Look

by Zan Romanoff

  He saw things, but he couldn’t control them. He couldn’t stop her and Cass from finding each other, or from falling into each other. And he can’t stop them now from saying this last goodbye and leaving, and never, ever coming back.

  Lulu goes downstairs, out the front door. She’s trying to be quiet, but as soon as she walks outside and hears Ryan’s voice she knows he’s not listening for anything. He and Cass are over by the pool, but in the silence of the afternoon his words echo off the concrete, bouncing right to her.

  “What was I supposed to do, Cass?” he’s saying. “I was just trying to show you what it was like on the outside. What it looked like looking in on you, like some stranger. I didn’t want to hurt you. I really didn’t.”

  “Well, you did.” Cass’s voice is fluorescent with pain.

  Ryan says something indistinct.

  Lulu walks closer.

  “. . . I wanted you to see that you were hurting me,” Ryan is saying, when she can hear him clearly again. “I didn’t know how else to make you see that, Cass. You just brought her here. You didn’t even ask! And then it was like I didn’t matter anymore. Like we, what we were—”

  “Nothing changed!” Cass says. “You were still my best friend. I told you that, Ryan.”

  “We weren’t just friends. You know we weren’t.”

  “Maybe that’s how you felt about it,” she says. “But for me, we were. I’m sorry if that wasn’t enough for you. I’m sorry if I couldn’t be what you thought I’d be for you, or what you wanted, but—Ryan. It wasn’t ever going to happen between us like that.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I don’t know what I want?”

  “You don’t know the future,” Ryan says. He sounds petulant, childish. “You don’t know.”

  “I’m gay, Ry,” Cass says. “That doesn’t have anything to do with you or Lulu. It’s not gonna change. It’s just a fact.”

  “You were gay when I met you,” Ryan says. “That didn’t used to stop you from loving me.”

  “Nothing stopped me from loving you except you,” Cass says. “What did you think? That I would see it and feel sorry for you? That I would suddenly realize your dick was the magic one for me? And that if I did, I would forgive you for exposing me like that?”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking.” Ryan is talking softly now, low and coaxing, but Lulu can still hear him, which means she’s gotten too close. She knows this. She should go back to the car. This is private. This isn’t hers to hear.

  But she can’t make herself move. Lulu almost—almost—feels bad for him. He sounds so totally, helplessly lost. She’s felt that kind of lost. She knows what it is to wonder if you know how to love anyone, and if anyone else wants to love you.

  That doesn’t mean it gives him license to hurt her, though. Or to hurt Cass.

  She pulls out her phone, pulls up the voice notes app, and hits RECORD.

  “I can’t explain it,” Ryan is saying. “It just felt like—like you’d forced me into a corner. It was the only thing I could do. I was losing you. I was desperate. I was desperate to keep you, Cass.”

  “To trap me, you mean. To keep a record of me, whether I wanted to be recorded or not.”

  “It was our project,” Ryan says. “We made it up together. We talked and talked. We had so many ideas. And then she came along and it was let’s just chill, Ry, we can do other stuff every now and again, are these photos really going to be that great anyway. So yeah, I figured out a way to get content. Because I don’t abandon shit that matters to me.”

  “Don’t say ‘get content’ like that. You didn’t get content. You took it. You took me and turned me into content.”

  This is it. This is it this is it this is it. Lulu’s hands are shaking. This is the clearest admission of guilt she’ll ever get from him.

  This is how she reminds him that other people can see him too.

  “Sure,” Ryan says. “It wasn’t, like, ethical. I should have told you about the cameras, especially in the rooms. I should have told you about the pictures before I showed them. But really, Cass, look at who you’re dating. You think she’s not gonna do something like this to you, someday? You think Lulu Shapiro is going to keep your secrets?”

  “Don’t talk about her. This isn’t about her.”

  “You’re fucking stupid to trust her. She’s not even interesting, Cass. She’s not who you think she is.”

  “I don’t forgive you,” Cass says. “I never will.”

  Lulu’s thumb presses down once, hard, on the END RECORD button.

  They look up when she comes through the pool gate. They’re both crying, Cass quietly and Ryan miserably, determinedly, like even still he needs them both to see, to know, to witness him. Like they’ve done something to him. Like any of this is either of their faults.

  “Go away,” he says.

  “Cass,” Lulu says quietly. “Are you ready?”

  “Yeah,” Cass says. “I’m ready.”

  Ryan’s temper flares. “Do you want to make me your enemy?” he asks. “Do you really think that’s smart?”

  “I don’t care if it’s smart or not,” Cass says. “Fuck you, Ryan.”

  “You were always our enemy,” Lulu says. “I guess I should say thank you for making sure we’d never forget it.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  LULU DRIVES THEM home. She doesn’t put on her GPS or ask Cass for directions. She just drives: down the hill, into the hum of the city, through sleepy weekend traffic. Cass stares blankly out the passenger-side window.

