Look

by Zan Romanoff

  “And I applaud that,” Mr. Winters says.

  Lulu knows he didn’t have to take that at face value, to pretend that Doug wasn’t implying Lulu’s a lesbo now. He saw the pictures. He gets the joke.

  But he decided to pretend he didn’t, because he’s woke, sure, Mr. Winters, and he’s patient, and probably he’s trying, but he’s still a man. Deep down inside, he’s still a boy, and his instinct is always to belong with them, to think their jokes are funny. To think their jokes are just jokes.

  * * *

  Lulu catches up with Kiley after class. “Thanks,” she says. “For having my back in there. Made me feel less crazy for speaking up.”

  “You’re welcome. But it wasn’t about you,” Kiley says. “Sometimes things aren’t, you know.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  IF SHE’S GOING to be a full-time feminist crusader now, there’s someone she should be talking to, so that night Lulu calls Naomi. She can’t remember the last time she called anyone—much less her sister. For advice.

  The world really has been turned upside down.

  She doesn’t know how to start telling the story, though. Instead, she says, “Naomi, you’ve read the book I got Cass for Christmas, right?”

  “Yeah, a couple of years ago,” Naomi says. “When I thought I might be a lit major freshman year, I took a course on fairy tales. Did she not like it or something?”

  “No,” Lulu says. “She liked it.”

  “What about it, then? Just curious?”

  “Cass said something about it. About how many stories we tell about women getting murdered.”

  “Oh, yeah, the SVU thing.”

  “Law & Order?”

  “A whole television show about violence against women. And you know, those serial killer podcasts and stuff? People are obsessed with hearing about ways women die.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You okay, Lulu?”

  “Something happened. No one died. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay.” There’s a pause. Then Naomi asks, “You want me to talk to you instead?”

  “Sure.”

  So Naomi does. She tells Lulu about her classes, and how she thinks maybe a grad student in one of her upper-level seminars is flirting with her. She tells Lulu about how the other night she and her friends went out to a bar and played pool. She tells Lulu a bunch of sort of funny, sort of boring stories, until Lulu’s lulled her brain into quiet, until, when there’s a pause in the conversation, Lulu says, “The thing is that it turned out that Ryan was spying on us.”

  “I’m sorry,” Naomi says. “But what? And who? And what the fuck?”

  Lulu tells her the whole story.

  After she’s explained, Naomi says, “I’m so sorry, Lu.”

  “What are you sorry for? You didn’t do it.”

  “Of course I didn’t do it. I just didn’t want anything like this to happen to you.”

  “Well, yeah. But it did.”

  “Have you talked to someone? A guidance counselor or anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Oh Lu. I wish you would.”

  “Well, I don’t want to.”

  Naomi sighs. There’s a long silence. “I don’t want to tell you what to do,” she says. “I know that usually doesn’t work. But I just—I don’t want this to be your secret either. I don’t want you to live with this alone.”

  “I don’t, though,” Lulu says. “You know. That’s why I called you. Bea knows. Cass—”

  Cass knows. Even if they never speak again, they’ll have this between them. They’re the only people who know this specific betrayal, inside and out.

  “Still,” Naomi says. “It’s different. But it’s up to you. As long as you know it’s an option.” And then, “God, no wonder Cass has been thinking about Bluebeard.”

  “We didn’t die,” Lulu says. She doesn’t understand why she has to keep explaining this.

  “No, of course not. But it’s—the things men do to women. The ways they think they get to be in charge of you. The way it never seems to stop.”

  Those retellings too, which is what Cass was talking about: The way that, even when the physical violence stops, their stories get repeated, and reimagined. Again, and again, and again.

  Naomi continues, “I will say, in that class, one of the things we talked about was how people read that story like it’s a warning to women—to trust your intuition and not marry creeps, or, if you do marry a creep, not to be curious about him. To leave things be. Which weirded me out, because he’s the villain. Whatever else happens in the story, he dies at the end.”

