by Zan Romanoff
“I don’t—uh. Sorry. But, like, do you watch me eat?”
Kiley looks mortified. “I mean it’s not like—I don’t—I’m not creeping on you,” she says. “It’s a bad habit from ballet. The monitoring. And I do, you know, see you around, like on the quad, at lunch and stuff. And on Flash, when you post, there’s usually, like, not food? I guess it’s still weird that I notice.”
She let the door close behind her when she came in; Lulu watches her glance back at it, assessing the cost of leaving now, and admitting that she doesn’t belong here, versus what she can gain if she stays.
Lulu shouldn’t be surprised that Kiley collects herself. She laughs, shrugs, sits. “You know how it is,” Kiley says. “I mean, you’d be lying if you said you weren’t watching too, right?”
Lulu doesn’t know what to say to that. Of course she’s watching: what she eats and what everyone else eats. She does it so instinctually that she doesn’t even think of it as a thing she does, any more than she would think of breathing as, like, a hobby, or a pursuit.
But she doesn’t want to find common ground with Kiley. She doesn’t want to let Kiley put the two of them on the same level. If Kiley is dumb enough to admit that she’s trying—and exactly how—that doesn’t obligate Lulu to do the same for her.
It’s a good reminder, actually, that Kiley is young; Lulu has been playing this game longer than she has. All Kiley knows is that Lulu disappeared last night and took Owen with her. She probably thinks Lulu has the upper hand. The trick is to act like she’s right.
“My mom is gluten-intolerant,” Lulu says. Her mom is intolerant of anything that anyone has ever said might make her fat, but Kiley doesn’t need that level of detail. “Usually I figure it’s better to avoid it too, but, you know. Desperate times.” She gestures to herself and laughs, like her hangover is funny, like she doesn’t care if she looks like shit.
Kiley will figure it out for herself, if she hasn’t already: Acting like you take your own good looks for granted is the easiest way to fool people into thinking you’re pretty when you aren’t. Or maybe that’s a trick you only need to know if you aren’t that pretty. Lulu has never been entirely sure how much she’s faking it in comparison to everyone else. Maybe Kiley never has to think like this.
“Late night?” Kiley asks.
Lulu thinks, Wouldn’t you like to know.
“Yeah.” To be polite, she asks, “How was yours?”
Kiley shrugs. “I don’t think we hung around for too long after you peaced,” she says. “Wasn’t that good of a party.”
“Are they ever really that good, though?”
Lulu says it mostly to have something to say, but Kiley shakes her head in earnest agreement.
“No,” she says. “No, right? I’m so glad to hear you say that, because I only really started going out in the last, like, little while, so I thought maybe it was just me who didn’t understand. Is there something I’m not getting that makes a party universally fun? No, right?”
Lulu gives her a placeholder shrug.
Kiley doesn’t back down.
“If you asked me about the most fun I’ve had at a party this year, I’d say it was this one I went to last weekend,” she says. “And it was, like, pretty much sophomores only, and not even that big, and mostly it was me and Frida—my friend—hanging out. It was sort of quiet, and we just chilled and did whatever. And it was nice, actually, to not be worrying about who else was there and who might be coming and just, like, to be there. With who we were with. Which is why it’s funny that—” Lulu sees her snag on the words, watches her trying to decide whether she’s going to say them or not.
One of us will, she wants to tell Kiley, because now that the first half of the sentence is out there, the second is coming, one way or another.
Kiley says, “It’s funny that when I stopped hoping someone cool would turn up, Owen did.”
Lulu wishes she hadn’t eaten the bagel. She wishes she hadn’t eaten anything, ever, so that she would never have lived to experience a lurch of vertigo picturing how it must have happened: Owen looking for her at Patrick’s party and not finding her. He was thinking about leaving anyway. Someone had invited—not him, probably. A friend of his from the baseball team. Whatever. He decided there wasn’t anything for him at Patrick’s, so he left, and found Kiley instead. Someone new. Someone nice.
