A Song to Take the World Apart (14 page)

C
HRIS DETOURS ON THE
way to practice to pick up McDonald's drive-thru for everyone. It's been three hours since lunch, so of course all of the boys are going to be starving. Lorelei gets French fries and extra barbecue sauce, mostly just to be companionable.

She's glad they have the food, because as soon as they walk in and Jackson sees her face, he shuts down like a light being flicked off.

“We brought burgers,” Chris says.

Jackson takes the paper bag he's offering without saying anything back.

A month ago Lorelei would have felt awful. She would have curled in on herself and gotten small and silent, hoping that the awkwardness would somehow resolve itself around her, or just wash itself away. Now she looks at Jackson's bad mood and thinks,
If you would just talk to me, you'd know there's nothing to worry about.
She folds down onto the floor next to Chris and holds out her own bag in Jackson's direction. She tries to sound neutral when she asks, “Want fries?”

Jackson shrugs, and takes one. It shouldn't break the tension, and it doesn't, entirely, but it fractures enough of it that Lorelei's shoulders loosen. She's done her part without making a big deal out of it. Bean comes to join them and starts joking with Chris; after a while, Jackson chimes in. Lorelei lets them have their boy-banter.
See?
she thinks at Jackson.
I'm not trying to take anything from you. I promise.

The food disappears so quickly it looks like a magic trick, or stop-motion animation: Lorelei sees it happen in flashes, and all of a sudden it's just her and the boys and a sea of greasy wax paper. No one seems to be in a hurry, though. Bean folds his napkin into a floppy origami mouth, and Jackson is lingering over the last of her French fries. The talk turns toward music like it always does when they're together.

“I want to play another show before the end of the year,” Jackson says. “We do better when we're practicing for something, instead of just, like, dicking around.”

Bean wads up his napkin and tosses it vaguely in the direction of Jackson's head. “Like now, you mean?”

“We'll get to it,” Chris says. “In a minute. You think I brought Lorelei out here just to make her smell your farts all afternoon?”

“Wouldn't want Lorelei to be bored,” Jackson says.

“I've got homework,” Lorelei says. Maybe she shouldn't try to placate Jackson—there's no reason for him to be a dick—but she's not really in the mood for the afternoon to turn sour, either.

“Forget that. You should practice with us,” Chris says.

Lorelei makes a face. Of course she'd love to sing with him—for him, even—but that's not something she's ready to try out in front of a group yet. She's just as worried about her family's mysterious legacy as she is gripped by plain old stage fright. “Nah.”

Chris tips sideways so he can lie down and rest his head on her thigh. “Someday you're going to say yes,” he tells her. “And you're going to blow us all away.”

“You'll have to say I'm good, after you've spent all this time trying to convince me.”

“You will be,” Chris insists.

“We'd tell you if you sucked,” Bean cuts in. “Just so we'd never have to hear this argument ever again.”

“Oh, please.” Jackson's voice is cold and furious. “Lorelei will never do it. She just wants to make sure Chris has to keep asking her.”

Lorelei's face goes white and then red.

“That's not—” she starts.

“Oh, shut
up,
” Jackson says. “I know he's gagging for it, but some of us are tired of the sound of your voice.”

Lorelei reacts without thinking: she pushes Chris's head off her leg and stands up shakily, grabbing her backpack as she goes. Distantly, she can hear Chris saying something, but it doesn't matter: whatever it is, she doesn't want to hear it. He doesn't try to stop her when she slips out of the studio. He doesn't follow her down the hall, or come running out the front door of the building.

Lorelei pulls out her phone—and stops. Shit. If she asks Nik to come get her, he'll have questions, and if she can't answer them, he might stop covering for her when she needs him. Jens will have fewer opinions but even more questions, and she doesn't want to draw his attention if she doesn't have to. She weighs her options and hates each of them. In the end she texts Jens, mostly because she's sure he'll come no matter what.
I went to a thing with Zoe and Carina but now I'm not feeling great—can you pick me up?
she sends.

A minute later he says he will, and asks for the address. Lorelei hopes she can pretend she's too sick to talk. She almost wasn't lying about that: now that the initial shock has worn off, all she feels is the nauseating pulse of her anger.

