by Zan Romanoff
“Oh, cool!”
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“I don’t like looking at pictures of myself.”
“No one does, Cass.”
“Says the princess of Flash.”
“Those aren’t of me,” Lulu says. “Well, not always. And I thought these weren’t of you, mostly. Wasn’t that his whole thing? That he didn’t like taking pictures of hot girls?”
“Are you saying I’m hot?”
Lulu dips in and kisses Cass’s neck, just because she can. Cass looks pink and pleased when Lulu pulls away.
“Yeah, no, I’m just being weird and paranoid,” Cass continues. “When he took them, I sort of thought he’d let me look at them before he put them up. But I’m probably stressing over nothing. I’d bet he decided to scrap those, and it’s just gonna be pictures of walls and wires and construction equipment.”
“Dude stuff.”
“Dude stuff.”
Cass lifts her glass, and she and Lulu do a little toast.
“Heyyyyy!” Kiley slides over to them. The sequins on her dress rub against one another, and give off a low, soft murmur when she moves.
“Hey,” Lulu says.
“Happy New Year! You look great, Cass,” Kiley reports. “You and Lulu both, duh. You guys want a picture together?”
“No phones at The Hotel,” Lulu says automatically.
Cass shakes her head. “He changed the rule,” she says. “Turns out the finishing touch on this place was Wi-Fi. The password is aster. I meant to Flash you when I got here, just to freak you out.”
“Whoa.”
“I know. End of an era.”
At the other end of the room, Roman Sr. is clinking a fork against his glass, trying to get everyone’s attention.
“We have a little while till midnight, but I thought I’d get the introductions out of the way early,” he says. “I’m Roman Riggs, and I’m thrilled to welcome all of you to the opening of Riggs Realty’s newest project. This business has been in our family for generations, and I’m excited to introduce you to my son Ryan, who can tell you more about how this latest iteration came to be.”
Roman turns and claps a hand onto Ryan’s shoulder. Lulu wishes that Christine L. Tompkins, of Beauty, Power, Danger, were here to see this—the casual way men hand off power from one to the next.
“So as some of you know,” Ryan starts, “it’s a tradition in my family to take on a project when we turn eighteen. Each of us is given a chance to prove that we understand how money works, and that we know what to do with it. That we’re ready to inherit our legacy.
“That’s a big word to put on a kid: legacy. My great-great-grandfather made a name for himself, and every generation since has built on that foundation. I’m grateful to be a part of the Riggs family tradition, but it’s also, you know, a little intimidating.” Ryan pauses for a murmur of laughter to ripple through the crowd at how charmingly honest he’s being.
“I was deeply inspired by my brother’s creation of Flash, which you should feel free to use tonight, by the way, hashtag TheFutureIsRigged”—another chuckle—“because it showed real vision, I thought. Roman didn’t just look at what our family’s past was; he didn’t do what we always do. He imagined, boldly, what our future could be. He radically re-thought what it meant to build something from the ground up.”
Ryan gestures to the space around them. “I went a more traditional route, obviously. I used to come here with my grandfather when he was still alive; the Aster had been closed for years, but this property was the source of some of his favorite childhood memories. I wanted to restore it to its glory days, even if he wouldn’t be here to enjoy it.
“But I also wanted something else.” Ryan scans the crowd. He looks at Cass, and then looks away. Lulu feels something cold start to settle over her, so faint at first that she mistakes it for the air-conditioning being turned on, or a breeze blowing through an open door. As Ryan keeps talking, the cold takes on weight, settling around her shoulders like a cloak.
“Because I was thinking a lot about that question of legacy, of what it means to build something that lasts. What can stand up to history? Is it buildings? Is it art? Is it family? The answer, ultimately, is nothing. A thousand years from now, probably, no one will remember our names. This hotel won’t still be standing.”
“I wouldn’t bet against the Riggses!” someone calls from the audience. More laughter; applause.