  “That’s what I said! That’s what I’m saying.”

  “It can be about both things, though, is what I thought was interesting. This idea that it’s a story about how women die, but it’s also a story about how women survive.”

  Lulu’s dad’s favorite joke is to short-circuit their Passover seders. A seder is supposed to be a long ritual dinner, hours and hours devoted to telling a story everyone already knows. His parents, observant immigrants, used to make him sit through all of it. Lulu’s whole life, he’s sat everyone down at the table and said, “You know how this one goes, right? They tried to kill us; they couldn’t; let’s eat!” and tucked right into his matzoh ball soup.

  Bea’s parents left the Philippines decades ago, but their siblings are still there; they don’t work in politics, but her grandparents used to. She doesn’t talk about it much, but she mentions, every now and again, how violent things are over there, under the new president. How glad she is that part of her family is here, and how impossible it is not to worry about the rest of them, who are still there.

  If you’re telling the story, it means you’re still alive. If you’re telling the story, it means you’re still haunted by it too.

  “Survival is a privilege,” Naomi says. “And it is also kind of a burden.”

  “I don’t want it. Either of it. Any of it.”

  “What do you want instead?”

  Lulu doesn’t have an answer for that.

  After a while, Naomi says, “Thank you for telling me.”

  “You’re . . . welcome?”

  “I know you want to handle it on your own. So I appreciate that you chose to let me help. Or try to.”

  Lulu doesn’t know what to say to that. She doesn’t think of herself as being particularly tough, or self-sufficient. She doesn’t think of herself as being someone who doesn’t want help. Only someone who’s trying desperately not to.

  “I love you, little sister,” Naomi says.

  Lulu’s thought so many times that being hard would break her, that she would crack in half under the pressure. But somehow it’s Naomi’s tenderness that does it, that finally makes her feel like she’s suddenly, totally come undone.

  * * *

  Lulu goes and sits on one of the stone benches in the grove of fruit trees in the backyard. It’s dark out and it has been basically since she got home from school. The dark here isn’t romantic the way it was at The Hotel; she can see the neighbors’ lights, and the ones from her house up the hill. She can hear city noises and see the buzzy ambient hum of urban fluorescence brightening the world around her, making all of it seem mundane and comprehensible. She closes her eyes and it presses harder against her, demanding her attention, insisting on being let in.

  “No,” Lulu whispers. Her eyes were squeezed shut but at the sound of her own voice against the night they fly open. “No,” she says again. “No!” she yells. “No no no no no no no no!” By now she’s howling. “NO!” She screams. “NO! I WON’T! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!”

  She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, or even who she thinks she’s yelling at. Definitely not Naomi or Ryan. God, maybe. Whoever, whatever made a universe like this one.

  She’s yelling at herself, for not
being able to keep Ryan from hurting her, and the women who raised him, who raised him like this. The men who raised him, who raised him like this. His great-great-grandfather and all of his money. His great-great-grandfather and his money and his property and the woman he saw on the screen and then plucked off of it to keep for himself. Avery wanted what Ryan wanted: to own a woman’s body. To control her any way he could.

  “No,” she says again, and this time it comes out in a raw, hurt whisper. “No. No. No.”

  But the world doesn’t care what Lulu has to say about it—whether she hates it. If it seems like it’s trying to kill her. Good, it’s probably thinking. You weren’t tough enough anyway, then.

  Lulu knows what she wants, now: to look the indifferent universe in the eye, defiant, and triumphant and recklessly, impossibly, alive.

  Despite it. Despite everything.

  Lulu looks around at the orange grove, her little tiny oasis of quiet in the big busy noisy city night. She remembers standing here with Owen, plucking fruit from the trees, letting their heaviness tug them off the branch and into her open palms. That was when she first started to understand that she was really, really going to lose him. That was the day after she met Cass for the first time. That was a different life, she thinks, and yet here she is again, her bare feet in the same earth.

