Free A Song to Take the World Apart by Zan Romanoff

possessed. Not the way her father did when he heard her singing, which was a distant thing, like he’d become a vacant body, a zombie. Petra looks like there’s a spirit inside her, making her mouth move too quickly and giving it strange shapes.
    Lorelei says, “She just told me—”
    “Not to sing, never to sing. She told me the same thing, baby, but now I think we might be free.”
    “You can’t possibly think Oma was, like,…a witch.”
    If anything, it’s her mother who’s the witch, always shut away from the rest of the world, bound up by a tight smile and this angry suspicion. She looks like she could do magic right now if she could channel the energy sparking behind her eyes into her fingers and her mouth.
    “I know what I know,” Petra says, but she loosens her grip a little. “Trust me. What she did to me—I hope she didn’t do it to you. I hope it all goes away now that she’s dead and gone. Maybe now it will all be over.”
    At this point, Lorelei is sick to death of crying, but she feels tears gathering behind her eyes, anyway. Her body stopped obeying her the minute Nik said, “Something’s happened. With Oma,” the minute she looked close enough to see the resignation written across his face, and the dark soft sadness welled up in his eyes.
    Because she’s starting to understand, and wishes she wasn’t. From a certain angle—at seventeen, say, and terrified—bad luck can look a lot like something worse. What her mother must mean is: Oma cursed her, and she ended up pregnant. Petra sang for Henry, and slept with him, and somehow her babies are Oma’s fault. The morning’s conversation, and the air it seemed to breathe into her mother’s life, crumbles in on itself. Petra doesn’t want to take responsibility for anything. She wants to blame Oma for everything that’s gone wrong so far, and start over again like Oma never existed.
    She believes their family is her curse.
    “How can you say that?” Lorelei asks.
    “You don’t know her like I did,” Petra says. “And you weren’t there when—”
    But Lorelei can’t bear to hear any more. “You said this morning that you loved us,” she starts. “That you wanted to take care of us, that you were scared, and now you’re saying—that having Nik, and Jens, that was a
curse
? Thank god you didn’t raise us, if that’s how you feel.”
    This, finally, stills Petra. Her face goes blank and white. “That’s not what I meant,” she says, but it comes out mechanical. She must not have realized what she was really saying. What she was confessing to her daughter, who’s part curse too, or cursed, or who knows.
    “Sure.” Lorelei is a minute, maybe less, from crying. She thinks that if her mother doesn’t get out of the room before it starts, she’s going to scream, or die, or just explode. “Okay. You told me. Please leave now.”
    “I’m sorry,” Petra says. She slips out the door with her shoulders hunched.
    Lorelei refuses to feel sorry for her.
    She falls asleep on top of the covers in her clothes, and wakes up to a face that’s stiff with tear tracks. She stares up at the ceiling and licks delicately at the salt crusted against the upper corner of her lip. There’s an ocean’s worth of sadness inside her that’s just started spilling out. It’s briny and sharp against her tongue.

E VERYTHING IS COMPLICATED IN the days that follow Oma’s death. Grief is not straightforward, and Lorelei’s is full of twists and turns: sadness followed by anger, and then whole minutes where she forgets, and then has to remember again.
    Oma died on Tuesday night. Wednesday is lost in a blur of sleeping, or trying to, or staring at walls. She calls Zoe when she knows she’ll be in class so that she can just leave a voice mail explaining where she’s been. Jens tells her when to come down for meals and reminds her to eat while she sits at the table, lost. Everything tastes like sand and feels just as heavy in her stomach.
    On