Ryan smiles and nods. “Thank you,” he says, “but the idea was actually freeing. I stopped worrying about legacy and started thinking, instead, about desire. What do I want right now? What do I want most of all? That’s the real genius of Flash. There’s nothing to it, really—it’s built on impermanence. It gets built and rebuilt every day, because people want to use it so badly.
“When my great-great-grandfather built this place, he wasn’t thinking about the real estate empire he would go on to create. He wasn’t imagining a great-great-grandson feeling the weight of the family’s name heavy on his shoulders. His concerns were far more immediate: He had a beautiful new wife, and he wanted to build a beautiful place for her to live in.
“And I thought, isn’t that what we’re after, when we build buildings, and take pictures and post them on Flash? Aren’t we just looking for ways to express and capture beauty?
“I thought, I don’t know a better legacy for my family than that. Maybe it won’t last forever, but it will make you feel something while you’re here.
“Upstairs, you’ll be able to see rooms as they’ll be set when guests arrive. But you’ll also be able to walk through the photographs I took in the process of changing this place from a derelict, abandoned site to the gorgeous space you’re enjoying now. In that process, I excavated more than the land: I dug deep into my family’s history and my own aesthetic preoccupations. I wanted to give you a sense of the history of beauty that the Riggs family represents, and hopefully, a peek at the future we’re going to bring you.”
* * *
Lulu is one of the first people up the stairs. She feels Cass behind her, but she’s afraid to turn around and look at her. What did Ryan mean by all that?
The hallway is lined in the construction process shots Lulu was expecting: close-ups of rubble and walls tangled in vines. Trucks filled with debris that was emptied out of the pool, and trucks filled with tile for the bathrooms, piles of blue and gold. She starts to breathe easier.
Three, the room whose bathroom she used that first morning, after her night in the tent with Owen, is the one that’s set up as a sample. It’s in there that Lulu sees the first picture of an actual person: Kiley is hung up like art on the wall, captured sitting with her legs dangling into the empty pool, laughing up at the enormous blue sky stretched above her head. Next to her is a shot of Cass in the bathroom, wearing her pajamas, looking at herself in a mirror, caught in the act of brushing her hair. Ryan managed to keep himself out of the frame, so it’s easy to forget that someone took the photograph. It looks like it was always meant to exist.
It makes Lulu’s skin crawl a little bit. Cass was so anxious about her image earlier. She wishes Ryan would have checked with her before he put these up. It’s a beautiful picture, but who knows if Cass will agree.
Lulu glances around for her, but they’ve lost each other in the jostle of the crowd.
Ryan, however, has found her. “You like them?” he asks.
“Sure,” Lulu says. “Congratulations, by the way.”
“Thank you.”
He holds something out to her. It’s small, gold, gleaming. A key.
“What?” Lulu asks.
“Look,” Ryan says. “See for yourself.” He gestures toward a door.
Three is part of a suite, it turns out: It opens right onto Four. Lulu fits the key into the lock and presses the door open. The walls in here are a pa
le seashell pink: the ones she and Cass and Ryan painted by hand. The only piece of this place she helped make real.
You can barely see the color, though, because of all of the bodies.
There’s a moment before the rest of the crowd pushes in behind her when Lulu is alone with them: probably a hundred photographs framed and hung on the wall. All of them are pictures of women, women, women.
There are so many of them that at first she can’t make out any details. She’s rushed over by the repeating pattern of lips, teeth, eyes, hair, arms, legs, breasts, waists. The photographs are black and white or warm with color. The sheer number makes them impossible to parse. It’s just a silent stack of slender limbs and disembodied smiles and deep, generous cleavage.
