Look - Zan Romanoff Page 0,37

the shade, but even still, it’s hot inside. All that afternoon air, trapped and magnified by the glass. Lulu calls up to the rafters, a nonsense sound, but it doesn’t echo. Tree branches brush the roof over their heads. For the first time since she’s been at The Hotel, Lulu thinks the word abandoned.

“We don’t come in here much,” Cass says. She’s lingering near the door, almost as if she’s afraid to walk all the way inside.

“No greenhouse projects?”

“Ryan says he has a black thumb.”

Lulu walks around the perimeter. There’s nothing in here but space and air.

“You like it,” Cass says. It’s not a question.

“I do.”

Cass smiles.

“What?” Lulu asks.

“I’m glad.”

“Okay—okay.”

Cass holds her arms out and twirls her wrists absently. Lulu likes the way the length of her takes up space.

“We have this little orchard that’s my favorite place at my dad’s house,” Lulu says. “I like places where things can grow.”

Cass’s smile gets wider. “Lulu,” she says. “Are you secretly kind of . . . a hippie?”

“Absolutely not.” Lulu crosses her arms in front of her chest.

It doesn’t stop Cass’s grin. “I don’t know about that,” she says. “You play like you’re some scary, too-cool party girl, but—”

“Hey,” Lulu says. “You think I’m scary?”

Cass raises an eyebrow at her. “Not anymore.”

But Lulu’s not giving up that easily. “You thought I was scary?” She’s fascinated. She can’t imagine what it would be like to look at her and not already be tired of what you saw.

Cass frowns. “When we first met, you didn’t look like you would be easy to talk to,” she says eventually.

“I’m a very good conversationalist!” Lulu thinks of how often she got in trouble for whispering with her friends in class when she was in elementary school. Mr. Lindsey and Mrs. Garland and all the rest of them wish she had been hard to talk to.

“Not bad at talking, you absolute goose,” Cass says. “Hard for me to talk to. I didn’t know if we—if we could get along.”

Lulu has been watching Cass walk around the space, but when she hears Cass say that, she has to look away. She can feel the way the afternoon is moving, the way Cass is peeling her apart in onionskin layers, so fine Lulu barely notices the process of being bared. But we do, right? Lulu could ask her, and Cass could read whatever she wanted into the question. We do get along?

Instead she goes back to the joke, the easy spar. “We were getting along,” Lulu reminds her, “until you started making fun of me for having a feeling.”

Maybe Cass senses their conversation is getting dangerous too, because her voice comes out high and a little strangled when she replies. “I was not making fun! I was—pointing something out. I was observing. Weren’t you an indoor kid? Don’t you know that’s what we do? Observe?”

“I was busy being scary and going to parties,” Lulu says.

Normally it makes her nervous to know that people are looking at her and seeing things she’s not already aware of herself.

God, she likes the idea that Cass is noticing her, though.

“How did I ever entrap you in my secret garden?” Cass wonders.

Lulu hasn’t taken any of the openings Cass was maybe-offering her. Now, helpless, she makes one of her own. “You didn’t trap me,” she says. “I wanted to come.”

But now it’s Cass’s turn to avoid looking at Lulu. Or maybe she’s just not looking anyway. Maybe she’s not even thinking about what Lulu might mean by that, because why would she? Because they’re just friends.

Cass changes the subject. “Did you ever read that book?” she asks. “The Secret Garden?”

“No.”

“It was my mom’s favorite when she was a kid, so she started to read it to me when I was little. Then she realized how fucking racist it was, but it was too late—I was obsessed.”

“Huh.”

“Obsessed. The movies are better, mostly, so we watched them together instead.”

Lulu takes this in. “That is,” she declares, “pretty freakin’ adorable. Also, see how I just acknowledged your feeling, and didn’t make fun of it?”

“God,” Cass groans. She shakes her head. Then she says, quieter: “The funny part is, I didn’t want to be Mary when we played it.”

“She’s the main character?”

Cass gives Lulu a withering look.

“We weren’t all Secret Garden nerds!” Lulu says. “I don’t know.”

“Mary is the only girl in The Secret Garden,” Cass explains. “She starts out this sick, spoiled little princess, and then she plays in an English garden and gets hearty and healthy