Look - Zan Romanoff Page 0,42
to streak each cheek rosy. “How’s this for contour?” he asks.
“Very good,” Cass says approvingly. “I like a man who knows his angles.”
Ryan smiles, but when Lulu turns back to the patch of wall she’s been working on, he leaves, probably to go wash it off. She feels like she’s won some obscure victory, though she couldn’t say exactly what it was.
“I’ve been thinking about that conversation, actually,” Cass says to Lulu. “About how you asked what I thought of you when we first met.”
“You’ve come back around,” Lulu deadpans. “It was JAP-y bitch. I knew it.”
“Lulu!” Cass brandishes her roller at Lulu, but she isn’t really trying, and it’s easy to dance out of her way. “No,” she continues. “What I was going to ask was why you wear that stuff if you think it makes you look so dumb.”
Lulu paints a long stripe up the wall, pressing the roller from bottom to top. She looks at the pink streak she’s left in her wake. She says, “I mean, I don’t hate it or anything. But mostly it’s just easy: I can do it without thinking about it. And when I do, no one thinks too much about me.”
“It’s, like, private school girl camouflage.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay but so then: What are you hiding?”
Lulu doesn’t say anything. Cass uses her roller to go over Lulu’s line of paint, turning it darker and more solid.
“The fact,” Lulu says, “that I’m not very interesting.”
“I think you are,” Cass says. “Interesting.” The sun is already starting to slide in the western sky, and the room is suffused with a rosy glow that makes Cass’s cheeks look particularly pink.
Lulu shrugs.
“Okay,” Cass says. “Fine, don’t believe me. But I guess I should say—um—that you’re only kind of right. The first night when I met you? Your camouflage worked. At first, I didn’t notice you at all. But when I did, it was because of what you did. When I saw you sneaking upstairs—that’s when I started wondering what your deal was.”
Lulu forgets her self-pity instantly. She narrows her eyes. “Wait a minute! So when you found me, did you—”
Cass is definitely blushing now, the color coming on fierce and sudden. “I didn’t know you were in the bathroom,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to follow you in there. I just wanted to know where you were going. I wanted to know what else there was to do at a party like that one.”
“Not much.”
“See,” Cass says. “I had thought the options for that type of thing were to go, or not go. And then I saw you leaving without leaving, and it was like, I don’t know. Like I hadn’t imagined there could be this third thing.”
“Well, I had never imagined I could really not go,” Lulu says.
“Not going is my specialty.”
Cass leans over to dip her roller back into the paint; somehow, when she straightens, she and Lulu are standing closer than they were a moment ago.
It’s weird to remember that night. Lulu was a different person then, in certain ways. She never would have imagined when she walked into Patrick’s that a few weeks later she’d be so far from anywhere she’s ever been before, wearing someone else’s clothes, looking at a girl in this soft, gold, late afternoon light and feeling almost like she would be allowed to reach out and touch her.
She hasn’t changed enough to do it, though.
Cass takes her roller and applies it to the next patch of wall. Ryan reappears in the doorway. “I Postmates’ed us some snacks, and it should be here in a few if you guys want to take a break,” he says.
“Oh thank god.” Cass puts her roller back down. “I think the fumes are starting to go to my head.”
“I’m just gonna go over this once more so it can dry while we eat,” Lulu says.
“That’s the spirit,” Ryan tells her.
And then Lulu is standing alone in an empty hotel room, surrounded by pink light and paint fumes. Feelings rush over her in waves: happiness and restlessness, and hope, and fear. It’s too much and there’s nothing she can do about it. She closes her eyes and holds her breath. It doesn’t help. Her body is still buzzing, thrumming. When she opens her eyes again, she realizes she was standing alone in the room and smiling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE NEXT TIME Cass and Lulu come to The Hotel, there’s a new car in the driveway: a little navy BMW 3 series parked neatly between two lines.
“Who’s the