teacher; he should be able to point her in the right direction.
“I’m so glad you’re taking an active interest in film history,” Mr. Winters says. “Especially this part of it. A lot of students aren’t as serious as you are, Lulu. They just want to watch the fun stuff. Not that this isn’t fun. It’s just not as obvious, I guess, why it’s fun.”
He’s always doing this—giving you compliments, like you should be really thrilled that he’s noticing you. It gives Lulu a slight but definite case of the creeps.
“Yeah,” she says. “Thanks.”
“Any particular reason you’re interested in the Wilmott story?” he asks. “Do you know Ryan?”
“Do you know Ryan?”
“His family,” Mr. Winters says. “His older brother, Roman—maybe five years older than you? He was one of my students my first year here. I met his mother at a parent-teacher conference, and we hit it off. They actually hadn’t ever seen the Riggs version of Bluebeard, and I got to introduce them to it. That was fun. We’ve been friends ever since. I do Thanksgiving at their house when I don’t want to go back home to my parents’. Always a glamorous evening. I love eavesdropping on their other guests.”
It’s weird hearing a teacher talk about having parents. Lulu knows he wants her to ask who the other guests are and what he’s heard, and she should, probably—ingratiate herself with him, why not—but she really doesn’t have the patience for it today.
“I don’t really know Ryan,” she says, which is true as far as it goes. She doesn’t, like, know him. “I met him the other night. I’m thinking about my midterm project for class, mostly.”
“Are you planning on writing a paper? I assumed you’d take the creative project option.”
Lulu shrugs and smiles. “We’ll see, I guess,” she says. “I should get back to studying, but—”
“If you want to learn more about Connie, there’s a podcast you should check out,” Mr. Winters says. “It’s called Beauty, Power, Danger, and it’s about women in the arts. Have you heard of it?”
Lulu shakes her head.
“They did an episode on Connie and Bluebeard at some point. I know the woman who hosts it a little bit—I wrote for her sometimes when she was an editor at the Weekly. Christine is . . .”
Lulu taps beauty, power, danger into the Notes app on her phone, and tunes out the rest.
* * *
Lulu has actually been pretty lazy about updating her Flash story lately, so lazy that she got a couple of messages yesterday asking her what was up. She feels self-conscious and then self-conscious about being self-conscious. She knows she shouldn’t care what these people think of her. She doesn’t even know most of them.
She can’t help it, though. She does care. At first, right after Sloane, it was a reflex to keep doing what she’d always done, to pretend that nothing had changed and everything was fine. Lately she’s not sure, but she keeps at it. Treading water. Staying afloat.
So before she gets in her car, Lulu texts Tae Young, who’s in her English class, to ask her if she’s studying for the final tomorrow. Tae Young invites her over to her house, where she and her friends and Lulu spend the afternoon googling themes and quizzing each other on quotations.
At the end of the afternoon Lulu convinces everyone to jump in the pool fully dressed. She goes with them, and then gets out to film the girls, their hair and their clothes billowing around them like soft flowers in the water. It makes her feel better about everything in her life right now, to know that at least it still looks like she’s living the way she always has.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BEA IS SITTING on Rich’s lap, her knees curled to her chest and her head flopped lazily against his shoulder. Jules is sitting next to Rich, and Patrick is sitting next to him. Patrick’s girlfriend, Taylor, is perched on the couch’s armrest with her feet in Patrick’s lap.
They look like a puzzle, Lulu thinks, neatly put together so that everything fits. She’s sitting on the floor with the rest of the odds and ends: Emily Williams, who’s Bea’s best friend from elementary school, and Jason Aguilar, a junior on the baseball team who one of the dudes must have invited.
Lulu never knows what to call the thing that happens before the party—the part where whoever’s closest and most in comes over to hide valuables and lock bedroom doors and take shots together, to