Look - Zan Romanoff Page 0,40
She doesn’t know what Bea means by that.
Bea sends I haven’t seen you in any of the usual suspects’ flashes as if to explain herself.
Yeah I guess, Lulu sends, because she doesn’t know what else to say.
When the Sloane Flash went up, Bea messaged, Heyyyy what’s going on? everything okay, and Lulu sent back, I’m okay, I promise. She was lying, but she wasn’t not-okay in any ways Bea could help with.
She didn’t want help, because she didn’t want it to be happening. Nothing about the Sloane Flash made sense in Lulu’s life, which she had constructed so carefully. In a fraction of a second, she had undone all of her work to make herself a pretty girl, with pretty friends, and a nice, hot boyfriend—all of her efforts to only ever be seen in this one particular, legible way.
So what she wanted was to never have done it, or, barring that, to at least be able to pretend it away the way she’d pretended past every other inconvenient fact in her life.
Lulu thinks about Bea defending her at that party, being sharp and rude to Jason and then distracting and charming to Oliver. She would never have asked Bea to do those things for her—to take care of Lulu’s messiness instead of leaving her to clean up after herself. But Bea did them anyway, and that’s worth so much that it scares Lulu sometimes. To think that Bea loves her more than she loves her own social status, or her own rules. That Bea just loves her, just because.
I’m not up to anything cool, Lulu sends Bea. I miss your face.
Well feel free to FaceTime me whenever then
I got international data for dayssssssss
Don’t answer your phone while you’re skiing please B
Lol never, Bea says. Def no.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
IT FEELS LIKE Cass is giving the days to Lulu like gifts: afternoons on the balcony, or down by the pool while Ryan practices skateboarding and takes pictures. Sometimes Lulu will wander off to the sunlit greenhouse and wait for Cass to come find her. Cass always does, and when she appears in the doorway, Lulu’s heart kicks against her ribs. She’s overcome with the sweetest, hottest ache: that Cass noticed she was missing, and wanted to know where she was.
Work on the property seems to have stalled out for the season. The Hotel looks finished, but there’s nothing in it: no furniture except what Ryan’s brought in for his own personal use. For days and days, nothing changes, and it’s a relief. The days keep getting shorter, sliding into each other so fast sometimes Lulu feels like she can barely keep up, so it’s nice that this one thing has arrested itself for her, just a temporary lacuna where she can sit still.
The tent has been relocated to The Hotel’s lobby. It’s too cold to sleep out of doors anymore. On the day they bring it in, Cass insists on stringing Christmas lights around the inside so they can get stoned and lie on their backs and watch the colors blink. Ryan takes a video of the scene, panning across their faces and then up to the lights.
He usually asks before he takes any pictures. “You guys good?” he’ll say, and Lulu has never said no, but more and more she’s been thinking about it.
She doesn’t, though, because then he would ask why, and she wouldn’t have a good answer. She’s still filming herself basically every minute she’s not at The Hotel—when she’s getting dressed, or taking off her eye makeup, or little funny family things, like when she stops by her dad’s to pick up a sweater she forgot and Olivia is putting on a fashion show in their living room—so she doesn’t have that defense. She just doesn’t want to, is all.
For just a little while, she just wants to be allowed to forget that anyone is looking, or that anyone cares what she looks like.
Plus, she’s started listening to Beauty, Power, Danger from the beginning, and it’s giving her all kinds of weird ideas about images and who owns them, and how and why it matters. She doesn’t listen to it at The Hotel, but she’s started reading the things Christine L. Tompkins mentions in the show notes—online articles, and sometimes even parts of actual books. Lulu can’t believe she’s reading, like, academic texts over vacation, but then, they’re academic texts about interesting things: women and power and sex.
And she’s a feminist, right? Or she’s always thought she