by Zan Romanoff
The orchard isn’t really big enough to be an orchard, technically—it’s just a loose cluster of a half dozen or so trees (oranges, lemons, and a lone avocado) and stone benches that sit, quiet and solid, under their branches.
Lulu hears Owen before she sees him. He’s quiet too, barefoot like she is, but Lulu has spent years and years in this space when it was truly empty. She knows what it sounds like the moment someone else arrives.
He’s carrying a bowl. “I didn’t know if you needed something for the oranges,” he says. “To put them in.”
“Oh,” Lulu says. “Yeah. That’s smart, actually. Thanks.”
Owen places the bowl on one of the benches, and Lulu puts the oranges she’s already picked into it.
“It was also a good excuse,” Owen says. “To. Um. Talk to you.”
How long have they known each other? Lulu watches the way the light filters through the trees’ leaves, falling on the mess of his sandy hair, and does the math: since the first day of seventh grade. It was five years in September, then. Like, basically a third of her life so far.
“About what?”
“I’m sorry,” he says, “to start with. The way I ended things . . . I’m not proud of it.”
Owen didn’t ghost her, but he came close. He told her he didn’t want to talk about what had happened on the phone, and then he didn’t try to make plans with her when he got back to LA. Finally, desperate, she called him the night before school started.
He said, “I can’t do this anymore, Lu.” He probably said other things too, but that’s what Lulu remembers: the word can’t, and how tired his voice sounded, and how much her heart ached, like it was exhausted, like all it wanted was to be allowed to quit beating for a while.
Now he says, “You were, like, really important to me, and I hope I didn’t make you feel, just because it ended badly, that I hadn’t—that I didn’t—that—that wasn’t true.”
This does not sound like a prelude to an offer of the two of them starting over again. Lulu feels her defenses rising as surely as if they were physical walls going up, locking firmly into place.
“You don’t have to apologize to me,” she says. “I mean, since you’re here and everything. I feel like it’s obvious that I’m okay with you. Don’t worry, O. We’re good.”
“I’m glad,” Owen says. “But I also—I know there’s no good way to break up with someone, but I wish I hadn’t gone dark on you like that. I just needed some time, you know? I needed a minute to figure things out. But lately I’ve really been missing you, Lu. And I want us to try being friends again, if you’re interested in that.”
Lulu doesn’t know what to say.
“I get that I can’t, like, ask you for anything. So I’m not. I’m just saying: If that’s something you want, that’s something I want.”
Lulu nods. She turns back to the trees. It’s their season, and there are so many ripe oranges that she doesn’t even have to go looking for them. When she reaches, they fall right into her hand.
Owen is offering her something. It’s not what she imagined or guessed, but it’s something.
The problem is that it’s something new. Lulu has no idea what it would be like, what it would mean for them, to be friends. She could probably figure out the best way to play this, but she needs much, much more time. She feels undone by the scope of possibility, the idea that there’s some halfway point between being nothing to each other and being them again. The idea that he could want her, but not like that.
She doesn’t want to lose him, though. She knows that much.
She says, “You can help me with this, for starters.”
“Sure,” Owen says.
If they were—when they were—he would have razzed her about not answering questions, about being evasive, the same way Bea was giving her shit earlier.
Lulu thinks, Serves him right, that he can’t be familiar with her anymore. He can’t ask for more than she decides to give him.
On the other hand, now he’s just another person she has to keep a wall up with. And she already has so many of those.
CHAPTER FOUR
LULU DOESN’T TELL anyone about the specifics of her conversation with Owen. Bea is too distracted by Rich to ask on Sunday; by Monday, all anyone’s thinking about is finals, which start next week.
But the sense of detente between them seems to filter through their friends, and resettle some of the fracture their breakup caused in September. Lulu finds herself sitting at tables with the boys during lunch again. On Wednesday, Rich asks her to share her calc notes. On Friday sixth period, Jules texts her that they’re going up to the lookout to get drunk if she wants to come.
She doesn’t.
It would be easy to sneak off campus—technically she’s got Cinema Studies this period, but Mr. Winters is giving them “research time” to work on their midterm projects, so it’s not like anyone would notice if she left. The projects aren’t due until the beginning of next semester, which Mr. Winters thinks makes their lives easier but actually just extends their stress for another few weeks after finals are supposed to be over.
But Lulu doesn’t want to go hang out with her friends right now. What she wants, instead, is quiet. And she knows where to find it: Recently she’s claimed herself kind of a spot in a corner on the top floor of the library. She can go up there and post something to Flash, the way she did at Patrick’s party, so that on the internet it doesn’t look like she’s hiding out.
The space isn’t ideal for taking pictures, but she’s figured out how to make it work. The overheads are horrible fluorescents, but the windows are big enough to let some actual sunlight in, and the camera’s eye is so easy to trick once you know it. All she has to do is hide most of her face in shadow and she looks okay.
“One of my nannies taught me a game when I was little,” Lulu whispers to her phone. “Literary prophet, she called it. You ask a question, pull a book off the shelf, and let it fall open to a page that will have the answer you need on it.” The app blinks at her: full. Okay. They can only be like ten seconds long.
