by Zan Romanoff
OWEN FINDS HER between periods on Monday morning. “Lu,” he says.
“Hey.” She tries to weave by him, but Owen isn’t having it. He texted her three times on Sunday, and called her that night. She had hoped that ignoring him would be enough, but clearly he isn’t getting the hint.
“What’s up?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Well, I have class right now.”
“After school, then. We can go up to the overlook or something. Please, Lu.”
She’s never been good at saying no to him. “Sure,” Lulu says. “After school.”
“Okay,” Owen says. “Okay good. I’ll see you then.”
* * *
The overlook is at the end of a little dead-end street a few blocks from St. Amelia’s, tucked up in the hills: ten feet of flat dirt and scrub before the land drops out from under you. From the cliff’s edge you can look out over the campus and have a little secret smoke or drink or whatever.
They used to come up here sometimes when they were together—not to smoke, even, just to kiss and talk. To be alone. It’s weird to think now how precious it was to Lulu then, getting any time alone with Owen: how he would try to say hi, ask about her day, and she would already be kissing him, tucking a hand into the waistband of his jeans, reminding herself of all of the parts of him that were hers, just hers.
When she arrives, O is leaning against the trunk of his car, legs crossed at the ankles, staring placidly into the middle distance. Lulu looks at him, and the distance between them feels uncrossable. Not dangerous, exactly, but definitely, like, there.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
“You wanted to talk?”
“I saw, um. I watched the video you posted. I wanted to check in with you.”
“Well, great news: I’m fine.”
“Don’t be like this, Lulu. I’m asking how you are.”
“So ask, then.”
“I just did.” He looks genuinely confused.
“No you didn’t. You said you wanted to check in.”
“What’s the difference?”
Lulu is tired. “I don’t know,” she says. “I guess maybe the difference is, I don’t want to check in.”
“So why did you even come here?”
“You said you needed to talk to me!”
“What were you expecting?”
“What do I ever expect anymore?” Lulu spreads her arms, exasperated. “I don’t know. I really don’t. My life has been nothing but nightmare circus crazy things for weeks now. Maybe you want to tell me you’re getting in on the revenge porn game too. I don’t know, O.”
“Jesus, Lulu, you really think I’d do that? That’s honestly—I know Ryan turned out to be a dick, but that’s, like, very deeply twisted. To think that about a person who . . .”
“Who what?” But Lulu knows why he can’t finish the sentence. It’s because he genuinely doesn’t know what to call himself—whether to say who loves you, or who loved you.
She doesn’t know which one she wants him to say.
“I wanted to know how you were doing,” Owen says. “I’m sorry if that’s, like, an imposition now.”
Lulu shrugs.
“I wanted to know if I could do something to help.”
Lulu shrugs again.
“I wanted—”
Lulu looks at the sky. She says, “I want you to consider: I might not know if I’m okay right now. And this might not be about what you want.”
Owen goes quiet again.
Then he asks: “What are you saying? That I’m not a part of your life anymore?”
“I’m saying that you’re asking me to make room for you right now. To give you some of my feelings. I didn’t ask for that, O. For you to do that.”
“You never ask,” he says. “You have never in your life asked me for help when you wanted it, Lulu. How am I supposed to know the difference?”
Bea said kind of the same thing. Lulu looks down at her shoes. “You’re not supposed to be a person I ask for help from anymore,” she says.
Owen sighs. “I know that,” he says. “I do. But this is an extreme circumstance. This is—god, Lulu, I hate this. I hate Ryan. I hate that someone so small, so nothing, could do this to you. He doesn’t deserve to get to hurt you. You know?”
“I very much do.”
“I wish I could change that.”
“I wish you could too.”
Lulu wishes she could give Owen more, but she can’t. There’s nothing there to offer. Her feelings are still too tender, and tangled, and private. He used to be the one person she would turn herself inside out for, but she can’t do that anymore. Even though he’s sweet to be asking. That doesn’t mean she’s wrong to refuse.
“Listen,” Lulu says. “I don’t like anything I’m feeling right now, for the record. The last thing I want is to give Ryan Riggs any power over me or my life. But like, the whole point is, this is not about what I want or deserve. Sometimes people just take things from you. They just take them! Whether you like it or not! Whether you asked for it or not!”
She pauses. Takes a deep breath. “I could pretend I didn’t hate it, but that would be a lie. And I think it would be a worse lie, honestly. I think it would be way more fucked up to sit here and pretend that I was fine so that you felt fine, and I felt fine, and tough, and brave, or whatever. There’s nothing either of us can do about it right now. I’m fucked up about it. I just am.”
Lulu turns away from him, faces out over the canyon, the houses and the roads, the cars, the school, the brush and the trees and lawns below. “I’m! Really! Fucked! Up! About! This!” she yells. She half expects her voice to echo, but it doesn’t. There’s just the sound of it in the moment, and then the quiet that comes after.
She hears Owen moving behind her, but then he stops. Probably coming to hug her, and then thinking better of it. It feels nice, much nicer than his offer to talk: his holding himself back, and letting her have this series of moments to herself.
