Look - Zan Romanoff Page 0,32

you, thank you.

While Lulu was distracted, Cass was conferring with Ryan. Now she steps in close and says, “Hey, um, I think we’re gonna take off.”

“Shit, really?”

“Yeah.” Cass shrugs.

“I’m sorry if Bea—”

“No, no, it’s not her fault I can’t hang,” Cass says. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have even come, probably. I don’t do well in these situations.”

“You didn’t have to come.”

“Oh,” Cass says, and Lulu knows she said the wrong thing.

“No,” she says. “I didn’t mean—I just—I’m sorry if you didn’t have fun.”

“It was fine,” Cass says. “It’s fun to see you in your natural habitat.”

Lulu looks around. Is this her natural habitat? She’s certainly spent a lot of time at parties like this one. It’s sort of funny, then, that she still feels so uncomfortable. That it feels like a relief to be invited every time. What has she done tonight except worry that she’s screwing everything up?

The answer is, drink to forget that she’s screwing everything up.

“You know me,” Lulu says. “I’m great at parties.”

“You are!” Cass says. She throws up her hands, and somehow Lulu finds herself stepping in toward Cass’s body, taking advantage of the movement to wrap herself around Cass in a funny, too-tight hug.

As soon as she does it she realizes they’ve never touched like this before. Lulu is shorter than Cass, and her head fits against her shoulder, and if she turned her head—casually, it wouldn’t even be a thing, really—she could touch her face to the skin of Cass’s neck.

Cass, for all she’s thin and spare, is also warm and solid. Her arm comes around Lulu’s shoulders and Lulu allows herself to stay there, laughing, feeling Cass laugh with her.

“Cass,” Ryan says. “You ready? The car’s going to be here in, like, two minutes, and I think if I miss another they’re going to kick me off of Ryde permanently.”

“Yeah.”

For a wild moment, Lulu wants to beg her: Take me with you. Get me out of here. This party—which she wouldn’t have questioned six months ago, which she’s spent her whole high school career working to keep getting invited to—is the last place in the world she wants to be.

But instinct holds her back. Don’t ask to go where you haven’t been invited. Act like you have somewhere to be even—especially—when you don’t. Hold still, hold still, hold still.

“Bye, Lulu,” Cass says.

“Yeah, okay, bye,” Lulu says.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

LULU WAKES UP in the wrong bed. It takes her several long minutes to sort that out: wrong. It’s not unfamiliar, it’s just not—But it is hers. It’s her bed at her mom’s apartment, because she’s on winter break now, and that means she’s staying with her mom.

Lulu allows herself a self-indulgent groan while one hand gropes for her phone.

Her mom’s place is fine, obviously. It’s not a hovel or anything, and Lulu’s not so spoiled that she can’t recognize that having not just one but two places she can live in is nothing to complain about.

It’s just that this one has somehow never felt like home. It has a castle vibe, and not in a luxe, royal way—there’s something very haunted fairy tale about it. Lulu’s mom moved in after the divorce and turned the place into a princess palace, with fresh flowers in the bedrooms and clusters of candles on every side table. Lulu and her elementary school friends loved to hold séances here during sleepovers.

It sometimes feels like they succeeded in bringing down bad luck on the place, or else they sensed that it was destined for a pall of sadness—because ten years later, Lulu’s mom is still here, and single, waking up in a canopy bed and cursing her lonely princess fate. A row of her headshots hangs in the hallway where a different type of mother might have family photos.

Her mom’s asleep now, and she probably will be for another hour. Lulu has the kitchen to herself as she rifles through the cabinets, trying to find something to eat that isn’t some kind of nut or seed. Usually she doesn’t mind being on whatever weird diet her mother’s gotten obsessed with while she’s here, but just now Lulu really, really wants toast with butter on it, or at least real coffee. Fuck.

Instead she makes green tea that smells like old moss; there’s some dubious-looking gluten-free “bread” in the fridge that, toasted, tastes like warm cardboard. Lulu nibbles it very miserably. With her free hand, she fumbles for her phone and searches for the podcast Mr. Winters mentioned. She scrolls back to