Lulu uploads that video fragment and starts another. She films her feet, clad in a pair of new boots, walking across the library’s industrial carpet floor. She asks her question before she chooses the book. “Why am I so fucking bored?”
Of course, she’s up in the science section, surrounded by textbooks. “Because it’s my biological destiny, apparently,” Lulu says, and slams the book closed. She snaps a few stills of the illustrated dissection diagrams and then a last black frame over which she adds the text: I GUESS JUST DONATE MY BODY TO SCIENCE WHEN IT WITHERS AND GOES OKAY.
It occurs to her then that, probably for the first time in her life, she actually has something she wants to look up in a book. There’s a small section on the first floor of the library dedicated to Los Angeles’ past, with a display table encouraging kids to read up on the history of St. Amelia’s Studio City campus and farming and water rights and whatever.
Of course, there’s also a couple of books about the library’s namesake: Avery Riggs.
Lulu did some cursory googling about Avery after her visit to The Hotel, to see if she could find more information about him and its history, but most of what she turned up was loose threads and weirdness: conspiracy theorists claiming he was illuminati, or that his wife was a vampire, or that if you draw a line between every building with his name on it in the city of Los Angeles you’ll come up with a pentagram or a map to a portal to hell.
Normally she would have left it at that—Lulu isn’t really that into history, even when it’s cult-conspiracy history. But the supernatural bent to people’s theories made her curious. She wants to know how Avery, who seemed basically kind of normal when he was alive, has a legacy that got so warped after he died.
The first book she pulls is called The Men Who Built Los Angeles, which only has one ch
apter on Riggs. Apparently his dad had a very big trust fund and an even bigger gambling problem; Avery was raised to believe he’d never have to work, and then, when he came of age, discovered that he if he didn’t, he and his mother and sisters might starve. He left the East Coast for Hollywood, hoping to remake the family name out there in the wilderness. But he wasn’t really a very good director, and after a while, no one would hire him.
He got lucky when he begged his way into a screening of a film called Bluebeard, an adaptation of the fairy tale starring a young actress named Constance Wilmott. She was still a teenager, and aside from her studio contract she had nothing. He married her even though it wouldn’t do anything for his “prospects”: a true love story, very touching. Except that it turned out she was a good investment, because it was the money she’d earned on that film—her first and last—that he took and used to buy his first property.
Lulu recognizes the outline of the story, if not the specifics. Her dad was still a junior associate at his firm, not a failed director, and her mom didn’t choose to stop being a serious actress, she stopped getting good roles, but other than that, yeah, she pretty much knows how this one goes. An older man and a younger woman; two people with almost no power, and yet, somehow, one of them has more.
The book says: Wilmott may not be a star that many remember today, but in fact her single role changed Los Angeles irrevocably. The intangible forces of her beauty and talent became the seeds for a real estate empire that would materially reshape the hills and valleys of Los Angeles. It was her image that allowed Avery Riggs to begin to create the city according to his singular vision.
It makes Lulu feel shivery to imagine it: these two people, small and ordinary, falling in love and changing the course of an entire city’s history. Connie playacting in a movie, and her acting turning into money that turned into land and business and a legacy. Maybe that’s why people are so obsessed with Avery Riggs: He made something out of nothing. He married a much younger woman and turned her into an empire.
If only her dad had figured out how to do that, Lulu thinks, instead of the extremely boring regular thing he did, which was to dump her mom when her career never took off, and marry someone younger, and then someone younger again.
She almost misses Rich’s response to her Flash amid all the stuff from people she doesn’t know. He went up to the lookout with Jules, apparently, and Bea, and a smallish bottle of vodka. In the video he sent her he’s holding his phone at arm’s length and filming the two of them, Bea’s dark head huddled close at his side. “You think that just because you have—what, two thousand—”
“Five thousand!” Bea chirps. She’s definitely drunk.
“Five thousand Flash followers,” Rich corrects himself, “you’re too cool to hang out with us now?”
“You’re bored ’cause you’re boring,” Jules says, somewhere off camera.
“Julian Powell!” Bea yells. Rich swerves to turn toward Jules and Lulu catches a glimpse—barely that—of Owen.
Someone is standing next to him. Someone shorter.
Some girl.
Then the video cuts out.
Lulu thought her heart froze the day Owen broke up with her; she thought she put it in deep freeze and left it there to just—well, not rot. Ice. Whatever. So it surprises her to feel it kicking in her chest, the gasp of a spasm where she was supposed to be numb. She wasn’t sure she wanted Owen back, but she definitely didn’t want him to move on first.
She’s sure her face will give her away if she tries to send a picture back.
Instead she messages Bea, I hope you’re defending my honor up there.
OBVSSSSSSSSS, Bea replies. BUttt shouldn’t you be here defending it yourself?
Lulu types, I have English eighth.
Come out with us after, Bea says. We’ll be at R’s house for a while and then I think going to some party? Someone Patrick knows?
Lulu weighs her options. It’s nice to have something to do, first of all, and if Owen is—whatever—with whoever—and who would he even be—she should assert her claim to her place in the group. She belongs there with them. She has belonged there for years, in ways that have nothing to do with being or not being Owen’s girlfriend.
