Look - Zan Romanoff Page 0,19

she stays.

Lulu shouldn’t be surprised that Kiley collects herself. She laughs, shrugs, sits. “You know how it is,” Kiley says. “I mean, you’d be lying if you said you weren’t watching too, right?”

Lulu doesn’t know what to say to that. Of course she’s watching: what she eats and what everyone else eats. She does it so instinctually that she doesn’t even think of it as a thing she does, any more than she would think of breathing as, like, a hobby, or a pursuit.

But she doesn’t want to find common ground with Kiley. She doesn’t want to let Kiley put the two of them on the same level. If Kiley is dumb enough to admit that she’s trying—and exactly how—that doesn’t obligate Lulu to do the same for her.

It’s a good reminder, actually, that Kiley is young; Lulu has been playing this game longer than she has. All Kiley knows is that Lulu disappeared last night and took Owen with her. She probably thinks Lulu has the upper hand. The trick is to act like she’s right.

“My mom is gluten-intolerant,” Lulu says. Her mom is intolerant of anything that anyone has ever said might make her fat, but Kiley doesn’t need that level of detail. “Usually I figure it’s better to avoid it too, but, you know. Desperate times.” She gestures to herself and laughs, like her hangover is funny, like she doesn’t care if she looks like shit.

Kiley will figure it out for herself, if she hasn’t already: Acting like you take your own good looks for granted is the easiest way to fool people into thinking you’re pretty when you aren’t. Or maybe that’s a trick you only need to know if you aren’t that pretty. Lulu has never been entirely sure how much she’s faking it in comparison to everyone else. Maybe Kiley never has to think like this.

“Late night?” Kiley asks.

Lulu thinks, Wouldn’t you like to know.

“Yeah.” To be polite, she asks, “How was yours?”

Kiley shrugs. “I don’t think we hung around for too long after you peaced,” she says. “Wasn’t that good of a party.”

“Are they ever really that good, though?”

Lulu says it mostly to have something to say, but Kiley shakes her head in earnest agreement.

“No,” she says. “No, right? I’m so glad to hear you say that, because I only really started going out in the last, like, little while, so I thought maybe it was just me who didn’t understand. Is there something I’m not getting that makes a party universally fun? No, right?”

Lulu gives her a placeholder shrug.

Kiley doesn’t back down.

“If you asked me about the most fun I’ve had at a party this year, I’d say it was this one I went to last weekend,” she says. “And it was, like, pretty much sophomores only, and not even that big, and mostly it was me and Frida—my friend—hanging out. It was sort of quiet, and we just chilled and did whatever. And it was nice, actually, to not be worrying about who else was there and who might be coming and just, like, to be there. With who we were with. Which is why it’s funny that—” Lulu sees her snag on the words, watches her trying to decide whether she’s going to say them or not.

One of us will, she wants to tell Kiley, because now that the first half of the sentence is out there, the second is coming, one way or another.

Kiley says, “It’s funny that when I stopped hoping someone cool would turn up, Owen did.”

Lulu wishes she hadn’t eaten the bagel. She wishes she hadn’t eaten anything, ever, so that she would never have lived to experience a lurch of vertigo picturing how it must have happened: Owen looking for her at Patrick’s party and not finding her. He was thinking about leaving anyway. Someone had invited—not him, probably. A friend of his from the baseball team. Whatever. He decided there wasn’t anything for him at Patrick’s, so he left, and found Kiley instead. Someone new. Someone nice.

“He’s great, right,” Lulu says, forcing the words out.

“Yeah,” Kiley says. “I really, um, I really like him.”

Lulu nods.

“It’s not really anything yet,” Kiley says. “It’s not even enough of anything to really talk about, obviously, except that you’re—I know you—” She squares her shoulders. “I respect you,” she says. “I know that sounds like a weird thing to say, but I do. I remember seeing you around last year and thinking you seemed like someone who had