  The world is indifferent to her, and that means she can do whatever she wants as long as she’s in it.

  “Fuck you,” Lulu says to the night. She wipes her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater. She turns and goes inside.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  BEA DRESSES LULU up for the party. That’s the condition: Lulu will go with her, but only if Bea is responsible for her outfit, and for driving, and for making Lulu feel like less of an ass for being there.

  “Act like everything’s normal, right?” Bea said when she proposed it. “And, like, fuck anyone who wants to mess with you.”

  “Didn’t you say I shouldn’t do things I didn’t want to do?” Lulu replied.

  “Ugh,” Bea said. “Technically, I did.”

  But Lulu doesn’t want to be home alone, so she lets Bea put her in one of her dresses—something loose and flowy, which turns perilously tight and short on Lulu’s curves—and get her in the car. She’s actually almost looking forward to it by the time they arrive. Whatever it is when she gets there, at least she’ll know. It can’t be as bad as she’s imagining. Right?

  Even thinking that was asking for trouble, she realizes, when she walks into Jules’s house and the first person she sees is Sloane.

  “Um,” Bea says.

  Jules introduced them. Jules introduced them at that party in August. He’s how Sloane came into her life in the first place, so Lulu should have known. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but Lulu’s been so distracted that she forgot to worry about this single particular thing, so of course this is the thing that’s happening. Sloane Mori is sitting on a couch next to Patrick, drinking what looks like a rum and Coke.

  She sees Lulu and she smiles and then she looks away, and Lulu has no idea how to respond. She knows what she wants to do, though, which is what she does: walks into the den where they’re hanging out, sits down in one of the chairs, and pours herself a drink. She swallows it in two gulps and makes herself another.

  “Hey-o, Shapiro,” Patrick says. “What is up.”

  “Feel you, girl,” Sloane says. “That’s exactly the mood. Also. Um. Hey.”

  They haven’t seen each other since That Whole Thing happened. They haven’t spoken since they came downstairs at the party where they met, and one of the boys said, “Rude of you to let the internet watch, but not the people who are actually here.”

  For an infinite, split-second moment, Lulu didn’t know what he meant; then he held up his phone, and she did. She fumbled her phone out of her pocket and deleted the video, and even then, fingers shaking, nausea roiling through her, she knew, instinctively, that she was already way too fucking late.

  “Hey,” Lulu says to Sloane now.

  Bea comes and balances herself on the arm of Lulu’s chair. She nudges Lulu with an elbow. “Bartender,” she says. “Make me one?”

  “Sure,” Lulu says.

  She busies herself pouring while Bea introduces herself to Sloane, as if she doesn’t know who she is. Rich shows up and distracts Bea; Jules and Cristina Vega and Faye Samson arrive with him, and then there’s more people to say hi to and drinks to pour and sip and distractions, and somehow Lulu is at a party, a party with Sloane, and it’s—fine, she thinks. Somehow it seems like everything is actually kind of almost fine.

  * * *

  Bea disappears with Rich, which was the actual point of them coming to the party. Lulu stays in the den, mostly. She feels like a prey animal or a spy, keeping her eyes on the door so that no more surprises sneak up on her tonight.

  There’s only one bathroom down there, though, and someone has been in it for a while. Lulu really has to pee. The second-floor bathroom is just at the top of the stairs—safe enough, she figures, and it is. She pees, washes her hands, redoes her topknot, wishes she could touch up her eye makeup, which has gotten a little too smudgy for her taste.

  Sloane is standing outside the door when she opens it.

  “Sorry,” Sloane says. Her facade of calm has fallen slightly with the wash of drunkenness. She’s twisting her hands together, biting the inside of her lip. Lulu feels a swell of the thing she felt over the summer, the ease of desire, of sheer, sharp want.

  And then she immediately feels disloyal to Cass, which is—No. She pushes the thought away. Cass still hasn’t texted her back. Lulu assumes this means they’re over.

