by Zan Romanoff
Lulu looks at her sister. Naomi is wearing jeans and sneakers and a worn-in Georgetown sweatshirt. Her long, dark hair is loose around her face; thin gold hoop earrings are threaded through each earlobe, but she doesn’t have on any other jewelry, or any makeup. She has their father’s strong, sharp features, and his seriousness too. For most of their lives, Lulu has felt like Naomi was at least part stranger, someone she’s never really known.
Lulu asks, “What do you mean by bad?”
Naomi shrugs.
“You can’t ask me about mine if you won’t talk about yours.”
Naomi twists her mouth. “I know you’ve probably done it all,” she says. “But it makes me feel like an irresponsible older sister to tell you.”
Lulu snorts. “I will respect you so much more if you tell me you ever broke a rule,” she says.
“Lulu, of course I broke rules.”
Naomi isn’t a stranger at all, and unwillingly, Lulu knows exactly what she means: Lulu breaks dumb rules—about drinking, and kissing boys, and girls too. Naomi broke Lulu’s Rules for How to Get By. She breaks them every day.
She’s not a stranger, but she and Lulu still don’t understand each other at all.
“Whatever your bad nights were, though,” Lulu says, “you survived them.”
“I did. I did. It’s just that—what if survival wasn’t really what mattered?”
“Huh?”
“Like, yeah, I lived through it. I grew up. I’m fine now. I just think it could have been easier.”
“If you’d never been allowed out of the house on your own? To make your own mistakes?”
“If, after I’d made my mistakes, I could have come home and talked to someone about them.”
Naomi looks at Lulu, so level and direct that Lulu can’t bring herself to look away.
“I’m trying to be someone you can talk to,” Naomi says. “That you want to talk to, even.”
“I’m not one of your projects,” Lulu says. “I’m not some kind of self-improvement thing.”
“Of course not. You’re my sister,” Naomi says. She forks a raspberry off of Lulu’s plate.
In the spirit of sisterhood, Lulu lets her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LULU STANDS OUTSIDE of The Hotel’s gates with empty hands. Cass texted her the code this morning, with an invitation to come hang out. Lulu recited it to herself on the drive over, across the long, hot plane of the freeway, and then as she wound her way through the lush, quiet neighborhoods, up and up into the hills.
She knew it was stupid to be scared, but she worried anyway—that she would get there and the message with the code wouldn’t load on her phone, that she wouldn’t be able to call Cass and ask to be let in, that she was in some kind of fairy tale where, when you tried to come back in daylight, on your own, you couldn’t even find the door.
But The Hotel isn’t a fairy tale. It’s just a place. Lulu enters the numbers and the gate swings open for her as easily as it does for Cass. Lulu steers her car along its tree-lined driveway with the windows down, one arm stretched out to grab palmfuls of the warm, dry air.
The front door is unlocked, but she can’t find Cass or Ryan in the lobby. Upstairs, they aren’t in either of the finished rooms. She’s about to go back down when she hears Cass call, “Ryan?”
“No,” Lulu says.
“Hey, Lu!”
“Where are you?” Lulu turns in a circle in the hallway, like Cass is camouflaged in it somewhere.
“Walk to the end of the hall,” Cass calls. Her voice is muffled by the space between them; she sounds like she’s underwater. “Through the last door on your left.”
In the room, Lulu is hit by a wall of sunlight, echoing white off the floors and the walls. She holds a hand up to her eyes instinctively, squinting.
This must be where whoever works on The Hotel when she’s not around leaves their tools: The ground is littered with tarps and rollers and tool kits and cans of paint. Past them is a sliding glass door that opens onto a balcony. Cass is sitting out there in a folding chair with her back to Lulu. Her hair glimmers copper under the sun.
“Come hang,” Cass says, raising a lazy arm in greeting.
“Hey,” Lulu says. She makes her way across the room, careful not to step on stray nails in her thin-soled ballet flats.
“Did you see Ryan on the way in?”
“No.”
“Huh.”
“Should I have?”
Cass shrugs. “He wandered off a while ago. I thought he might be downstairs.”
“Should we go looking for him?”
“Nah. I’m not worried.” Cass stretches her legs out to rest them on the balcony’s top railing. She’s wearing a pair of jeans so worn that they might be actual vintage, not new-made-to-seem-old. Lulu wonders if the denim is as soft as it looks.
“I guess this is his place,” Lulu says. “He can do whatever he wants.”
“Exactly.”
Lulu sets up so that she’s facing Cass, sitting on the ground with her back against the balcony railings.
“Noooo,” Cass says. “You can’t sit that way! You’re missing the best part.”
“I wanted to keep the sun out of my face.”
“Don’t be a baby. Put your sunglasses on.”
“What if I don’t have sunglasses?” Lulu asks, just to be annoying.
Cass looks over the brim of her own pair, down at Lulu.
“Fine,” Lulu says. She finds them in her bag and puts them on before turning around so she and Cass are facing the same way. “Now, what am I looking for?”
“The view.”
