your shit together.
“And then when the thing happened with Sloane, the way you handled it—you were so brazen. Not everyone could have done that, I think. Handled it well. Handled it at all, even. So, like, not because you’re popular, and not because you’re older, but because you’re you, I wanted to say that I hope that whatever happens with Owen and me—I hope you won’t hate me.” She laughs. “Let’s start there, I guess.”
Lulu is breathless. A small piece of her is in awe of Kiley’s monologue, the apparent uncalculated truth she just put out there, the sort of basic human semi-decency of what she just said.
“I don’t hate you,” Lulu says. “I don’t, um. I don’t know how I feel about any of it yet.”
“Like I said, maybe there’s nothing for you to even be feeling things about,” Kiley says. “But I like him. And as long as he keeps liking me—yeah. I don’t imagine you’re going to want to be friends with me. But I really don’t want you as an enemy if I can avoid it.”
Lulu forgets, sometimes, that there are people who think she’s powerful, that because she has these Flash followers and because she knows how to play by the rules so well, they think she could actually do something to them if she wanted. She gets so obsessed with people liking her that she forgets that she could decide not to like them. She could turn against them. She could probably turn other people against them too.
It doesn’t feel good to imagine hurting Kiley, starting a rumor, spreading some little bit of poison. But at least it feels powerful; it fills in the icy, empty pit that opened in her stomach when Kiley said Owen’s name like he was someone she knew. The idea that Lulu could do something—exact revenge—gives her enough space to feel like she doesn’t have to.
Because the real power move is to say “You’d have to do more than hook up with my ex to become my enemy.” Like Lulu’s got boys and social capital and generosity to spare. Like she isn’t dying at the idea that all she can do is be generous, and pretend she’s letting Owen go, when really he’s the one who doesn’t want her back.
CHAPTER NINE
THE WHOLE STUPID point of Flash was that it didn’t archive anything. That was the idea, anyway. You uploaded pictures or video snippets, either for general public consumption or to a few select friends, who could watch them once, and then never again.
Lulu knows it was stupid to believe that was possible, that anything on the internet could live and then actually die. Or not die, she thinks now, because the dead don’t disappear either, do they. They leave corpses too. Traces.
Evidence.
She and Owen had been dating for nine months when she proposed the idea of the girls. At the time it seemed brilliant. Things had been a little quieter between them, almost even sometimes a tiny bit strained, and Lulu had thought that here was a new thing she could offer to keep him interested. It would be sexy and wild, something he wouldn’t get from anyone else: Lulu kissing a girl, and him watching.
It would make him look at her all over again, the way maybe sometimes she’d seen him looking at other girls, lately, just for a second, without even knowing he was doing it probably. It would make other girls part of their relationship instead of a threat to it.
It wasn’t like he’d never seen her kiss a girl before, before they were together. Owen hadn’t seen the beginning of it, how it started in the sixth grade, when it was just lessons, Lulu at sleepovers offering to teach and be taught. But he’d seen the end result, which was that, as a teenager, it had become her party trick.
They would be sitting around drinking and someone would bring it up. Lulu would monitor a girl’s reaction: whether she got flustered, or curious. If she was curious it didn’t take much coaxing. Lulu just had to be casual about it, laughing, playful, and together they’d watch how much the boys loved it. She would kiss a girl until a boy got up between them, and laid claim to whoever it was he’d decided he wanted to kiss for himself.
It was the kind of behavior, Lulu discovered, that if you didn’t explain, people would happily explain for you. If you didn’t tell everyone right away that