Look

by Zan Romanoff

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  Owen nods. He’s not like Lulu: always weighing and measuring, trying to see all of the angles and come at it from the best one. He just likes to know his own mind, to make sure he’s right with himself. He knows how to keep his balance better than almost anyone else Lulu knows.

  “That makes two of us,” he says, and slips between the canvas flaps.

  Lulu looks up at the darkness of the sky above her: all of that limitless black. In the context of infinity, it’s easy to think that there’s no right thing to do, at least not right now, at least not tonight.

  She follows Owen in.

  * * *

  Once they’re settled, Owen takes out his phone to try to play music, but Ryan makes him put it away again—“No phones at The Hotel,” he says, and Cass echoes him. No phones at The Hotel.

  At first the quiet that surrounds their conversation unnerves Lulu. You can hear each of them tuning in and out again. The moments in which no one has anything to say stand out, stark and unmissable.

  Eventually, though, in the later, woozier hours, she starts to find it comforting. There’s a rhythm to this, she thinks. What we’re doing here together. The way conversation falls away and then finds itself again, if you let it.

  Lulu wraps herself in a blanket; she tips sideways into Owen’s lap. His hands tangle in her hair. She remembers digging her fingers into his thighs, his back, the back of his head.

  “Are you guys together?” she hears Ryan ask. The words sound like they’re being spoken somewhere very far away.

  “Nah,” Owen says. “We were.”

  “You look so pretty like this, though,” Cass says.

  “Lulu and I love each other,” Owen says. “That’s all.”

  Lulu hears bodies shifting, rearranging themselves.

  Cass asks, “That’s all, huh?”

  Lulu wishes she were awake enough to read Cass’s tone.

  “That’s all,” Owen says. “That’s all there is, right?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LULU WAKES UP because her face is too warm. She blinks and blinks. She must have fallen asleep in the tent last night. Now the sun is falling over the lip of the pool’s edge, streaming through the thin canvas. Owen is next to her. Ryan and Cass are gone.

  She stumbles outside, only barely managing not to step on Owen. The day is beautiful: clear sky, clear air, exactly the kind of fresh, sweet a.m. hour that makes having a hangover feel especially depraved. Lulu wishes she had her sunglasses, at least.

  The lobby has a bathroom, but its fixtures haven’t been installed yet: Three toilets sit, attached to nothing, in the stalls. Lulu heads upstairs and then hesitates. Ryan said something the first time she was here about spending time in room Three, but she’s only ever seen him in Four. He’s probably still there, right? And it probably has a functioning bathroom, right? Cass said there was running water now.

  Lulu is in luck: Three is deserted and the toilet works. There’s toilet paper, but no soap to wash her hands with, which is better than it could have been, at least. She doesn’t even think about the sound of the flush in the otherwise silent morning until she emerges back into the hallway and finds Cass there.

  Cass is wrapped in a blanket, and above its woven fabric, her pale shoulders are bare except for one dark tank top strap.

  Oh, Lulu thinks. Well, that makes sense. Good for them.

  “Sorry,” Cass says. “I know we kind of abandoned you guys out there last night. You were very insistent about sleeping under the stars, and—”

  “It’s fine,” Lulu says, though she has only the vaguest memory of this part of the conversation. She definitely overdid it on the vodka. “I’m good.”

  “You found the bathroom okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ryan appears over Cass’s shoulder. He’s dressed, or at least wearing sweats and a T-shirt.

  “You gonna invite her in?” he asks.

  Cass looks flustered.

  Lulu doesn’t want to make her feel weird. “I should probably,” she says, “go.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Ryan steps back and gestures for Lulu to join them. “Come on.”

  Ryan’s bed is unmade. An enormous digital camera is sitting in the nest of its sheets.

  “I was just taking advantage of the light,” he says.

  “Ryan’s a photographer.” Cass flops onto the bed and lets the blanket fall from her grasp. She’s wearing a pair of sweats that look identical to Ryan’s except they’re enormous on her, fabric pooling shapelessly between her waist and where she’s scrunched them up on her calves.