“He’s great, right,” Lulu says, forcing the words out.
“Yeah,” Kiley says. “I really, um, I really like him.”
Lulu nods.
“It’s not really anything yet,” Kiley says. “It’s not even enough of anything to really talk about, obviously, except that you’re—I know you—” She squares her shoulders. “I respect you,” she says. “I know that sounds like a weird thing to say, but I do. I remember seeing you around last year and thinking you seemed like someone who had your shit together.
“And then when the thing happened with Sloane, the way you handled it—you were so brazen. Not everyone could have done that, I think. Handled it well. Handled it at all, even. So, like, not because you’re popular, and not because you’re older, but because you’re you, I wanted to say that I hope that whatever happens with Owen and me—I hope you won’t hate me.” She laughs. “Let’s start there, I guess.”
Lulu is breathless. A small piece of her is in awe of Kiley’s monologue, the apparent uncalculated truth she just put out there, the sort of basic human semi-decency of what she just said.
“I don’t hate you,” Lulu says. “I don’t, um. I don’t know how I feel about any of it yet.”
“Like I said, maybe there’s nothing for you to even be feeling things about,” Kiley says. “But I like him. And as long as he keeps liking me—yeah. I don’t imagine you’re going to want to be friends with me. But I really don’t want you as an enemy if I can avoid it.”
Lulu forgets, sometimes, that there are people who think she’s powerful, that because she has these Flash followers and because she knows how to play by the rules so well, they think she could actually do something to them if she wanted. She gets so obsessed with people liking her that she forgets that she could decide not to like them. She could turn against them. She could probably turn other people against them too.
It doesn’t feel good to imagine hurting Kiley, starting a rumor, spreading some little bit of poison. But at least it feels powerful; it fills in the icy, empty pit that opened in her stomach when Kiley said Owen’s name like he was someone she knew. The idea that Lulu could do something—exact revenge—gives her enough space to feel like she doesn’t have to.
Because the real power move is to say “You’d have to do more than hook up with my ex to become my enemy.” Like Lulu’s got boys and social capital and generosity to spare. Like she isn’t dying at the idea that all she can do is be generous, and pretend she’s letting Owen go, when really he’s the one who doesn’t want her back.
CHAPTER NINE
THE WHOLE STUPID point of Flash was that it didn’t archive anything. That was the idea, anyway. You uploaded pictures or video snippets, either for general public consumption or to a few select friends, who could watch them once, and then never again.
Lulu knows it was stupid to believe that was possible, that anything on the internet could live and then actually die. Or not die, she thinks now, because the dead don’t disappear either, do they. They leave corpses too. Traces.
Evidence.
She and Owen had been dating for nine months when she proposed the idea of the girls. At the time it seemed brilliant. Things had been a little quieter between them, almost even sometimes a tiny bit strained, and Lulu had thought that here was a new thing she could offer to keep him interested. It would be sexy and wild, something he wouldn’t get from anyone else: Lulu kissing a girl, and him watching.
It would make him look at her all over again, the way maybe sometimes sh
e’d seen him looking at other girls, lately, just for a second, without even knowing he was doing it probably. It would make other girls part of their relationship instead of a threat to it.
It wasn’t like he’d never seen her kiss a girl before, before they were together. Owen hadn’t seen the beginning of it, how it started in the sixth grade, when it was just lessons, Lulu at sleepovers offering to teach and be taught. But he’d seen the end result, which was that, as a teenager, it had become her party trick.
They would be sitting around drinking and someone would bring it up. Lulu would monitor a girl’s reaction: whether she got flustered, or curious. If she was curious it didn’t take much coaxing. Lulu just had to be casual about it, laughing, playful, and together they’d watch how much the boys loved it. She would kiss a girl until a boy got up between them, and laid claim to whoever it was he’d decided he wanted to kiss for himself.
