The day Lorelei's parents died, she had been shopping.
She was browsing the racks of the local Ross, looking for black tops, pants, and anything dark that would help her blend into the crowd at the club. It's customary for photographers and videographers to wear black, which wasn't exactly difficult for her. After all, half of her wardrobe was black. But she'd just gotten her new camera lens and was going to test it out that night, and for a night as special as that one, she wanted a new outfit to match.
Her brother, Lucas, was scheduled to play an acoustic set. It wasn't his first time playing, but it was the first after self-releasing his album titled "Within". It was a debut EP that only had four songs, meant to be the introduction to his work, and served as the beginning of a story that he'd already told her many times. He was a natural storyteller, well-versed in the art of tragedies due to his love for Shakespeare (and their family's lineage tracing back to their thirteenth great-grandfather being William Shakespeare's first cousin). However, Lucas's story was a tragedy about the current music industry, and his EP was reflective of the beginning of his own dreams—his desire for someone, anyone, to love his work. He'd always said that if just one person was touched or changed by his music, that was good enough for him. And Lorelei knew it would, so she wanted to capture it all—his journey and passion.
So she spent far too long that morning among the racks in Ross until her phone rang.
She didn't remember much after that. She didn't know what had happened to the clothes she was holding, or the iced coffee she'd just gotten before walking into the store. Her keys were suddenly turning the ignition of her old Nissan, and the road was a blur all the way to the hospital, where Lucas was sitting.
He was in the waiting area of the emergency room, his elbows on his knees, running his hands through his hair. And when he looked up at her, she just knew.
It had been a head-on collision with a semi-truck. The doctors said their parents were killed on impact, but it didn't soften the blow. They were seventeen and nineteen and still felt like orphans, leaving them with a half-empty house and a business they only half knew how to run. But it was their parents' dream, and so Lucas put aside his own to keep their parents alive in the only way he knew how.
So they sold their childhood home. They rented the small, long-empty apartment above their parents' club and lived off the money from the house sale. They took over their parents' business and spent months learning a new rhythm. Lorelei did what she could, but Lucas was a natural at maintaining some normalcy. He paid their bills, bought the groceries, and cheered loud enough for three people when she walked across the stage in a cap and gown, accepting her diploma from the superintendent of her school with a forced smile. Because she knew Lucas's cheering and smiling would turn into sobs that she could hear through the thin walls of their old apartment at midnight. Every once in a while, his muffled noises still crept under the crack in her bedroom door. Only, these days, they'd been laced with the effects of too much liquor and too much thinking.
And there was something about the air that surrounded the dark alley in front of her now that pulled her toward the sobs.
She scanned the alley, the distant hum of traffic comforting in its normalcy. She moved forward, her steps tentative and her eyes locked on the shadow leaning against the brick. Her imagination ran wild, suddenly envisioning the worst, but her concern won out, and she took a breath and pushed the thoughts aside.
She took a step closer, then paused, the silence around her amplifying her heart pounding. The figure was motionless, their head hanging at an angle that seemed unsettling. She swallowed hard, torn between the need to help and the fear of what she might find. But, closer now, she could see more—clothing that suggested something other than the usual alleyway denizen.
Her pulse quickened with fear and curiosity, the emotions intertwining until she couldn't tell them apart. But then she noticed something lying in a puddle, black and blue hues catching the street lamps' light.
She knelt before drawing back again—it was a mask, a pattern she knew too well now. Her eyes shifted to the person slumped against the wall—a half-conscious young man. He didn't seem to notice she was even there, caught somewhere between reality and a world blurred by pain and the scent of alcohol.
"Hey," she said. "Are you alright?"
Silence. Her heart pounded as she watched his chest rise and fall, fragile and tentative. He sat limp against the bricks. Wet streaks made trails through the blood on his cheeks. It dripped and disappeared into his black clothes while her eyes flicked back and forth between the mask in the puddle and back to him, unable to understand. Was this a fan of Willow? And the mask, perhaps a simple replica of the infamous one that had been on stage hours before? Maybe—but his clothes, his rings...
No. There was no way.
She sank to the ground beside him, noticing things she hadn't before—a tattoo, barely visible beneath the sleeve of his torn shirt. The calluses on his fingers were undeniable proof of artistry, something she knew from her brother's hands all too well. The vulnerability of his unconscious form was so stark that it almost made her look away. But she didn't. She absorbed every detail, the photographer in her unable to stop seeing, recording, and capturing. It was the only way she knew how to understand, to process, to make sense of the world when things seemed to be falling apart.
She reached out, her hand trembling slightly, her mind a jumble of what-ifs and maybes. The hesitation clung to her before she swallowed it down and leaned in. She was close enough to see the shallow rise and fall of breath, propelling her to do something, anything, to help. Her fingers hovered above his skin, hesitating, before he looked up at her.