  Cass grabs the camera and aims it at Lulu and Ryan. “Click!” she announces.

  Ryan isn’t interested. “Cass. C’mon.”

  She rolls her eyes and hands it to him.

  Light is streaming in through the windows. Cass’s face falls in shadow, and her hair, still sleep-mussed, is an electric halo of crimson and gold. Lulu looks at the camera in Ryan’s hand and understands the instinct to capture her, and all of this: to pin down the strangeness of this space, and the impossibly beautiful girl in it.

  Lulu doesn’t think of herself as a photographer. She loves taking pictures for her Flash, but that’s different. It’s not art; it’s just easy. She found out the difference when she tried to take a photo class last year and wound up hating it—all the technical talk, f-stops and exposure length and blah blah blah. But she recognizes Ryan’s instinct: She knows exactly what it’s like to see a moment and want very badly to figure out how to keep it for yourself.

  “Cass and I were just talking,” Ryan says. He barely looks at the camera as he turns it on and focuses it on Cass. “She says you’re big on—”

  “I thought we covered that,” Lulu says. She tries to sound polite. What planets have fallen into alignment? Why does the universe insist on reminding her, over and over again, of Flash, and then, inevitably, of Sloane, and that night?

  “I fucking hate Flash,” Ryan says. “Roman was smart to make it, but it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Another platform where all anyone does is make themselves look good.”

  Lulu wants to ask more about Roman, but she knows better than to pry. She remembers the way Ryan and Owen assessed each other last night: the way Ryan said my dad, your dad, and that put them on the same terrain. No one here knows who Lulu’s dad is, or cares.

  “Are you making me look bad?” Cass asks.

  Ryan doesn’t answer her. He’s holding the camera casually, but Lulu can see, in its tiny screen, that he has Cass neatly framed. He says, “No one ever records their hangovers. Their actual first-thing-in-the-morning selves. I woke up like this is total fucking bullshit. It’s all just, like, filters, and the best fifteen seconds of the party.”

  “That’s not exactly—” Lulu starts, and then stops herself. Does she really want to defend Flash? She likes it, but Ryan’s not wrong about how she uses it, especially lately: to make her life look beautiful and interesting, especially when she’s lonely, or uncertain, or bored. “So you’re doing something different?”

  “I don’t photograph people, mostly,” Ryan says. “That’s not what I’m interested in, as subjects. It just feels cheap, you know? It’s not hard to take good pictures of hot girls.”

  “What’s this, then?”

  Ryan gives Lulu a look she doesn’t understand. “Mostly what I’m doing is process shots,” he says. “The Hotel as it’s being rebuilt. I’m documenting the whole thing so I can have a record of it.”

  “It’s one of our projects,” Cass says. “While the space is being made, we make things in it.”

  Ryan holds the camera up a bit, and it draws Cass’s focus. Lulu watches him watch Cass smile.

  “You want to come sit with me, Lu?” Cass asks.

  Lulu is glad she hasn’t seen a mirro
r this morning. That’s probably the reason she’s bold enough to do it, she tells herself: to sit down next to Cass, cross-legged, on the bed.

  “You want some real morning-after shit, this is it,” she says to Ryan. “I bet you let Cass brush her teeth first.”

  “Nah,” Ryan says.

  Cass bares them in a grin. “See?”

  Lulu leans forward as if to examine Cass’s mouth. It’s all a joke, just part of the weird elongated prank she’s playing on herself by being here, except she’s been thinking about Sloane too much, and here she is again, on a bed with a girl, her body inclined forward. She feels the world shifting around her, gravity rearranging itself. Ryan’s camera doesn’t make noise when the shutter blinks, or maybe he’s not even bothering to take pictures.

  Lulu thinks, This is definitely not, and then nothing else because, thank god, Owen is standing in the doorway, looking pained.

  “If I was going to puke somewhere,” he says, “do you have a preference about where I do it?”

