is Paul. Daniel has a fake ID with someone else’s face on it. He flashes it at the bartender and buys them all their drinks.
    Lorelei can see the boys doing the math in their heads: three girls, three guys. Nik is charming Carina as easily as he charmed Zoe in the car; Zoe tilts her face up toward Daniel’s when she talks. He motions that he can’t hear her. She rises onto the balls of her feet and props a hand against his shoulder to steady herself.
    Paul and Lorelei catch each other’s eyes, and smile, and look away. For the first time Lorelei understands the appeal of a wedding ring: some silent symbol she could flash that would say
off-limits.
Not unfriendly, just unavailable.
    “Have you heard these guys play before?” Paul asks.
    “Yeah,” Lorelei says. “A couple of times.”
    Should she be flirting with him, and trying to get a rise out of Chris, who’s tuning his guitar onstage? It seems pointless to pretend. Instead, she sips at her icy beer, so cold it doesn’t really taste like anything, and lets the chill and the alcohol numb her from the inside out. Chris not kissing her stings less and less and less.
    “So they’re good?”
    “I think so,” she says. “Pretty good.” Lorelei nods at Chris on the stage. “He’s my boyfriend, so. You know.”
    “Oh,” Paul says. He smiles at her. “Got it.”
    By the time the band comes on, Lorelei is buzzing. She feels like a firecracker about to go off: tightly wrapped, full of sparks. She knows all the songs by now, from the last show, and the practices, and Chris humming them unconsciously under his breath.
    It’s different, though, when the band comes together, when the sound rolls up and spreads through the air in the room. Instead of concentrating her inside herself like the first show did, this one connects her to everyone around her. It’s nice to look at a crowd and see every face in it: to think,
You and you and you and you.
At the first show she wasn’t sure she belonged, or whether she could move in a mass governed by a beat. Now it seems easy. Natural, almost. She understands how to let her body tell her what to do.
    If she was the one onstage, her voice might snare all of these people the way it did on the Pier. When it first happened, Lorelei was horrified by herself. She doesn’t want anyone under her thrall. But the power Chris