The Hotel stretches out below them, a spread of white stone against the green and ochre of the winter hillside. Lulu feels like she’s sitting inside of the curved cup of a bowl. The sun on her face is syrupy golden. She closes her eyes and lets it wrap around her limbs, slow and thick as honey.
“How are you doing?” Cass asks.
Lulu leans back against the door, letting the glass take her weight. “You know,” she says. “I’m good.”
“Cool.”
Cass doesn’t say anything else.
“My sister’s home,” Lulu says.
“From college?”
“Yeah.”
Cass nods. “My brother too.”
“Are you guys close?”
“We get along.”
“Naomi and I don’t, always.”
Cass takes this in. “Do you fight?”
“No. We just—” Lulu lets the sentence drop.
“I thought about you the other night,” Cass says.
Lulu concentrates on staying still and neutral when she says, “Oh?”
“Is that weird? I know we don’t know each other that well.”
“Depends on why you were thinking about me.” It’s hotter out here than Lulu would have guessed, once you sit for a while. Her thighs prickle with heat under her jeans. She wishes she’d worn a dress.
“Dylan—my brother—he was talking about his girlfriend. The way he described her reminded me of you.”
Lulu goes for the easy thing, which is a joke. “Too cool for her own good?” she asks.
“No,” Cass laughs. “That’s not what he said.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know,” Cass says. Lulu doesn’t believe her. “Hey, you want anything? Water? Weed?”
Lulu almost says yes without thinking about it, the same way that, when Cass asked her how she was, she automatically said, You know. I’m good. The rules say: If Cass is stoned, she should be stoned. The rules say: Being fucked up is cooler than being sober, and gives you an excuse if you’re a little weird too.
But she doesn’t want to be high right now. She wants to sit in this quiet sunlight with Cass and talk to he
r slowly, their conversation going wherever it goes. She wants—she wants—nothing she’s ready to name.
“I’m okay,” Lulu says.
Cass smiles at her. “Glad to hear it.”
And then, in that moment, Lulu wants something with sharp, specific clarity: for Cass to reach down and touch her hair. The desire goes through her so suddenly and violently that in order to keep herself from leaning into it, asking for the contact even just with her body, she leaps up to her feet. She walks to the far end of the balcony and peers around the edge of The Hotel.
“Hey,” she asks, “what’s over here?” There’s something tall, a structure, glinting from among the trees just around the corner.
“Oh,” Cass says. “The building, you mean? That’s the greenhouse.”
“Like, for growing stuff?”
“Yeah, like for growing stuff. Apparently it was one of the things The Hotel was famous for back in the day—it had this amazing collection of rare plants and things.”
“What does it have now?”
“Dust, mostly. Ryan had the structure repaired and reinforced, but he hasn’t put anything in it yet.”
“Can we go there?”
“God, I should have known you were gonna make me get up.”
“We don’t have to—” Lulu starts, but Cass is already standing, and smiling. It doesn’t look like she really minds.
* * *
The greenhouse is, in fact, dusty. The doors are propped open and it’s sitting in the shade, but even still, it’s hot inside. All that afternoon air, trapped and magnified by the glass. Lulu calls up to the rafters, a nonsense sound, but it doesn’t echo. Tree branches brush the roof over their heads. For the first time since she’s been at The Hotel, Lulu thinks the word abandoned.
“We don’t come in here much,” Cass says. She’s lingering near the door, almost as if she’s afraid to walk all the way inside.
“No greenhouse projects?”
“Ryan says he has a black thumb.”
Lulu walks around the perimeter. There’s nothing in here but space and air.
“You like it,” Cass says. It’s not a question.
“I do.”
Cass smiles.
“What?” Lulu asks.
“I’m glad.”
“Okay—okay.”
Cass holds her arms out and twirls her wrists absently. Lulu likes the way the length of her takes up space.
“We have this little orchard that’s my favorite place at my dad’s house,” Lulu says. “I like places where things can grow.”
Cass’s smile gets wider. “Lulu,” she says. “Are you secretly kind of . . . a hippie?”
“Absolutely not.” Lulu crosses her arms in front of her chest.
It doesn’t stop Cass’s grin. “I don’t know about that,” she says. “You play like you’re some scary, too-cool party girl, but—”
“Hey,” Lulu says. “You think I’m scary?”
Cass raises an eyebrow at her. “Not anymore.”
But Lulu’s not giving up that easily. “You thought I was scary?” She’s fascinated. She can’t imagine what it would be like to look at her and not already be tired of what you saw.
Cass frowns. “When we first met, you didn’t look like you would be easy to talk to,” she says eventually.
“I’m a very good conversationalist!” Lulu thinks of how often she got in trouble for whispering with her friends in class when she was in elementary school. Mr. Lindsey and Mrs. Garland and all the rest of them wish she had been hard to talk to.
“Not bad at talking, you absolute goose,” Cass says. “Hard for me to talk to. I didn’t know if we—if we could get along.”
Lulu has been watching Cass walk around the space, but when she hears Cass say that, she has to look away. She can feel the way the afternoon is moving, the way Cass is peeling her apart in onionskin layers, so fine Lulu barely notices the process of being bared. But we do, right? Lulu could ask her, and Cass could read whatever she wanted into the question. We do get along?
