Look - Zan Romanoff Page 0,18

wants to tell her, doesn’t work out quite the way you think it does.

“Come on,” her dad says. “We should have been in the car ten minutes ago.”

“If you’d told me last night that I was supposed to be ready—” Lulu starts. She can’t resist needling him, even though she knows it doesn’t help.

“If you’d been home last night, I would have,” he says. His back is to her. The same way that Deirdre assumes Lulu always wants to do what Deirdre wants her to, her dad always assumes that she’s scampering behind him, listening intently.

“Don’t be nervous, honey,” Deirdre says to Lulu’s dad. “If he invited you, clearly he thinks you’re—”

“He invited the whole firm,” her dad says. “I’m the only one he’s going to be expecting to know the prayers.”

Lulu follows them into the car and slumps gratefully into her seat. Of course this is some business thing of her dad’s; some other partner’s son turned thirteen and now Lulu’s being dragged out of her house on a Saturday morning to illustrate how thoroughly, totally picture-perfect his life is. So what he’s on his third marriage? His daughters are growing up beautifully, and his wives are staying young the same way.

Lulu snaps a video of her reflection in the car’s window, just the line of her collarbone and the sleeve of her sweater, sound off. She captions it Will I ever sleep again.

It’s early enough that responses only kind of trickle in, which is why she sees Cass’s as soon as it comes. It’s a shot of Cass in her own bed, probably, eyes closed, face slack. You get into so many kinds of trouble, her message says.

Enough to know this morning’s is the boring kind, Lulu replies.

* * *

Midway through the service, Lulu’s Advil wears off, and a headache starts to press a barbed-wire crown of pain against her skull. She slips out to take some more and can’t make herself go back in. It’s been so long since she was at temple. She doesn’t remember any of the words.

Instead, she makes her way to the reception hall, where, by the grace of the god Lulu’s just been failing to pray to, the Bar Mitzvah boy’s parents ordered catering, and a spread is already set. She drinks an entire black coffee while she covers a bagel in cream cheese and lox; she’s well into her second cup as she heads for the bridal room, a changing space off the hall that’s usually unlocked. Lulu may not know the service well, but she’s an expert in every place you can go to get away from it.

The room is empty, nothing but four walls and a mirror, but that doesn’t matter. Lulu sinks gratefully to the floor and eats half of the bagel in three or four bites, swallowing throat-sized lumps. She takes another Advil with the last of the coffee.

Glancing up, she catches sight of her reflection: her hair, dry now, down and limp. Her bare face, bare legs, bare arms. The dollop of cream cheese at the corner of her mouth.

Who do you think you are? Lulu asks herself.

She has absolutely no answer.

Lulu rubs a knuckle against the cream cheese, realizing as she does it that she didn’t grab any napkins. Her finger hesitates. The door swings open.

Kiley Rathbone walks in.

Of fucking course.

“Heyyyy! I thought I saw you earlier with your family,” she says, like she expects Lulu wanted to be seen, or acknowledged.

“Yeah,” Lulu says.

“I don’t usually?”

“No.”

Lulu wipes the cream cheese off her finger and onto the carpet.

“I’m here every Saturday, so I know the regulars,” Kiley says. “I think my parents make us come to prove a point. Like, See, look at us. We’re real, live black Jews! We’re still real Jews! It’s so boring.”

Lulu doesn’t say anything.

Kiley is undeterred. “I also don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat carbs before,” she says.

“I don’t—uh. Sorry. But, like, do you watch me eat?”

Kiley looks mortified. “I mean it’s not like—I don’t—I’m not creeping on you,” she says. “It’s a bad habit from ballet. The monitoring. And I do, you know, see you around, like on the quad, at lunch and stuff. And on Flash, when you post, there’s usually, like, not food? I guess it’s still weird that I notice.”

She let the door close behind her when she came in; Lulu watches her glance back at it, assessing the cost of leaving now, and admitting that she doesn’t belong here, versus what she can gain if