But also: ugh.
Then a second thought occurs to her. If the party is being thrown by someone Patrick knows, he might know Cass too. She said she never went to those parties. It’s totally a long shot. But last time Lulu disappeared, Owen went looking for her, and everyone knew it.
Okay fine, Lulu sends Bea. I guess I’m in.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE GIRL FROM Rich’s Flash, the one who was standing with Owen, comes to the party too. Kiley Rathbone. Some sophomore.
The worst part is that Lulu knows her a little bit: They’re in Cinema Studies together. Kiley doesn’t talk much, but when she does, she usually says smart-seeming things. She sits with a girl named Maija, who Lulu knows because she knew Maija’s older sister, Sam, when she was a senior last year, and also because Maija is probably the prettiest girl in the sophomore class. Not the most popular, but the prettiest, which means Kiley isn’t afraid of pretty girls. Which probably means Kiley has some sense that she’s very, very pretty too.
The only other thing Lulu knows about Kiley is that she dances, or at least she was in an assembly teaser for a dance theater show last year. That was the first time Lulu noticed her, up on stage, but to be fair, it was hard not to: She was the only black girl up there.
Also, she was, like, good.
Lulu ignores her and tries to look cheerful about it.
Luckily, there’s plenty to distract her. In the kitchen, Jules turns a TV on so he can watch the Lakers, but it’s part of an art installation that shows looped clips from news reports about missing and murdered girls spliced in with scenes from cop shows about the same thing. Whoever’s house they’re at—Isabel, maybe, someone said her name was?—her parents have truly atrocious taste, and an amazingly huge collection of stuff that demonstrates this fact. There are ugly “modern” sculptures and garish abstract paintings everywhere, and after the television incident, Lulu is afraid to sit on or really touch anything in case it turns out to be art.
At least the booze is stashed out back near the pool, where it’s obvious what it’s supposed to be.
Lulu scans the crowd for Cass and doesn’t see her. Something goes tight in her throat at the idea of spending the whole night standing around and making, like, small talk. Trying to get or keep Owen’s attention. Everyone looking at her, and looking at Kiley, and Owen and Kiley, and Owen and her, and thinking whatever they’re thinking.
Bea nudges her shoulder. “If this stuff is what these people think is appropriate for company, can you even imagine what they keep in their bedrooms?”
“Ooooh,” Lulu says. “Are you suggesting we find out?”
Bea widens her eyes like, Who, me?
“C’mon,” Lulu says. She and Bea lope away giggling. She hopes Kiley is watching them disappear and wondering what they’re up to. Imagining that it’s something super exclusive and cool.
Isabel’s parents’ bedroom is on the second floor, and Bea was right to guess that it would be weird. It looks like a vampire’s lair: Their round bed sits on a mirrored pedestal, covered in pristine white sheets, and everything else in the room is glass or crystal or bone, except the curtains, which are deep, purple velvet.
“Oh my god,” Bea says, turning in a circle. “Oh my fucking god.” She dashes over to the window and wraps herself in a curtain, fashioning it into a heavy-draped dress. “This is glamour,” she announces in a husky voice.
“Daaahling,” Lulu intones. “You are everything right now. You are the earth. You are the moon. You are a moondrop dancing with a god in the night.”
Bea laughs and lets the curtain drop. “What are you even talking about,” she says. “You’re a nut,
Lu.” Before Lulu can answer, she goes on. “This is so wild. Can you imagine having parents who live like this?”
Lulu shudders at the thought.
“Oh no. Oh no,” Bea says. She points, and when Lulu turns around she sees it: a sculpture of a naked woman, but she has two rows of teeth where her legs should be.
“Gross!”
“Tell me about it.”
Lulu goes over to inspect the thing. The woman is arranged in one of those improbable comic book poses, boobs thrust forward, waist turned at an angle. Lulu tries to mimic it with her own body, but it’s basically impossible.
“No,” Bea says. “It’s like this, see?” She tries to out-pose Lulu, but her legs get tangled as she tries to step around the curtain. She windmills her arms, teetering, before toppling over. From her crash landing on the ground, Bea sticks her tits up as far as she can. “Closer?” she asks. “This looks hot, right?”
Lulu is laughing too hard to reply. She pulls out her phone and takes a video of Bea squirming.
“You animal!” Bea yells.
Lulu writes @beatrizzzo is art over it and presses SEND with a flourish. Bea has her phone out now, and she’s taking a picture from the floor, which has to be a hideously unflattering angle.
“You!” Lulu reaches to grab Bea’s phone, but Bea pulls her down too. Lulu thumps next to her ungracefully, still laughing.
She looks up and sees Kiley in the open doorway, staring at them.
“Hey,” Kiley says. “I thought I heard voices. I was just going to get something from Isa’s room.”
Bea leaps to her feet. “Oh, yeah, us too,” she says. “We uh . . . didn’t know if this was it.”
It’s a bad lie, but Kiley is too drunk to notice. They’ve only been there an hour or so, but she’s already looking pretty sloshy, the alcohol loose and glistening under her skin. “No,” she says. “It’s over here.”