Instead she goes back to the joke, the easy spar. “We were getting along,” Lulu reminds her, “until you started making fun of me for having a feeling.”
Maybe Cass senses their conversation is getting dangerous too, because her voice comes out high and a little strangled when she replies. “I was not making fun! I was—pointing something out. I was observing. Weren’t you an indoor kid? Don’t you know that’s what we do? Observe?”
“I was busy being scary and going to parties,” Lulu says.
Normally it makes her nervous to know that people are looking at her and seeing things she’s not already aware of herself.
God, she likes the idea that Cass is noticing her, though.
“How did I ever entrap you in my secret garden?” Cass wonders.
Lulu hasn’t taken any of the openings Cass was maybe-offering her. Now, helpless, she makes one of her own. “You didn’t trap me,” she says. “I wanted to come.”
But now it’s Cass’s turn to avoid looking at Lulu. Or maybe she’s just not looking anyway. Maybe she’s not even thinking about what Lulu might mean by that, because why would she? Because they’re just friends.
Cass changes the subject. “Did you ever read that book?” she asks. “The Secret Garden?”
“No.”
“It was my mom’s favorite when she was a kid, so she started to read it to me when I was little. Then she realized how fucking racist it was, but it was too late—I was obsessed.”
“Huh.”
“Obsessed. The movies are better, mostly, so we watched them together instead.”
Lulu takes this in. “That is,” she declares, “pretty freakin’ adorable. Also, see how I just acknowledged your feeling, and didn’t make fun of it?”
“God,” Cass groans. She shakes her head. Then she says, quieter: “The funny part is, I didn’t want to be Mary when we played it.”
“She’s the main character?”
Cass gives Lulu a withering look.
“We weren’t all Secret Garden nerds!” Lulu says. “I don’t know.”
“Mary is the only girl in The Secret Garden,” Cass explains. “She starts out this sick, spoiled little princess, and then she plays in an English garden and gets hearty and healthy and in touch with nature and all of that. But I always wanted to be her friend Dickon.”
“Why?”
Cass shrugs. “I think it made my parents wonder if I was gonna turn out to be trans or something,” she says. “But it wasn’t that. I didn’t want to be a boy, exactly. Dickon just seemed cooler. He knew more stuff. And I didn’t understand why everyone thought I should always want to be the girl, you know?”
Lulu has only ever wanted girl things. Pink ribbons and glitter lipstick. Long hair, high heels. Pretty dresses. A pretty face.
“That’s exactly what I’ve always wanted,” she says. “To be the girl.”
“That’s okay,” Cass says.
Despite herself, Lulu believes her.
“What did you want to be instead?” Lulu asks.
Cass doesn’t have an answer. “I don’t know, just not that,” she says. “You really never—you never just wanted to be something else for a minute?”
Lulu shakes her head. “I’ve always been a princess.”
“Wild.”
“I think you mean basic.”
“Now who’s making fun of you?”
“I’m not making fun. I’m stating a fact. Is there anything more basic than wanting to be a princess?”
“I don’t know. I mean, if that’s what you really want, there’s nothing wrong with it.”
As much as Lulu’s been giving Cass shit about her hippie comment earlier, this contemplative, open conversation is worse, because it makes Lulu feel like she can say w
hatever she wants, and she isn’t sure enough where things stand between them—what all of these little moments mean—to do that. Lulu feels her chin get stubborn. “Listen. I’m not dumb. I know what I look like,” she says.
“What do you look like?”
“Like I’m dumb.”
Cass barks out a laugh. She rubs a hand across her face. “Jesus, Lulu.”
“Let’s be honest. That first time you saw me, what did you think?” Lulu gestures to encompass the space she inhabits: the pale lavender of her sweater, the tangle of thin gold chains around her neck, and the stack of rings on her fingers. Her pink manicure and pink mouth. She’s demanding something, and she’s not entirely sure what it is. It just seems important to press Cass. To be sure of her. To know.
Lulu says, “It’s okay. Scary party girl, right? You thought I was just some JAP bitch.”
“No.”
Lulu sighs and slumps down against the greenhouse wall. A puff of dust rises and then settles around her.
Cass comes to sit next to her. “We don’t have to talk about this,” she says. “I don’t even know how we got into this conversation.”
Lulu doesn’t look at her, because if she looked, she would see how close Cass is to her. Instead, she leans her shoulder against Cass’s, just the tiniest bit. Cass leans back.
“You were telling me about being into gardens when you were little,” Lulu reminds her.
“I’ve always loved a hideout,” Cass says. “That was really what I loved about it—not the garden but the secret. A place where no one was looking at me, and I could be whatever I wanted.”
“You could be nothing,” Lulu says.
“I could be anything,” Cass corrects.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HER CONVERSATION WITH Cass shakes something loose in Lulu. All afternoon it buzzes against her bones, and that night, she can’t fall asleep for its persistent, percussive force inside of her skull and against the backs of her teeth.