Look

by Zan Romanoff

  Tonight, though, she seems to have climbed to the top of some plateau. Everything Sloane does feels good but she stays restless, in her own skin, unable to find a build to anything, a way to open the door to true mindless abandon.

  “You don’t have to,” she says at some point.

  “Are you not going to?” Sloane says. “Because if you aren’t, I’ll stop, but I don’t mind. I know sometimes—”

  “I don’t think,” Lulu says, and shyness flashes through her, which is so ridiculous, when Sloane has two fingers hooked inside of her. “Um. I don’t think I can right now. I’m sorry. Can we—I might need a sec to—”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Sloane says. She kisses Lulu once, quick, and rolls off of her. Another thing Lulu is still trying to get used to, with girls. Owen would have been nudging his dick against her, saying “Can I still?” and she would have said yes. It’s not like she would have minded. She liked having sex with him, whether or not it was, like, going anywhere for her.

  It’s just weird to have sex where someone getting her off is a much bigger part of the point.

  “This isn’t about feelings,” Lulu says. “I’m just drunk.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not—” Lulu says, and then stops, because she’s being defensive, and that’s never a good look.

  “Even if you were,” Sloane says, “it would be okay, you know. Breakups aren’t rational. Feelings aren’t rational. It takes a while for your body to get over someone, sometimes. Even when your mind is like, I’m ready to be ready, you know?”

  “That’s not what’s going on.”

  “What is?”

  Lulu doesn’t say anything.

  “I won’t tell.”

  Lulu is teetering on the edge between the spin of being drunk and the toxic, pinching flush of her hangover. She wants a glass of water. She sits up and pulls her dress on, realizes her bra is still on the floor somewhere. She puts her head between her knees.

  Sloane puts a hand on her back.

  That’s what does it. Lulu says the words into the curl of her body, but Sloane seems to hear them. Lulu tells her the story. She tells her what Ryan did. All of it. The pictures. And the tape.

  “Yeah,” Sloane says when she’s finished. “That’s—Jesus. He’s a nightmare. But I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “What, because I deserved it?”

  “No. Fuck. Has anyone said that to you? That this was your fault?”

  No one but Lulu herself. She shakes her head.

  “You know this isn’t the first time he’s done something like this, right?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know Emma Kushner?”

  “No.”

  “She’s our year at Sanderson. I think she went to the Center. I know her because—never mind. It doesn’t matter. It’s just that they dated for a little while when we were freshmen, and, you know, she sent him some pictures. He said he deleted them after they broke up, but it turned out he didn’t. Instead he was selling them to dudes he knew. Twenty dollars per image, fifty for the set. Emma’s dad went to Ryan’s dad and Ryan’s dad said Emma was a slut, and Ryan had good entrepreneurial instincts.”

  Lulu remembers sitting next to Cass on the couch in her backyard, huddled next to her, pretending it was for warmth. Watching Connie Wilmott on screen as she opened a door and saw all of the bodies that had come before hers. How she knew, in that moment, that she was going to be next.

  Lulu can’t save herself or Cass, but what if she could spare whoever Ryan falls in love with next.

  “Now I’m sorry,” Sloane says. “If I’d known you were hanging out with him, I would have warned you. Emma bought the pictures back from all the guys who had them and got one of them kicked out of school for other stuff—he was selling amphetamines to freshmen on campus like some kind of criminal idiot—so people don’t talk about it, and I don’t like to spread the story. But I wish more people knew about Ryan.”

  “Me too,” Lulu says. “Me fucking too.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  JUST TYPING CASS’S name into the to field of a text makes Lulu feel like she needs to lie down and take a nap. They almost always messaged each other on Flash, so at least she doesn’t have to have the app reminding her how long it’s been since they spoke. Still, though, her pulse picks up with each letter she types. C-A-S-S. Lulu has never made a fool of herself for anyone before, not on purpose, anyway. She’s always figured out how to do the flattering thing.

  Fuck flattering, she thinks, and writes:

  You can ignore this or tell me to shut up, but I just wanted you to know that I saw Ryan after we talked, and he gave me a hard drive with some, um, “extra footage” on it. It’s been sitting on my desk and I haven’t known what to do with it, but I’m going to destroy it. I thought you might want to do that with me?

  She adds four hammer emojis for effect.

  Lulu has no idea if hammers will actually be involved. She just wants to be clear she isn’t trying to get Cass to, like, forget everything and start over. She’s just trying to facilitate a little bit of healing revenge and stuff-smashing. She wants to erase as much of Ryan from their lives as she can.

  That sounds kind of ideal, actually, Cass writes back. Bonfire at mine?

  You don’t think that’s a recipe for like . . .

  an explosion?

  You were being literal about the hammers?

  Could be cathartic

  Hang on, I’m googling.

  Lulu is sitting in front of her laptop, but she figures she’ll let Cass run the search.

  Instead, while she waits, she does something she hasn’t done in a long time: She googles herself. Owen’s dad’s fan sites come up first, the ones that were archiving her Flash. She wonders if they’ve figured out that she and Owen broke up, and if so, if they’ve stopped following her. She wonders if they’re on Kiley now instead, imagining her life as voraciously and inaccurately as they pictured Lulu’s.

