A Song to Take the World Apart Read Free

no words for the sound of the music and the way it makes her feel.
    Later, Chris will tell her what he calls it: California skate-rock, ska-inflected, maybe a little bit punk. She’ll learn to recognize the bands that influenced them, Green Day and Sublime, those godfathers of their lazy LA vibe. She’ll learn how to talk about music the way that people do, which is in proper nouns, without ever trying to describe the luminous, impossible fact of actual sound.
    That night what Lorelei responds to is the bright, high wail of a horn playing when a boy from the marching band steps in to add a trumpet blast or two, the fuzz of the guitar, and the clear kick and thrust of the drummer’s beat. She’s never been surrounded by so much at once before, listening to a song someone made up because he felt like it.
    Her skin prickles and burns, and gets tight and dry over her bones. Her throat wells up with choked-back notes. Her body wants to open itself up from the center, turn itself inside out to touch everything at once. The thrum of her pulse falls into the rhythm of each song, like her body recognizes the beat.
    Chris stands tall in the spotlight. He sweats and spits and swaggers. The press of bodies all around her crowds Lorelei too closely, and she wants to jump up next to him and take up space the way he does. Chris and the band demand things: the stage floor, and the people to watch them, and the very air in the room, which they fill to bursting with the vibrations of their voices.
    Lorelei is small. She’s been small. The music makes her want to be bigger.
    She’s dizzy and light-headed afterward, when they finally stop, bereft in the sudden hugeness of the silence.
    “Oh man, I can’t hear
shit,
” Zoe says, beaming, sticking a pinkie right in her ear.
    Lorelei almost can’t understand her. She’s still listening for the last echo of the last song, trying to get the melody back in her mind.

    A few minutes and a second cold Coke bring Lorelei back to herself. Now that she’s used to the noise and the people, she can start to pick out groups of her classmates in the crowd. A handful of tables crammed into a corner on the far side of the room seems to be the gathering spot: she recognizes Jackson the bassist’s girlfriend, Angela, and her crew of friends. They’re all draped on each other, laughing and drinking from dark glass bottles with the labels peeled off.
    The boys are starting to load out, pulling equipment offstage, but they pause to say hi to those girls. Jackson tugs Angela off her feet and spins her around in a circle. Lorelei looks at Chris again and tries to look like she’s not looking. He moves around easily, like he’s used to this chaos. There are so many girls so much closer to his orbit.
    He greets them all evenly, though, weaving his way through them like he has somewhere else to be. Lorelei watches Chris as he comes up behind one of the chairs at the far side of the group.
    A middle-aged woman is sitting in it, her ankles neatly crossed and her handbag in her lap. Her dark hair is pulled back from her face, which is bare. Lorelei must have seen her and managed not to notice, before. The woman doesn’t look like she wants to be noticed. There’s something shrunken about her, trembling, like she’s only barely clutching herself together.
    Chris drops a kiss on the top of her forehead. For one wild, hysterical second Lorelei thinks,
That cannot be his girlfriend,
and then it comes to her, sharp and clear: that’s his
mother,
at his gig, his
mother
is here, keeping an eye on him.
    The upside of having two overworked parents and being raised by her no-nonsense grandmother is that no one has ever shadowed Lorelei. No one hung around to make sure she felt okay on playdates or sleepovers, or on the first day of school. Lately she watches other girls get pink and flustered when their parents show up on campus or drop them off at parties. It’s funny to see her friends trying to navigate