  * * *

  Once Owen’s stomach is empty he feels much better, so Cass takes him and Lulu back to the cars they left outside of Rich’s house, their first stop last night. “See you soon,” she says, and drives off fast.

  Lulu turns to Owen. “So that was . . .” she starts.

  “Yeah,” Owen says. “That was awesome. I’ve never done anything like it before. I didn’t even know we could do that. How long have you been holding out on me, Lu?”

  “Cass and I met last weekend,” she says. “So not very long.” Lulu feels the weight of a conspiracy—small, inconsequential, but real—forming between them. She looks up at him and says, “It is weird, but I’m, like, into it, you know?”

  “I do,” he says.

  “Cool.”

  Lulu laughs, and Owen laughs too. It feels warm for a second, and then Lulu thinks, It’s been a while since we, and hurt slices through her, sharp and merciless. She looks away and starts fumbling through her bag for her keys.

  “Hey,” Owen says. He looks uncertain, at first, reaching out for her, but then his face breaks into a smile and he’s laughing, pulling her tightly against him. He musses her hair and kisses the top of her head a little too roughly, like he can mask the affection of the gesture. “Bring me with you next time too, okay?”

  Lulu thinks she knows why he’s laughing: Because it’s absurd for them to hug and absurd for them not to. It doesn’t change all of the easy, intimate ways they used to touch each other, or the fact that they aren’t touching each other that way anymore. Because they’re trying to find their way to a friendship they never had, which, in the face of what they had instead, feels like nothing much at all.

  From inside the circle of his arms, all she can think is that Owen smells so familiar. Lulu knows plenty of people’s shampoo, their soap, their perfume or cologne, but Owen she knows all the way down to the salt of his sweaty, sleepless skin.

  No one knows what they’re doing right now, or where they are. For the next thirty seconds, she thinks, there are no rules. Maybe that means there are no consequences either.

  Lulu doesn’t think Owen can feel the fleeting kiss she brushes against the cotton of his shirt. She’s careful where he was rough; the motion is meant mostly for herself, instead of him. “Of course I will,” she says.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “OH GOOD,” LULU’S dad says when he sees her. He’s standing in the kitchen in suit pants and a crisp white button-down. The remnants of a family breakfast are still on the table next to him. “Get dressed. We’re going to be late.”

  “Where are we going?” Lulu asks stupidly. He’s always doing this: assuming she just, like, knows what his plans are.

  “Temple,” her dad says.

  “Temple?” Lulu repeats. She understands what he means in a literal sense, but she’s still confused: They haven’t gone to a Saturday morning service at Shaare Tikvah since she turned thirteen, and Olivia’s too young for pre–Bat Mitzvah stuff yet.

  “Yes, Lulu, temple,” he repeats. “Go get dressed.”

  “I don’t feel great—” she starts.

  “I’m sure you don’t,” he says. “You should probably shower if you can do it quickly. Rinse off, at least.”

  “I really don’t—”

  “Don’t waste time.”

  Lulu could stand here arguing with him, but she knows from long experience that she’d just end up getting thrown into a dress and packed into the car at the last minute anyway, so she salutes him and turns to head upstairs to her room.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later Lulu’s hair is in a wet knot on top of her head and she’s wearing a new sundress with an old cardigan. Her face looks bare without any makeup, but there wasn’t time to put any on, and she was almost glad. Something about the idea of crusting herself up again—caking her eyelashes, her cheekbones, her lips—felt extra-nauseating.

  She’s got one piece of toast and two Advil in her stomach. She throws the whole bottle in her purse and takes one of Olivia’s post-soccer Gatorades out of the fridge for good measure. When she gets to the front door, the rest of her family is assembled, waiting for her. Lulu feels the familiar sensation of being the one puzzle piece that’s out of place.

  “Lu!” Olivia says. “You’re coming!”

  Lulu returns her little sister’s hug gingerly. She loves Olivia’s enthusiasm—she does—she just wishes it were coming from a slightly gentler place right now.