One of his eyes was black and swollen. She held her breath as they locked eyes for a long time. But it seemed as though he were looking past her, into her. Finally, he shook his head.
"I'm so sorry," he whispered, but the way the words fell from his lips made her understand they were words not meant for her.
His eyes closed slowly, but she couldn't look away, and the longer she looked, the more the details of his appearance seared themselves into her mind. The bruises bloomed darkly against his skin, telling stories she could only guess at. Blood traced paths along his cheek, a macabre reminder of how fragile fame and flesh can be.
Her hands shook as she pulled out her phone, the glow from the screen harsh against the darkness. He stirred, a low and anguished sound escaping him as she dialed with trembling fingers. Her voice was steady in the quiet night, betraying nothing of the confusing storm inside her.
"Yeah, I'm beside 23 Ansley Street. There's someone here who needs an ambulance."
***
The distant wail of an ambulance siren began to thread its way through the night before she had a moment to think about it—the mask.
She looked at it again, still lying in the puddle, its colors dull in the dimness. She scooped it up, as if cradling something fragile and infinitely valuable. If this were truly him, then she would protect his secret. So she tucked it carefully into her bag.
Red and blue strobed the alley, pushing back the shadows and painting their world in urgent color. Within minutes, paramedics came forward, stretching the moment into something surreal and urgent. Lorelei rose from the ground as they surrounded him. The medics moved efficiently, their hands practiced and sure as they assessed his injuries. Lorelei watched, feeling both relief and anxiety knotting tightly in her chest. They spoke in clipped, professional tones, their words a blur of medical jargon until they loaded him into the ambulance. One of them turned to her.
"Do you know what happened to him?"
"I'm not sure," Lorelei said. "I... heard him from the street and found him here."
"Do you know who he is?"
She hesitated, clutching the infamous mask inside her bag. Handing it over wouldn't provide them with his name, nor would telling them that he was possibly the lead singer of an anonymous band provide them with anything other than the truth to a secret he likely wanted kept. So she shook her head, her grip tightening around her strap.
Eventually, the ambulance lights flashed away from the alley's entrance, and she stood alone, her mind already reeling with how to get the mask back to him, if it even was—truly—him.
It all suddenly felt like the most impossible thing in the world, and she was sure, for reasons that she couldn't understand, that the world itself was ending and beginning all at once.
***
It was well after five-thirty in the morning by the time she crept through the door.
The lock jammed in the door like it was fighting to keep Lorelei out. Her fingers stumbled with the keys, and for a moment, she thought about just lying down in the hallway, letting the universe win. But then the lock gave way and she lifted the broken knob, turning it slowly.
Her jaw clenched, and she forced herself to relax as she opened the door. It squeaked open to reveal Lucas passed out on their worn-out couch. The door closed behind her with the whisper of wood meeting wood, barely disturbing Lucas's stupor. She took a deep breath, and the smell of cheap whiskey punched her square in the senses. Lucas's body was sprawled across the couch like it had fallen from a great height, his chest rising and falling in a slow, drunken rhythm. He slept the sleep of the reckless, every fiber of his being draped carelessly across the furniture, like the rest of the world couldn't have possibly needed him right now. His clothes were rumpled and creased, the last vestiges of a long day and an even longer night.
She kicked a pair of his discarded shoes out of her path and made her way toward the TV. It glowed with the artificial blue of pre-dawn, the tinny murmur of a reporter slicing through the stale air. A picture of an all too familiar masked group of men was splayed up on the screen—"Rising Rock Group Willow's Sold Out Performance At Local Venue Ansley Street" headlined the photo. But Lorelei ignored the screen and stepped lightly over empty bottles, using the TV's light to catch the glint in shattered glass that she knew littered the floor.
She knelt down and pulled the covers up over him. She took the remote from his open hand and pointed it at the TV, stopping short of pressing the power button when a clip from Willow's most recent music video played on the screen.
Her mind raced, jumping back to the concert, to the alley, and now here. All of it looped around the same points, but none offered any clarity. The night's exhaustion crashed over her anew, every wave carrying the debris of fresh revelation. She found herself watching it with tired eyes until it was over and the reporter had moved on to the breaking news of the early morning hours.
The first light of dawn spilled into the room, pooling around Lorelei in soft, golden waves. The night refused to let her go, anchoring her to its mysteries, each one more impossible than the last. She pulled the mask from her bag and stared at it. Somehow, it was the heaviest thing she'd ever held.
The curiosity weighed on her until a different kind of exhaustion settled over her, demanding a new type of endurance. So she tucked the mask back into her bag. Lucas gave a long, unbothered sigh and rolled to one side, his hair flopping across his forehead with perfect disinterest in his surroundings.
Her grip tightened on the remote, her knuckles white. She sighed, and with a small click of the remote, the apartment plunged into silence.