  She’s surprised to find, though, that a little bit farther down in the results, there are a couple of blog posts people have written about her. Maybe one of them is Naomi’s friend.

  She can’t tell about that, but Lulu is mentioned in some feminist website’s essay about the Selfie Generation and, like, what does it mean that kids these days are documenting their lives? The essay mentions the Sloane video, of course, a “radical, virtual, viral coming out that announced her sexuality not with language or labels but by enacting it on a very public stage.” It praises her for her courage.

  Then there are people’s responses to the essay, which argue Lulu’s actions and intentions, what other people think she meant and did with her Flash in general and that Flash in particular. They were all written before Ryan’s pictures came out; Lulu wonders what they would have thought of her if they had had that evidence at their disposal. They’d probably all still be wrong.

  No one knows what it’s like inside of her. It’s not their fault, and it’s not hers either.

  It’s strange to think of herself as the subject of feminist critique and debate, the same way the women she’s been hearing and reading about for months now are—to think of herself as a woman, much less a woman artist. Lulu imagines responding to all of these essays: “Thank you so much for your consideration, but I was just drunk and dumb and horny, tbh.” How hilariously disappointed they’d all be.

  You know, you might be right about the hammers, Cass texts her. Weirdly, I think analog is our best bet in this case.

  Let me know when you’re ready, Lulu says.

  Can’t tomorrow, Cass says. What about Wednesday night?

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  WHEN CASS OPENS her door, Lulu holds the hard drive out between them like an offering, or a shield. “I brought it,” she says.

  Cass smiles briefly. “Good.�
�

  “Are your parents or anyone home?” Lulu asks as they make their way through the house. It’s 4:30 p.m. and starting to get dark already. She’s ready for spring, but it’s still a few months off.

  “No.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Mmmm.”

  Cass’s backyard looks bigger without all of the stuff that was in it last time she was here, the couches and projector and screen, and all of those boys. She leads Lulu to a corner where apparently at some point someone tried to build a fire pit; now there’s just grass-free dirt and a circle of rocks. Cass has already laid down a tarp; she has a toolbox off to one side.

  “So do we just go at it?”

  “Hang on a sec.”

  Cass sits on the tarp and opens the toolbox, pulls out a screwdriver. After a moment, Lulu comes to sit with her.

  There’s a cover on top of the drive that she’s trying to pry off, working on unscrewing the screws. She does the first three before Lulu stops her.

  “Can I do one?”

  “If you want to.”

  “I do,” Lulu says. “I just. I want to feel it come apart.”

  Cass nods. She hands Lulu the screwdriver and the drive. “It’s sort of more prying than unscrewing.”

  “Cool,” Lulu says. She tries to do what Cass did. It takes her a while too, but the screw pops loose, and there it is: the vulnerable inside of the thing. An object she can attack and destroy.

  “Hah!” she says.

  “Very nice.”

  Cass is smiling indulgently and Lulu looks up at her and thinks, I want to kiss you. It reminds her of thinking it and trying to swallow it all those times before; it makes her realize how silly she was to imagine that this was something she could ignore, or deny. She’s never not going to want to kiss Cass when Cass is around. There’s no just friends about this.

  But she did not come over here to make that point.

  “There are discs inside,” Cass is saying. “See? Those are the things we want to ruin. That’s where the data is stored.”

  They’re so small and ordinary looking. For a second, something in Lulu wavers. What did those little pieces of metal ever do to her? What does she really think she’ll accomplish by putting them in pieces? The world will still be fucked and Cass will still be mostly not speaking to her. Ryan will still be able to do this whole thing to someone else again.

  But then she looks at Cass and remembers that there are other things in the world than pure justice, or vengeance. There’s her, and there’s Cass. There’s this one small thing they can do to make themselves feel safe.

  The first fall of the hammer is tricky: the aim and balance, making sure the blow lands exactly where she intends to place it. Soon, though, the tool is light in her hands. Her body knows how to do this, when she lets it: to smash up ugliness, to erase the evidence of how much she gave away, and how that still wasn’t enough, so that even more had to be taken from her. It’s another way of saying no, and Lulu says it until she aches all through her palms and fingers, in the muscle of her shoulders and her bones.

  * * *

  When they’re done, Cass gathers the corners of the tarp and ties them together; she puts the whole bundle in a trash bag, and the bag in the can, out on the street, to be collected in the morning. “Well,” she says. “So.”

  “Yeah,” Lulu says. “Okay.”

  “Thanks for coming over,” Cass says. “I’m glad we got to do that.”

  “Me too.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  Lulu shrugs. “Go home,” she says. “My homework, I guess.”

  “Oh, no, I meant . . .” Cass gestures at the evening around them with one hand, and laughs. “In general.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Me neither.”

  For a bare moment, they smile at each other.

  “I did delete my Flash account,” Lulu admits

  “I did too.”

  “Yeah. I, um, I realized I was tired of contributing content to the Riggs family.”

  Cass grimaces. “Roman Junior! Jesus. He is, believe it or not, way worse than Ryan.”

  “No, I believe that.”

  “Or I guess actually he’s more obviously a creep? Maybe that’s better. Because I always knew to stay away.”

  “Here’s some important work for the young women of the world to be doing—deciding which kind of asshole is the less-terrible kind.”

  “You are a feminist now, Lu.”

  “Books got to my head, I guess.”

  “All that reading.” Cass reaches out thoughtlessly to ruffle Lulu’s hair.

  Lulu holds perfectly still, hoping. Cass pulls her hand back.

  “Anyway,” Cass says. “It sucks that Ryan got to ruin Flash for you. I mean, not that it’s like a super-tragic loss or anything, but you were so—I don’t know. You were good at it. Is that a weird thing to say? I felt like you cared about it. Like it was so part of who you were.”

  “That’s who I was? That’s sad.”

  Cass rolls her eyes. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  Lulu tilts her head up to the sky. It’s pale, undifferentiated blue above her, going dingy and dim with gray at one edge as the sun fades behind the hills. “I don’t know that,” she says, at last. “I don’t know how you think about me. Especially since we—whatever. Broke up.”

  “Did we?”

  “The last time we talked felt pretty final.”

  Cass sighs. “I didn’t mean for it to be that way. Necessarily.”

  “What did you mean for it to be like?”

  Cass twists her mouth into a complicated shape. “I mean, it wasn’t even personal. I didn’t break up with you; I broke up with everyone, basically. I was just so angry and sad. I just didn’t have the energy for anything. I couldn’t make any decisions. I couldn’t handle anyone else’s feelings. I could barely fucking handle my own.”

  Lulu tries to imagine what it’s like to have such a certain sense of yourself that you can walk away from other people’s feelings: to not always be thinking about them, or imagining them, or trying to shape yourself around the fact of them. That’s what she meant to say to Bea, when B asked her about staying on Flash. It’s Lulu’s way of asking someone else to answer a question she can’t seem to stop asking: Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? Am I still doing okay?

  “Talk about selfish,” Cass is saying. “I was mad at you, but I was also—it was easier to be mad at you than at Ryan. To make sure to be mad at you so I didn’t have to feel anything else. After, it was like I wasn’t even there. Like my skin was a shell, and I was a ghost floating inside of it. Like I was nothing.”

  She swipes the back of one hand against her cheek where a tear was starting to fall. “Which, like, I didn’t want to—nothing really changed, you know? They’re just pictures. He didn’t really take anything important, even. Not in the way that, you know, he could have. This video. Or something else.” Cass might be crying, but Lulu doesn’t know, because her face is tilted to the ground.

  Lulu doesn’t touch her. “Do you want,” she starts. “We could go inside and talk a little bit more.”

  Cass keeps looking down, but she reaches out a hand to Lulu.

  Lulu takes it, and lets Cass guide her inside.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  THE LAST TIME Lulu goes to The Hotel, it’s the middle of January. She wears the same boots she had on that first night, but everything else is different. It’s day, for one thing, an ordinary blue-and-white Saturday, and it rained yesterday, so the hillside she and Cass drive up is lush with new green and small, open flowers. Even the thick, pale skins of desert plants and cacti are washed clean and dustless. The gate stands open and ready for them.

  The first time Lulu came to The Hotel, the only person who’d ever betrayed
her was herself. And so she trusted everyone else.

  Cass parks out in front, straight on in one of the spots, like she’s always been civilized here. Ryan comes out of the lobby to meet them. He looks bristly and wary and uncertain in a way that makes Lulu want to make sure she doesn’t look at him too long, in case she starts to hallucinate tenderness underneath it. She’s not here to imagine anything about Ryan. She’s just here to make sure Cass survives the reality of him.

  There’s a moment just before they open the car doors. “You ready?” Lulu asks Cass.

  Cass looks at her softly. “Yeah,” she says.

  “You sure you don’t want me to come—”

  “I’ve got this.”

  Cass gets out of the car.

  Lulu stays where she is. She looks down at the last moment, so she doesn’t have to see Cass and Ryan navigate greeting each other. So what if he took the option from her—she’s still decent enough to feel the instinct that he deserves privacy. She stares at her hands for long quiet minutes. The habit of not taking out her phone at The Hotel is so deeply ingrained.

  When she looks up again, Cass and Ryan have their backs to her. They’re walking over to the pool. Lulu waits for them to disappear from view before she eases her door open and steps out of the car.

  The front door of The Hotel is still unlocked. Of course it is. Ryan is so used to believing that he’s invulnerable.

  The lobby is set up like an actual lobby now: a small lounge with couches and plush chairs, a coffee table, a bunch of art magazines; a front desk with flowers on it, though the space isn’t supposed to open for another handful of weeks. The elevator is probably working by now, but Lulu takes the stairs out of habit.

  She’s glad it looks so normal. The Hotel she wants to revisit doesn’t exist anymore, for anyone. In Ryan’s room, a laptop is sitting on the desk, its screen black with sleep. It’s hard not to look at it and see the evidence of how Ryan thought he was master of this space: that he could know everything that happened in it. But that’s not what happened—that’s not what’s happening now.