  Sloane continues. “I didn’t mean to ambush you. I just wanted to talk, and I didn’t want to do it in front of everyone.”

  Lulu looks around. The second floor is open plan, mostly—a living room that unfolds into the kitchen; the bedrooms are all on the third floor. There’s no one around to hear them, but still she feels terribly exposed.

  “Do we need to?” she asks, trying to keep it light.

  “I just—I saw the thing,” Sloane says. “That Ryan made. And I heard a rumor that you weren’t, like, totally down with it.”

  “I guess,” Lulu says.

  “I mostly wanted to say: That fucking sucks,” Sloane says. “I knew him growing up, you know. And he—”

  Lulu’s had enough of watching girls take responsibility for Ryan. “He’s not your fault,” she says.

  “Thank god.” Sloane laughs, and then turns to go.

  “I’m sorry,” Lulu says.

  “What?”

  “About the summer. About the Flash,” Lulu says. “I’m sorry.”

  Sloane shrugs. “Nothing people didn’t already know about me,” she says. “And I know you didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “Do you?”

  Sloane smiles. “I was there. I know what happened. Plus, you had a boyfriend.”

  “I did.”

  “He’s not here tonight.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I heard you guys broke up.” Sloane waits for Lulu to respond, and when she doesn’t, she continues. “I sort of figured it would be temporary. I don’t know why. I just thought it might blow over, after.”

  “If you heard about the pictures, you must have heard the rumors about me and Cass.” Lulu hasn’t said her name much lately. It makes her seem more real, somehow, not just the memory of her, indistinct, but her name like currency, something anyone can use to conjure her.

  “I guess I did,” Sloane says.

  “And Owen has a new girlfriend,” Lulu adds. Now that she’s got a knife in her own side, may as well twist it a little.

  “And you and Cass?”

  Lulu shakes her head.

  Sloane steps in closer to her. “Do you want me to kiss you?” she asks.

&n
bsp; Lulu feels the same sting of disloyalty, the idea that this is wrong, that it will hurt Cass. But Cass is the one who stopped speaking to her. May as well, she thinks. And Sloane is still so beautiful. “I do.”

  Sloane kisses her in the hallway. She puts her hands on Lulu’s waist, under her shirt, and now that Lulu isn’t so overwhelmed by the fact that it’s happening, that she’s kissing a girl for real, it’s easier to notice details: that Sloane’s hands are bigger than Cass’s were, but smaller than Owen’s, and softer, that instead of being slick with summer like last time, she’s cool and dry. Sloane touches Lulu easily, certainly, like she’s trying to tell Lulu something, to convince her that she knows what she’s doing.

  Sloane is the one who pulls away after a while, takes Lulu’s hand, and leads her silently up to one of the guest bedrooms. Lulu thinks about last time this happened, and all the things she didn’t know, didn’t know how to do. Now she could be in charge, if she wanted to. She could ask for the things she wants.

  It feels good, though, to give in. To follow Sloane, to lie down on the bed, to kiss until her mouth is numb. Lulu takes Sloane’s shirt off; she surrounds herself with the distraction of someone else’s skin. She loses herself to the moment and lets it go further than it should. Usually she tries to be careful about things—ask questions about where someone’s been, what they’re doing, should we get a condom or whatever. But tonight Lulu can’t find a way to care, and before she knows it, she’s grinding mindlessly into the pressure of Sloane’s palm. She’s just a body now, something seeking satisfaction and release. No thoughts. No ideas. Just the distance she has to cross between where she is, and where she wants to be.

  The thing is, she can’t get there tonight.

  Lulu’s body has always been easy for her, this one way: She doesn’t usually need to be in any particular headspace to come. It’s not an emotional experience for her, the way it seems like it might be for some girls. It’s just a matter of friction and rhythm, someone who’s willing to be a little bit patient. She’s been patient for enough boys to know that she doesn’t actually take all that long.