Then certain faces start to resolve themselves into something familiar. There’s Constance Wilmott, captured on set and in stills from Bluebeard. Press photos of her, young and glamorous, are contrasted with later snapshots: Constance still alive in the ’50s and ’60s, no longer a star but still unmistakably, shockingly beautiful. Lulu recognizes Ryan’s mother, who modeled before she met his father, posing in advertisements for cigarettes and cheap beer. Roman Jr. must have loaned out the use of some photos from Flash: There’s the girl Lulu just saw downstairs, pictured taking a selfie in a mirrored hallway, her body multiplied endlessly out around her.
The movement of the crowd moves Lulu. She sees pictures of women she can’t identify. There’s so much. There’s so many.
What is Ryan doing?
A flash of color on a far wall blinks at her. Lulu would know the flame of Cass’s hair anywhere. She pushes through until she sees the picture.
The picture of Cass, and of herself.
All of the walls in the room are crowded, but mostly the images are diverse, scattered: like a collage clipped from fashion and art and social media and a few things Lulu suspects originated in soft-core porn. This wall is all Ryan’s work, and the models are the same in every photograph: just Cass and Lulu, over and over and over again.
The first picture is the first one he took of the two of them sitting in bed together. Lulu is looking at Cass’s mouth. It looks just as intimate as Lulu feared it would what seems like a hundred million years ago, the way she’s leaning into Cass’s body. What she can see now, which she was too nervous to notice then, is that Cass is leaning toward her too.
They march on from there: Lulu and her milkshake; Cass painting a wall; Lulu and Cass bent over a book, their heads together, talking. That one is in black and white.
Why? Lulu wonders. What’s the point? Is it supposed to be artsier? Is it supposed to be—as she leans in closer to inspect it, she sees why. This photo is black and white and blurry because it was taken by a black-and-white camera. Not Ryan’s fancy, expensive digital, and she knows that because you can see Ryan in the photograph: His body is a blur, midway through some skateboarding trick in the bottom of the pool.
Ryan didn’t take this picture. The Hotel did.
Lulu doesn’t know where they are, but she knows that they’re here. They’ve always been here, the cameras. He mentioned them the first night, the security footage he was taking, how he needed light to do it by. That piece of printer paper taped up in the lobby: WARNING: THESE PREMISES ARE BEING MONITORED BY VIDEO. Of course Ryan needed to protect the construction site.
She hadn’t counted on him using them to surveil her too.
Lulu races through the rest of the images: There’s another black-and-white shot of her alone in her bathing suit, looking as docile and posed as a doll. She and Cass in their robes in color in the lobby, Owen and Kiley fuzzed out to vague background blurs. Ryan took these, Lulu thinks, and then, He took these.
The last images are three in a row of almost the same shot, all in black and white: Cass and Lulu asleep together in bed. They must have been taken over the course of the night they spent here. Their bodies shift around each other in the sheets, restless and random. It was dark when they were taken, and their limbs are grainy and indistinct. The images are perfectly innocent: abstract, almost. They look like shapes and shadows.
They mean that there was nothing Ryan was willing to let them keep for themselves.
The crowd around Lulu mills and swirls; it ebbs and eddies. Someone touches her shoulder, indicates the photograph on the wall, offers her a congratulations.
She sees Ryan talking to someone, some man in a suit. Ryan inclines his head to accept his praise. Lulu can almost see the crown that sits there, and how long he’s been waiting to wear it.
And then he’s under her hands. She shoves him hard. She drops the key she forgot she was holding. It clatters to the floor and the sound silences the room.
“You’re a fucking piece of shit, you know that, right,” Lulu says.
“Oh come on, Lulu,” Ryan starts, and instantly she can see that she miscalculated. Because even though she’s the one who’s been fucked over here, he’s mad. He looks contained and removed because he’s clenching against a fury that’s consuming him from the inside out. He doesn’t care if he hurt her tonight. “You’re really mad that people are looking at you?”
Maybe, actually, he wants to be allowed to hurt her worse.
The room is full of men in black suits and they’re Ryan’s friends. His dad’s business partners. Lulu’s pink dress feels so foolish, like she just had to go ahead and let everyone know that she’s just a dumb, defenseless girl. There’s no one here who’s on her side, except Cass, but Cass—where is Cass? She can’t find her in this sea of people.
