A Song to Take the World Apart Read Free Page B

likes the shape of the words in her mouth, the way she can mimic Chris’s loose native drawl when he says them. He kind of leans against her arm for a second, and then lopes back to the band. There are layers and layers between them but Lorelei touches the jacket anyway, where he brushed up against her. She rubs her fingertips together and looks at them, like she might actually be able to see sparks there.
    She finds Zoe flirting with a serious-looking man at the bar, a twenty-something with a neatly trimmed beard and a solemn, intense gaze. She’s trying to talk him into buying her a real drink.
    “C’mon,” Lorelei says. She used up all of her boldness talking to Chris; now, under this stranger’s eyes, she can barely look up from her shoes. She doesn’t want to ruin her friend’s fun, but she doesn’t like the look of this all that much. “Zo, whatever, we’ve gotta go.”
    “It’s no fun here, anyway,” Zoe says. She throws a challenging look over her shoulder as they walk away. The man doesn’t respond. “Oh shit, we’ve gotta get this stuff off,” she says then, to Lorelei, rubbing a thumb against her blush-bright cheek. “Bathroom, c’mon.”
    “Sorry to hassle you,” Lorelei says, shouldering the door open.
    “It’s fine,” Zoe says. She pulls makeup wipes out of her bag and passes them over.
    “I mean, you came here for me and—”
    “L,” Zoe says. “Seriously.” She keeps wiping at her face, mouth open in a distracted, uneven O.
    “Okay.” Lorelei starts with her mascara. The sting of chemicals makes her eyes water. She watches Zoe’s reflection in the mirror, her vision blurred by reflexive tears, as her friend’s face slowly becomes its familiar self again. This is the girl she knows, soft and private. “Thanks,” she says when they’re done. “For everything.”
    “I had fun too,” Zoe says. “And. You know. Thanks for trying to keep me out of trouble.”
    “Yeah,” Lorelei says. That’s the balance of them, the way they work: if Lorelei needs Zoe to tell her it’s okay to be loud, to lie to someone’s parents and flirt with a boy, Zoe needs Lorelei to keep her at anchor. The flip side of her boldness is that it gets heedless, sometimes. It can skid into reckless. Zoe doesn’t like being told what to do, mostly, but she trusts Lorelei to tell her when to stop.
    The man at the bar is lost to the crowd by the time they leave.
    Outside, the boys are loading equipment into someone’s station wagon, Jackson and Bean the drummer slowly losing a complicated game of real-world Tetris. Chris is there too, laughing and not helping, sitting against the side of the building with his legs stretched out across the sidewalk.
    He’s strumming the unplugged strings of his guitar and singing while everyone else works. Lorelei recognizes the tune: it’s from one of the records that Zoe’s sister Carina always played when she was still living at home. It’s a short song, a woman singing throaty and full over nothing more than handclaps and the cheers of a crowd.
Oh lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
    “You have a goddamn Mercedes!” Bean yells out. “Come help us deal with this Volvo.”
    “Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,” Chris rejoins.
    The spirit comes over Lorelei: she can hear the next words in her head. She looks at Chris sitting on the sidewalk and thinks,
Of course you’re what I want.
She sings out, “Oh lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” finishing his verse as she skips nimbly over his ankles.
    She doesn’t look back, after. She doesn’t think about whether anyone heard her over the street sounds, other voices, passing traffic. She just lets her voice ring out behind her, resonant in the dry, clean desert air. It’s the first time she’s ever sung out so boldly, and the vibration of it rings through her like a bell, high, sharp, and clear.
    She doesn’t see—though she