It was the kind of behavior, Lulu discovered, that if you didn’t explain, people would happily explain for you. If you didn’t tell everyone right away that you were questioning, or queer, or bisexual, or any of those other too-clinical, too-certain words, and especially if you were a girl with long hair and a lot of pink in her wardrobe and a lot of followers on social media—well, they already knew what kind of girl she was, so they knew what to think of her. Everyone knew that Lulu Shapiro would do anything for attention.
Lulu always wanted to correct them, to say that, in fact, she did it as a dumb bit of misdirection. It was easy for her to let people know that she liked kissing girls; who wouldn’t? Kissing was fun, and easy. Kissing girls made Lulu seem like someone who was fun and easy. Kissing girls in public was a way of showing a side of herself people were interested in seeing, and at the same time making sure they’d never look closely enough to see any of the rest of it.
Which was also why she didn’t explain to Owen that, with her, with girls, it went beyond kissing, that his body was not the only kind of body she knew how to want. Lulu didn’t want to try to explain something to him that she was still in the process of figuring out for herself.
Even still, he didn’t love it at first.
“I need—” he said. “Some time.”
“I don’t have to do it,” she said. It was one of their rare long nights together. His dad was on tour and his mom was away for the weekend at a conference. They’d bribed his younger brothers to stay downstairs and keep their secret. Lulu was naked, she was in his bed, she was his, she was so his. It felt safe, somehow, like he could give her permission to do this thing and it wouldn’t mean the same things as if she did it on her own. And then she would have everything: Owen, and girls, and a life that was safe and exciting and normal and good and right.
“It’s not like a compulsion or anything,” she explained. “I just sort of thought you might be into it. A fun little game.” Lulu pouted for good measure. “A lot of guys would want to.”
But maybe Owen sensed that Lulu’s intentions weren’t as pure or selfless as she was making them out to be.
“I just—as long as you don’t leave me out of it,” he said. He was smiling like he was just kidding around, but Lulu knew him well enough to recognize his serious eyes. “It’s not just you making out with random girls at parties and I stumble on it and it’s like, oh, cool, there’s Lulu doing her thing.”
Lulu hated the idea of hurting him. That wasn’t what she wanted at all. “It would be for us,” she said. “For you and for me, together.”
“We could try it out,” he said. “We can definitely try.”
* * *
Owen wasn’t at the party where Lulu met Sloane. It was late August and he was on tour with his dad at that point, doing one week of adventuring before he had to start school. He wasn’t there when Jules introduced them, when they sat next to each other on the back patio all night, Sloane’s thigh warm and soft and so incredibly bare against Lulu’s.
The two of them shifted and twisted, moved against each other without ever managing to lose contact. It was sweltering outside, the air refusing to calm and cool even when it was long past dark, but all Lulu could feel was the burn of desire in her belly, in her fingertips. It sparked her. It lit her up. Someone said something to Sloane about her ex, and Sloane said, “Yeah, she was . . .” and Lulu didn’t hear anything else for a whole minute.
She chatted Owen on Flash. Might have an adventure in mind for later, she said. That thing we talked about. A girl. I could send you pictures?
No fair, he replied. Stuck on the bus tonight. Can’t even really jerk off in peace. A picture of the cramp of a bunk, the bulge in his sweats. Lulu was dizzy, she was drunk, she couldn’t be expected to keep track of all the things in the world she wanted to touch and be touched by.
That’s going to be tough for you, then, she said. Unless you tell me not to.
Just keep me in the loop, he said.
It wasn’t even hard, Lulu kept thinking. It wasn’t hard at all, with a girl who wanted what you wanted. With a girl who wanted you.
The party got late, got loose. Lulu went inside to make herself a drink. She lingered in the kitchen.
Sloane followed her in.
“So hot out there,” she said. She lifted her hair from her neck and twisted it away from her face. A bead of sweat ran down the side of her neck, traced a lazy pattern across the sheen of her skin.
“I think the AC is on upstairs,” Lulu said. “If you want to, like, take a break.”
“I feel like I’ve mostly been talking to you anyway,” Sloane said. “I doubt anyone would miss us if we went missing.”