She looks at the city underneath her, the sprawl of Los Angeles, the spread of the Valley, already turning burnished gold as the sun starts to fall behind the hills. She looks at all the places she could be, and isn’t.
She feels an echo of the thing she felt in the car with Cass, coming down from The Hotel on Saturday—that sense of displacement and of hiddenness. Like even if someone was looking for her, they wouldn’t know where to find her. Like at last, she’s somewhere private, and secret, and hidden, almost all the way alone.
Lulu watches the sunlight drift across the city. Owen is standing right next to her, but she’s still the only person who sees it from exactly that angle. She’s the only person who knows exactly how this moment feels inside of her skin.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
THAT NIGHT, LULU takes a video she doesn’t post anywhere. It’s simple, kind of dumb, even—just the steam in the air after she’s taken a shower, the swirl of shed hair she made on one wall so that it wouldn’t clog the drain. In the morning she takes another one: the rumple of her sheets and the impression her head made on the pillow.
At school she takes footage of her desk at the end of Spanish, and her plate after she’s finished with lunch. She doesn’t know what she’s doing with any of it yet, exactly, only that she likes recording what she sees, reminding herself that only she’s seeing it. She likes making a picture that’s specifically about herself, but doesn’t include her body in the frame.
CHAPTER FIFTY
IT TAKES A few days, but eventually Lulu starts sending the videos she’s taking to Cass: her clothes laid on the floor in the morning before school; a stack of her books with their pages marked for studying; a shot of an open book that’s near-neon with her highlighters and her notes.
All day long Cass doesn’t say anything. In the evening, just
: So this is what you’re doing now, huh.
I think it’s a project, Lulu says. A proper Art Project. Mine, this time. Not trying to show the world what she thinks it wants to see from her, but showing it what she sees, instead.
Cass doesn’t ask her to stop, so she keeps sending them, day after day after day.
A week later, she asks, Do you know why you’re doing it yet?
I have some ideas, Lulu says. Then, daring: Want to get coffee and hear about them?
I can do that, Cass says. This weekend?
* * *
“We don’t actually have to talk about them,” Lulu says as soon as Cass sits down.
“I haven’t even said anything yet.”
“Sorry.” Lulu ducks her head. “I’m just. I think I’m really nervous?”
“What, am I suddenly going to decide I don’t like you?”
“I don’t know!”
Cass gives Lulu an assessing look.
“Don’t do that!”
“I mean. It’s not why I came.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
Someone at the counter calls Lulu’s name, so she busies herself picking up their drinks, making a show of tipping a splash of almond milk into Cass’s coffee, the way she knows she likes it. She delivers them to the table with a flourish.
“I am kind of curious about them, though,” Cass says. “The videos. If you don’t mind talking about them.”
“Did I tell you about Mr. Winters?”
“No. I don’t think so?”
“My Cinema Studies teacher.”
“I can honestly say I don’t think you ever told me you were taking Cinema Studies.”
“Oh. Well. I am.”
“Makes sense.”
“Yeah. Anyway, our midterm project can be a creative submission. And he knows Ryan—his family. He’d said something about liking me as Ryan’s model. So I sent him the thing I made, the first one, for a grade.”
“Daaaaang.”
“I know, right? I’m a whole new Lulu.”
“What did he say about it?’
“He’s not that stupid. He gave me an A and moved on.” Lulu shrugs. “But then it started to seem kind of cheap to me, because, like, that was not actually a movie, or a thing about movies. And so it got me thinking: What would it mean to do my own work? Really do it? In a way that was deliberate, and intentional. Not, like, fooling around on Flash and being dumb.”
“Those weren’t—”
“I wasn’t serious about them,” Lulu says. “I’m, um. I think I’m being serious about this.”
“You seem serious. Or at least productive.”
“They’re boring, right?”
“I don’t know what they are,” Cass says. “Honestly. It’s hard for me to imagine what it would be like to watch them if I didn’t know you. If I couldn’t picture you just outside of the frame.”
“That’s sort of the point, I think,” Lulu says. “To look at how many places in the world my body has made an impression. Just an ordinary one. How many places it was, and isn’t anymore. It’s like—sorry, this is so pretentious—but it’s like, how can I construct a self-portrait that I’m not in, if that makes sense.”
Cass mulls this over. “It almost sounds like you’re trying to pull some disappearing trick,” she says. “To be in a place, and also not be, at the same time.”
“I’m just trying to figure out where I am first,” Lulu says. “It’s like, process of elimination, almost? Like, here’s not-me. Here’s not-me. Here’s not-me. But also: Here’s what I see. Here’s me from the inside. Not out.”
“You’re the—like when you look at a Magic Eye thing,” Cass says. “You stare at that center dot and the design comes into focus around it. These pictures are the dot. Your life is the design.”
“That’s a way of thinking about it.”
“You’re the one in Cinema Studies. You’re the one who should have the theories.”
“I’m just trying to figure out how to live in the world,” Lulu says.