  Lulu feels like a kid again, like she’s in her dad’s car on her way to the airport on the first day of vacation. Like the rest of the world is still cogging its way along, and she alone has been cut free—suspended, dangling. Suddenly loose and light.

  She has power now. Not much—not enough—not anything that will make any big, real difference in the world. She can’t make Ryan take back what he did. But she can make it harder for him to do it to another girl.

  She knows what she wants to do. For herself. For everyone else.

  Lulu drives them to her house, where Cass picked her up just a few hours ago. It feels like it’s been days. She turns the car off but can’t make herself get out.

  “You can come in, if you want to,” she says.

  Silence.

  “Not like—I’m not trying to start anything,” she clarifies. “Like, if you want to drink a glass of water before you head back. Take a nap. I won’t even walk you up to my room.”

  Cass says, “I should probably go. I’m kind of exhausted.”

  Lulu remembers the last time Cass came over to see her, at her mom’s apartment, the first day after they’d kissed. What happened; what it meant to her. To both of them. That first night at Cass’s they’d opened a door together; at Lulu’s the next day it was like they stepped through it and into the same room. Oh, Lulu remembers thinking, this is happening.

  She can’t imagine how terrifying it must be to have something like Ryan happen to you: to know that no matter what you do or say, someone is going to take the presence of your body in the world as an invitation to do what he wants with it, and then blame you if you tell him you don’t like it. At least when he did it to Lulu, he didn’t pretend it was because he loved her.

  “Okay,” Lulu says.

  Cass yawns then, a huge, face-cracking thing that moves through her whole body. “Okay,” she says. “Maybe actually I could come lie down for a minute. Will I be able to find your room without you?”

  Lulu laughs. “This isn’t Patrick’s batshit maze mansion,” she says. “Through the front door, up the stairs, second door on your left. You can put whatever’s on the bed on the floor.”

  “I don’t even know if I can sleep,” Cass says. “I just need to be alone for a minute. Or a lot of minutes.”
<
br />   “As many minutes as you need.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know. Watch TV?”

  “You don’t want your room?”

  I want you to have it, Lulu thinks, and doesn’t say. Just for right now.

  “I’m okay, I promise,” she tells Cass.

  * * *

  It’s early evening by the time Cass comes downstairs. She sits down next to Lulu on the couch, where Lulu is knee-deep in a Benton and the Billions marathon. Lulu mutes the television.

  “So I did fall asleep,” Cass says. “Whoops.”

  “You probably needed it.”

  Cass gives Lulu a side eye. “You sound like my mom.”

  “You did!”

  “Speaking of which, she’s home tonight, and I promised her I would be too.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But before you go—I have to show you something.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t trying to start anything.”

  Lulu has to laugh at that. “Not like that, perv.” Then she sobers up. “I just wanted you to know I had it. I won’t do anything with it if you don’t want me to. And you don’t have to make a decision right now, but—”

  “Jesus, Lulu, you’re making me nervous. Just show me already.”

  “Whip it out?” Lulu suggests.

  “Something like that.”

  Lulu takes a deep breath as she hands her phone to Cass. “I recorded this at The Hotel earlier,” she says. “It’s probably not enough to go on, legally or anything. But if we wanted to put it out there, it might hurt Ryan’s reputation. Might keep him from thinking he could get away with something like this again.”

  Cass hits PLAY on the recording. Lulu watches the television screen and listens to Ryan’s tiny voice saying “I was desperate to keep you, Cass” and “It wasn’t, like, ethical.”

  Cass hands her back the phone.

  “You can delete it,” Lulu says. “It’s. I mean. You’re in it.”

  “Yeah. I am.” Cass sighs. She pulls her feet up onto the couch and rests her cheek against the tops of her knees. “Did you know you were going to do that?” she asks. “Is that why you wanted to come?”

  Lulu shakes her head.

  “You want to put it online?” Cass asks.

  Lulu nods.

  “Why?”

  “Like I said. I don’t want him to try what he did to us with anyone else. Because he has, before.”

  Cass lets out a shaky breath. “Emma,” she says.

  “You knew?”

  “He told me. He cried, Lulu. He cried when we talked about it, and he told me he would never do anything like it ever again.”

  “That fucking—”

  “You think that’s the worst part.” Cass’s hands are on her knees, and she’s staring at them intently. “The real worst part is, I still feel bad for him.”

  Her voice is so soft Lulu can barely hear her.

  “I know it’s fucked up, and I don’t want to forgive him or give him another chance, or—but I still feel bad for him, Lu.”

  “I don’t.”

  Cass looks away from her. Lulu feels bad for her fierceness. “I never loved him, though,” she says. “So it’s less complicated for me. I always thought he was kind of a monster. Turns out I was right.”

  “He’s not a monster, though,” Cass points out. “It would be different if he were, because monsters can’t help being like that. There’s nothing they can do about it. Ryan is just a guy. I knew him—this person. He knew me. And he chose to hurt me. Us.” Cass closes her eyes. “I don’t want revenge, but I want him to stop.”

  Lulu knows she’s holding her breath, and can’t make her lungs relax.