Lulu is almost glad. She doesn’t know if she could bear to look at Cass right now, to see Ryan taking all the privacy and intimacy he offered and turning it against her. He sold Cass on the idea that she could be anyone here, and now he’s captured her, and pinned her in a frame.
The cruelty of it is staggering.
Lulu is sure that if she stays in this room her body will stop breathing.
She doesn’t say anything to Ryan. Instead, she walks out of the room, into the hallway, down the stairs, through the lobby, and then out of its door at last, releasing herself into the cold, clear dark of the night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
IT’S FIFTEEN MINUTES to midnight when Lulu shows up on Bea’s doorstep. She thought about sending her a Flash on the way over, but then she figured Bea wouldn’t be paying attention to her phone, and might especially not be in the mood to talk to Lulu if she didn’t know it was urgent. It’s not like her parents are home to be woken up, anyway.
It feels very strange and formal to ring the bell. Lulu listens to it echoing through the downstairs.
It takes five minutes and another ring before Bea comes to answer it. Lulu sees her dimly through the door’s glass panes—the lights are mostly off down here, but Bea looks disheveled, and annoyed.
Her face changes when she realizes who’s standing on her porch.
She opens the door.
“Can I come in?” Lulu asks.
“What the fuck?”
“Can I come in?”
Bea stands back. “Of course. Of course. Lulu, are you okay? Is that Owen? What’s happening? What’s going on?”
Owen is sitting in his car. He was the one who came out and found Lulu standing, shivering, mute, in The Hotel’s driveway. He put his jacket around her shoulders and when she wouldn’t go inside he coaxed her into his car. “Bea’s,” she told him. “If you want to do something, take me to Bea’s,” and he did.
Lulu sends a mental apology to Kiley for depriving her of her rightful midnight kiss. She waves at him, Hi, I’m fine, and he flashes his lights in response and starts backing out of the driveway.
“Are you okay?” Bea asks again.
“I’m fine,” Lulu says. “Something bad happened. But I’m fine. Look at me. I’m fine.”
“You always look fine, Lulu!”
Bea
stands back to make room, so Lulu walks into the house, over the threshold, into the familiar space. There’s mail on the side table and it smells like Bea’s house always does, like her own almost-home.
“Where were you?” Bea asks.
Lulu follows Bea into the kitchen. “I don’t want anything,” she says.
“I might.”
“Is Rich upstairs?”
“Mmmm.”
“I was at a party,” Lulu says. “At the—at the hotel property Ryan owns.”
“Oh. Of course.”
“Can we put that on hold for tonight?”
“Put what on hold?”
“Our argument,” Lulu says. “Any argument.”
“Oh, so now that you need me we’re friends again?”
“Yes,” Lulu agrees. “Now that I need you. I really need you, B.”
Her voice must convey how desperate she is, because Bea just sighs. “Oh, girl,” she says, and holds open her arms.
After a while, Bea goes upstairs to let Rich know what’s going on. When she comes back down, she grabs a bottle of champagne out of the fridge and brings it and Lulu up to her bedroom.
“Where’s Rich?” Lulu asks.
“Jerking off in the shower.”
“Right,” Lulu says. “I forgot. Happy New Year.”
Somehow, that’s what does it—breaks the seal of tension between them, so that they both dissolve into helpless, eye-watering laughter.
“Happy New Year!” Bea says, miming a jerk-off motion, her hands describing a dick so big they don’t touch around it.
“Happy New Year!” Lulu cries, and pops the top off the champagne so that it fizzes and splashes onto her hands, and then the floor.
“My rug!” Bea yelps.
“MY LIFE,” Lulu yelps back. She sucks the foam out of the bottle. It spills, wet and white, down her chin.
“Give me,” Bea says. “Give it here,” so Lulu does.