“No one’s home,” Lulu said. “We can—wherever.”
She doesn’t remember much of the next few minutes—what they talked about, or where they walked. Lulu doesn’t remember anything except the fever in her blood and how she knew, she knew that soon she would have Sloane’s hands on her to soothe it, to draw it out and set it down.
They found a bedroom. Lulu let Sloane kiss her for long, hot minutes before she explained about Owen, and pulled out her phone.
“We can do whatever we want,” Lulu said, even though that wasn’t the deal exactly. They hadn’t really made a deal. “He just wants to know what I get up to.”
“I don’t like the idea of sharing you,” Sloane said. Her hand was on Lulu’s hip, palm pressed against her belly, and it was hard to concentrate on anything that wasn’t that single, physical fact. “I’m sure he doesn’t either.”
“There’s so much of me,” Lulu said, and in that one moment it felt true, and it felt possible. It didn’t feel humiliating to be so expansive. To want. To have. “I don’t run out, I’m not—”
Sloane kissed her. Lulu untangled one of the hands that was in Sloane’s hair. She filmed something. She didn’t look before she pressed SEND. Not at what it looked like.
Not at who she was sending it to.
It was Owen’s dad’s fans who’d started archiving her public videos. They were always looking for evidence: of Owen or his dad or the band, the pieces of their lives that brushed up against hers.
Later, when she emailed one of the big fan sites to ask them to take it down, just this one particular clip, they were adamant that it wasn’t porn or anything: just two girls kissing on a bed, fully clothed. It was almost sort of funny to see how chaste it looked if you didn’t know how it had felt.
It was painful like nothing else Lulu had ever known to watch the video and see at the last minute how Sloane looked up into the camera, smirking. How it made it look like something they had planned, had talked about, and had meant for everyone to see.
CHAPTER TEN
LULU SPENDS THE rest of the weekend studying. She has a B-plus average and every intention of keeping it up. She’s not like Bea, who applied early to Brown; Lulu has applications out at a handful of different schools, and they all seem fine to her. She figures the best thing she can d
o between now and when the letters come in the spring is try to keep her grades up and her options open.
These kinds of study binges are the only time she actively avoids her phone, in part because the post-test reunion with it is such a delicious reward. As soon as she’s done checking and rechecking her answers, she hurtles outside and lets her notifications wash over her in waves.
Flash is crammed with content from friends who don’t share her strategy: video of Rich flinging his notes into a backyard bonfire, his traditional start-of-finals ritual, and Jules filming Owen passed out, surrounded by highlighters and Red Bull. Bea quizzing their friends Amanda and Gina in super-slow-motion. And Cass and Ryan, hanging out at The Hotel.
It’s just a picture, not a video, taken sometime yesterday evening, probably: Cass’s phone camera capturing Ryan’s digital one, their lenses aimed at each other, Ryan’s hand already reaching out, oddly elongated by perspective, to tell her to stop. It stays on her screen just long enough for Lulu to register that it wasn’t a public offering—Cass broke the rules of The Hotel in order to send it directly to her.
Lulu takes a picture of the sky and writes back, Free from finals for the day:) :) :)
Cass gets back to her almost immediately. ME TOO, she says. Want to go to the beach?
Lulu doesn’t even really think about it. Yes.
Bea grabs her phone out of her hands. “What’s this!” she asks. “What’s that look about, Lu—” but the Flash has already disappeared. It doesn’t matter. Lulu’s heart is already kicking against her ribs, and her hands move panic-fast. She tugs her phone from Bea’s grasp so hard that it goes flying, landing on one corner of its case before settling, faceup and undamaged, on the ground. Thank god.
“Whoa,” Bea says. “Sorry, Lu.”
Lulu picks the phone up slowly, all of the hot curdled Sloane shame joining with a rush of new embarrassment: at the idea that Cass was even—that there’s something to even be embarrassed—that Lulu’s face was doing something.