  “I told you it wouldn’t be boring,” Deirdre says to Olivia. “Lulu will sit with you, won’t you, Lu.”

  Where will you be? Lulu doesn’t ask. Deirdre really isn’t that bad of a mother, or a stepmother, as these things go. She just doesn’t seem to understand that Lulu isn’t always as wild to hang out with Olivia as Olivia is to hang out with her. You girls, Deirdre’s always saying, like they’re both her babies. Olivia is nine; Lulu is seventeen; Deirdre just turned thirty-five. The math, Lulu wants to tell her, doesn’t work out quite the way you think it does.

  “Come on,” her dad says. “We should have been in the car ten minutes ago.”

  “If you’d told me last night that I was supposed to be ready—” Lulu starts. She can’t resist needling him, even though she knows it doesn’t help.

  “If you’d been home last night, I would have,” he says. His back is to her. The same way that Deirdre assumes Lulu always wants to do what Deirdre wants her to, her dad always assumes that she’s scampering behind him, listening intently.

  “Don’t be nervous, honey,” Deirdre says to Lulu’s dad. “If he invited you, clearly he thinks you’re—”

  “He invited the whole firm,” her dad says. “I’m the only one he’s going to be expecting to know the prayers.”

  Lulu follows them into the car and slumps gratefully into her seat. Of course this is some business thing of her dad’s; some other partner’s son turned thirteen and now Lulu’s being dragged out of her house on a Saturday morning to illustrate how thoroughly, totally picture-perfect his life is. So what he’s on his third marriage? His daughters are growing up beautifully, and his wives are staying young the same way.

  Lulu snaps a video of her reflection in the car’s window, just the line of her collarbone and the sleeve of her sweater, sound off. She captions it Will I ever sleep again.

  It’s early enough that responses only kind of trickle in, which is why she sees Cass’s as soon as it comes. It’s a shot of Cass in her own bed, probably, eyes closed, face slack. You get into so many kinds of trouble, her message says.

  Enough to know this morning’s is the boring kind, Lulu replies.

  * * *

  Midway through the service, Lulu’s Advil wears off, and a headache starts to press a barbed-wire crown of pain against her skull. She slips out to take some more and can’t make herself go back in. It’s been so long since she was at temp
le. She doesn’t remember any of the words.

  Instead, she makes her way to the reception hall, where, by the grace of the god Lulu’s just been failing to pray to, the Bar Mitzvah boy’s parents ordered catering, and a spread is already set. She drinks an entire black coffee while she covers a bagel in cream cheese and lox; she’s well into her second cup as she heads for the bridal room, a changing space off the hall that’s usually unlocked. Lulu may not know the service well, but she’s an expert in every place you can go to get away from it.

  The room is empty, nothing but four walls and a mirror, but that doesn’t matter. Lulu sinks gratefully to the floor and eats half of the bagel in three or four bites, swallowing throat-sized lumps. She takes another Advil with the last of the coffee.

  Glancing up, she catches sight of her reflection: her hair, dry now, down and limp. Her bare face, bare legs, bare arms. The dollop of cream cheese at the corner of her mouth.

  Who do you think you are? Lulu asks herself.

  She has absolutely no answer.

  Lulu rubs a knuckle against the cream cheese, realizing as she does it that she didn’t grab any napkins. Her finger hesitates. The door swings open.

  Kiley Rathbone walks in.

  Of fucking course.

  “Heyyyy! I thought I saw you earlier with your family,” she says, like she expects Lulu wanted to be seen, or acknowledged.

  “Yeah,” Lulu says.

  “I don’t usually?”

  “No.”

  Lulu wipes the cream cheese off her finger and onto the carpet.

  “I’m here every Saturday, so I know the regulars,” Kiley says. “I think my parents make us come to prove a point. Like, See, look at us. We’re real, live black Jews! We’re still real Jews! It’s so boring.”

  Lulu doesn’t say anything.

  Kiley is undeterred. “I also don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat carbs before,” she says.