She leans against the building's front railing and trembles, little starbursts of rage exploding under her skin. How dare Jackson talk to her like that. How dare he act like she's just some awful girl, when she's done everything she can to be good for Chris, to be good for everyone. He has no idea what she's protecting him from. Something dark spills loose in her, and she thinks:
I could show him, and then he'd really be sorry.

When the building's door opens again, it's not Chris coming to see her. It's Jackson. He doesn't look like he's going to apologize.

He comes down the steps and stands next to her. “Jesus, seriously,” he says. “Did you put that dude under a spell or something?”

Lorelei starts, guilty, but—no, she didn't, that's the whole stupid
point.

“He wouldn't let us get on with it until I came out to say sorry.”

There's a deliberate silence in which Jackson does not do that.

“I haven't told anyone,” Lorelei says, finally. She owes him this much, and no more. “I haven't talked to Nik about it or anything. About what I saw.”

“Okay,” Jackson says. “That's not even the point.”

“I know it's none of my business—”

“It really isn't.”

“I just—”

“It really isn't,” he says again.

He's my brother,
Lorelei wants to say.
I love him and I want him to be happy. I wouldn't do anything—anything—to mess with that.

“It's not serious,” Jackson says eventually. “It's just a thing we do, sometimes.”

“So, Angela?”

“I love Angela,” Jackson says. “I like girls, okay, I love her, she's—it's just— Nik and I started messing around a while ago. You know, before. Chris was gone a lot, dealing with his dad, and we had time to kill, I guess. And then there was Angela, and we stopped,” he says. “And if you hadn't started hanging around Chris, Nik would have stayed out of my way.”

“That's ridiculous,” Lorelei says. “This isn't my fault!”

“Oh, right, okay. How silly of me. Of course nothing is
your
fault. Because what have you ever done wrong? Nothing. Nothing. You're golden. You have no idea what this is like. You have everything. Enough to just—” He makes a little gesture: dismissive, royal, unconcerned.

That's what he thinks of her life, and why wouldn't he, from what he's seen of it? He thinks that just because she has Chris, she's never wanted anything she couldn't let herself have. Lorelei chokes back a laugh.

Jackson corrects himself. “No one has everything they want,” he says. “Duh. Yes. Okay. But you seem like you're coming pretty freaking close.”

Lorelei slumps against the railing, the sun-warmed metal biting hard against her back. She doesn't want to defend herself. She shouldn't have to. Just because she knows one of Jackson's secrets doesn't mean he can begin to guess at hers.

“Look,” Jackson says at last. “You can probably sing. I don't know why the hell you're pretending you can't, but I know that Chris deserves better from you. He loves music. He loves it so much. It reminds him of his
dad.
And if you're lucky enough to be in love, and to have someone want to share something they love with you—then don't waste it. Sing it for me now. The first verse. Don't think. Just do it.”

The darkness that spilled loose in Lorelei earlier is all through her, now, threaded across the network of her veins and into her lungs, her marrow, the thick muscle of her heart. She takes in a breath to tell Jackson to be quiet, and the air finds new space in her, in the hollows created by that blackness. When she breathes out again, she knows she's going to do it. It's not a thought; it's a physical fact. She opens her mouth and closes her eyes.

She doesn't really remember it, after. All she knows is that while she sang, she was seized in the grip of the sound, channeling something bigger than herself: conducting electricity. The music was white-hot and bright, sparking in her wrists and behind her eyes. It was like she could reach out and touch him: just Jackson, the hidden parts of him, his sadness, his loneliness, his quiet. She could pull at his inner life with her bare hands.

It came to her instinctually, like kissing, like breathing. She didn't have a name for what she was doing. Her whole self was absorbed by the space the sound made between them. It was the first time she had directed a song at someone, making it for him as much as for herself.

Lorelei gave away feeling without meaning to, with her father and that day on the Pier. She thought it might work like a mirror, turning her listeners into reflections of her own emotional interior. Singing to Jackson, though, and coming back after, she's distantly aware of something more complicated going on.

There he was, laid bare for her, his mind open to her mind's touch. It wasn't that she gave him what she was feeling. She convinced him to feel something specific. The words came to her as unbidden as the song, but she recognizes them. They're the ones she's been biting down on for days and days.