Cass quirks her mouth, wry, and takes a long sip of coffee. “Tell me about it,” she says.
* * *
That night Cass sends Lulu a picture of her empty sneakers, tongue loose, laces tangled. In the morning, a close-up of the damp fibers of a towel.
Am I getting the idea, she asks.
If you’re doing it it’s your project, Lulu writes back. But I mean, I think so, yeah.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
FOR WEEKS AFTER, that’s how they talk—by sending images back and forth of spaces their bodies used to occupy, and don’t anymore. The funny little pockets of emptiness that they find during the course of their days. Lulu learns more about Cass than she actually knew when they were hooking up: that she sits in the back of every classroom, and what the insides of Lowell’s classrooms look like. How long she sits in traffic on the drive home from school, some days. How often she eats dinner alone.
It’s a peculiar kind of intimacy, but it’s theirs: something they build together, a way of allowing each other a privileged view into the mundane particulars of their lives.
Lulu also starts putting some of her videos together—a collection of clips from her Flash, which, ironically, she has to pull from that dumb fan site, and then some of these.
She quickly learns that these compilations can’t be too long, or they feel disjointed. What she ends up with is usually no more than a minute. The first one she’s happy with starts with one of the first private videos she took, the one of her hair on the shower wall, which is mildly gross in a way she kind of likes. It ends with a Flash of Cass on New Year’s Eve, catching her eye from across the party. Lulu registers lululooks.com. After she’s made Bea tell her about a thousand times that she’s not ruining her life, she posts the video as a file called WHAT I LOOKED AT WHILE YOU WERE LOOKING AT ME.
She sends it to Cass too, with a note: Thanks for helping me start to figure it out.
Cass doesn’t respond directly, but the next day, she sends Lulu a picture of a pile of clothes, and Lulu recognizes the bra that’s pooled on top of it, a flimsy piece of lace she remembers because it seemed so at odds with Cass’s style when she first saw it on her body.
Lulu sends Cass an empty orange peel, still intact as one long, carefully peeled strip, and then an image of her lipstick-smudged pillow. She fell asleep with her makeup on last night.
She holds her breath when she sees Cass has texted her back almost immediately. It’s the first sight of her skin Lulu’s had in weeks: Cass’s sheets caught in the curl of her fist.
Lulu takes a selfie. This is what I look like when I miss you.
Cass asks, Can I come over?
Lulu says, Of course you can.
* * *
Cass must have had time to get shy on the drive; she lingers on Lulu’s doorstep like she might not be allowed to come in, one hand resting lightly against the frame, fingertips tapping out an uneven, unconscious rhythm.
Lulu stands inside, feeling slightly stranded.
“Lulu?” Deirdre calls. “Is someone there?”
“A friend,” Lulu says. “We’re studying.”
Too late: Deirdre’s spotted something she can do to make herself appear motherly, and now there’s nothing Lulu can do to stop her. She clacks her way into the front hall, still in heels from her workday. “Hi!” she says. “We were just about to sit down to dinner, actually, Lu.”
“Can you just put mine in the fridge? I can warm it up later.”
“Maybe your friend—” Deirdre turns to Cass to supply her name.
“Cass,” Cass says.
“Maybe Cass is hungry,” Deirdre suggests.
“I’m fine,” Cass says. “Thanks.”
“Are you sure? Don’t let this one make you feel bad about having an appetit
e.” Deirdre is very fond of reminding Lulu that she doesn’t diet, and Lulu is very good at not saying That’s only because you don’t have to when she does.
“I’m fine,” Cass repeats.
“Well, come sit with us for a minute, at least,” Deirdre says. “Lulu almost never brings friends over, and especially not to study. Do you have a test tomorrow?”
“Calc,” Lulu says, inventing wildly. This is probably the least sexy thing that’s happened to anyone, ever. She tries to imagine how she’ll set any kind of mood if they ever get upstairs.
“Fifteen minutes,” Deirdre says. “I made crispy chicken, so it’ll really be much better hot. And Olivia hasn’t seen you in days, Lu.”
“My little sister,” Lulu supplies for Cass, who nods.
“You’ll study better on a full stomach,” Deirdre says decisively. “As long as we’re eating, Cass, I’ll make you a plate?”
* * *
Which is how Lulu ends up sitting at her family’s dining room table with her stepmom and her little sister and her ex . . . whatever, who no one even knows she used to date. Her dad comes home halfway through the meal, which nixes any chance of the quick escape Lulu was hoping for. “Sorry,” she whispers to Cass when she can.
“It’s fine,” Cass says. “It’s actually kind of hilarious, to see Lulu Shapiro acting like an obedient daughter.”
“I’m not obedient.”
“I’ve never seen you this tame.”
Lulu raises one eyebrow. Cass has the grace to blush.
“So Cass, if you go to Lowell, how did you meet Laila?” her dad asks.
“Laila?”
“God, Dad!”
“It’s your name,” he says, and then, to Cass: “I’ve always thought Lulu was silly, but she insists on it.”
“We made friends at a party,” Cass says.