  “You should,” Cass says. “You should post it.”

  “Really?”

  “This isn’t just about me,” Cass says. “You’re right that this is about Emma. And other girls, maybe. Whose names we don’t know. And then, maybe, whoever’s next.”

  Lulu nods.

  Cass nods back.

  “Are you sure?” Lulu asks. “I don’t want to—”

  “I’m giving you permission,” Cass says. “But then you have to actually do it, Lulu. I can’t do it for you. And you can’t just do it because you think it’ll be good for me.”

  “Fuck,” Lulu says.

  “Fuck,” Cass agrees.

  Then she leans in and kisses Lulu so swiftly that Lulu finds herself chasing the ghost of Cass’s mouth, leaning forward as Cass stands up and straightens the hem of her shirt self-consciously.

  “I really have to go,” she says.

  “Okay,” Lulu says.

  “Bye, Lulu.”

  “Bye, Cass.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  LULU TAKES SOME time putting the whole thing together. She’s not going to post it to Flash—who knows what a Riggs-owned platform will do with this information.

  Instead she stitches together a video of her own. She starts with a series of portraits of women, pictures she takes from the little thumbnails in her art history textbook. SUBJECT/OBJECT she writes over each of their faces, across their eyes. Five of them in a row, picked at random: women staring into their era’s versions of the camera. Then five of her own selfies, same treatment: SUBJECT/OBJECT.

  Then, black screen, just text:

  HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THAT WHEN I DO THIS WHAT I AM LETTING YOU DO IS LOOK THROUGH ME

  then

  NOT AT ME

  then

  MOSTLY.

  Lulu blocks the camera and films the sounds of herself getting under the covers, making herself comfortable in bed.

  She keeps the camera blocked and makes a video that’s just the sound of her own voice saying, “I’m not trying to tell anyone how to live, but I would stay away from Ryan Riggs if I were you.” And then, almost as an afterthought, “And any of his hotel properties too. They seem to have a way of seeing you even when it doesn’t seem like they’re looking.”

  Then comes the audio from the afternoon.

  It ends with one of Ryan’s stolen shots: a still from the security footage of Lulu and Cass lying on their backs near the pool, looking up at the sun, talking. Lulu doesn’t remember what afternoon that was. Even she has no idea what they’re saying.

  When it’s ready, she registers RyanRiggsIsaCreep.com and posts the video there. She reactivates her account and Flashes the link out to her five thousand followers.

  Then she sends it to Mr. Winters. The body of the email says:

  I know it’s non-traditional, but please consider this my midterm project.

  * * *

  When Lulu wakes up in the morning, people are sharing it so ferociously that the hashtag #CreepShotsArentHot is trending on every social media platform she knows about. By mid-afternoon, Curbed has a write-up with the Riggs family’s real estate dynasty as the peg; the feminist film blog Celluloid & Cellulite does something on Connie Wilmott and the Bluebeard legacy around dinnertime. Local news outlets do segments that get picked up by national ones. Everyone loves a juicy story about fucked-up private school kids.

  None of it means anything until Lulu gets a text that says:

  hey it’s Sloane

  Got your number from Jules ran into a certain someone at a function w my parents last night and he was in a frothingggg rage

  Lulu replies: Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

  Sloane says, They’re replacing him on the hotel project. They’re keeping his name off of anything real estate related going forward. And they’re cutting off his trust fund until he’s 21.

  That’s just another few years, Lulu knows. The family is certainly already at work on a redemption narrative for him. They’ll do what it takes to clear their name—never mind that they’re just teaching Ryan that his bad b
ehavior is tolerable, encouraging him to do it again. She hasn’t changed anything, really.

  But now Ryan Riggs has felt afraid the way she has. He knows that he’s vulnerable. He knows that he’s not the only person in the world with feelings, or power, or rage.

  This probably won’t teach him to be kind. But that’s not Lulu’s fault. She gave him the opportunity to understand something. She can’t be responsible for making sure that he takes it too.

  Thanks for telling me about Emma that night, Lulu sends Sloane. And thanks for being so cool about all of this.

  What can I say, Sloane responds. I am cool.

  Lulu looks at her phone, trying to decide what to say next. When she got back to school after the Sloane Flash came out, Angie Dallow immediately tried to talk her into joining St. Amelia’s Out & Proud club, which meets Thursdays after school and organizes a couple of assemblies every year where queer speakers come talk about how it’s, like, so fine to be gay or whatever.

  Lulu brushed Angie off; she didn’t understand why being openly bisexual meant she had to start hanging out with a bunch of people she’d never wanted to be friends with before. But lately, the idea of having friends who understood certain things about her without her having to explain them, friends among whom she’d be standard, instead of a deviation—that’s started to sound appealing. Lulu will never love anyone more than Bea, but Bea can’t be everything to Lulu, the same way Lulu can’t be everything to Bea.

  I was thinking, Lulu says, what if we started being, like, friends

  WILD, Sloane sends back. And then, but also, yeah, I’d be super into that

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT