other hand and splashes whiskey and ginger ale onto the floor. They’re sitting inside now, in the lobby, in the tent, wrapped in blankets. The Hotel’s heat hasn’t been turned on yet.
“That means it’s the longest night,” Cass observes. She’s sitting next to Lulu. They’re wrapped up separately and Cass is very drunk, leaning heavily against Lulu’s side. The silk of her hair brushes Lulu’s collarbone, tickles her cheek. Lulu thinks she must be imagining that she can feel some warmth radiating from Cass’s body to hers through so many layers of fabric.
Ryan’s voice keeps echoing in her head: the idea that Cass feels something the same way she feels something. Even if she’s just an experiment, a convenience, the only girl in their private school web who’s stupid enough to have basically sent a coming-out announcement to the whole damn internet. Even if it’s nothing more than that. It’s like someone’s opened a door just a crack—not enough to walk through, but enough to spill light into a very dark room.
Cass likes girls.
Cass could like Lulu.
“What are we going to do with it?” Owen asks.
“You’ve been here, man, this is what we do,” Ryan says. “This is pretty much—this is pretty much it.”
“We should play a game or something,” Kiley says. “You guys know kings?”
“Too complicated,” Owen says. “And anyway, kings is just an excuse to play truth or dare. Why don’t we just play truth or dare?”
“God, Owen, how old are you?” Kiley pokes him. “Do you think this is a middle school sleepover or something?”
“Fuck yes. And I say we play spin the bottle,” Owen says. “Seven minutes in heaven.”
“The ratio here isn’t right for any of that,” Kiley says. “Two boys, three girls. Although—I guess Lulu wouldn’t mind.”
Lulu blanches.
Cass says, “What?”
Kiley laughs. “Oh, sorry,” she says. “But, like, do you not even know what Lulu’s really famous for?”
Cass sounds very uncertain when she says “No?”
“Luckily for you, the internet never forgets.” Kiley taps at her screen and then hands her phone to Cass. “Here,” she says. “Look. You can see.”
The volume must be all the way up. Lulu watches the screen’s blue glow playing on Cass’s face, that inhuman light, and hears the soft slur of her own giggle, the way it trips into a hitch in her breath. She looks down. She clenches her fists.
She doesn’t even think of Owen until she realizes Kiley is tripping over herself as she hurries to stand up, saying, “Wait, shit, O—” and she understands that the clatter she’s hearing isn’t her own heartbeat in her ears. It’s his feet on the stairs.
Ryan grabs Kiley’s shoulder to stop her. “Give him a sec,” he says. “He’s fine, I’m sure he’s fine. Just give him a minute.”
“Fuck!” Lulu didn’t realize how drunk Kiley was until she starts crying, all of a sudden, like a switch got flipped. Her tears are sooty with mascara and eyeliner. “Fuck!” she says again.
Lulu is glad she didn’t see Owen’s face before he left. She’s always been spared that one small thing. She didn’t have to see it when he realized that what he’d thought was a private message from her had actually been broadcast to her followers and, soon after that, halfway across the internet.
She’s seen the aftermath, the wreckage, his body when it’s near hers always crackling with the hurt of how badly she betrayed him, but she’s never had to see the moment of it happening: the raw shock punching through him like a fist.
Because of course when he saw it for the first time, he didn’t know she’d sent it out like that by accident. He assumed it was a selfish betrayal: that Lulu wanted attention so badly she’d share something private like that in order to get it. And once she knew he thought she was capable of that kind of thing—even though he wanted to forgive her—even though she wanted to forgive him—it opened up a chasm between them.
Lulu has looked at him across a gap for so many months now.
“I have to,” Lulu starts. “I have to go talk to him.” She waits for someone to stop her, the way Ryan did with Kiley, but no one does. Then there’s nothing to do but walk up the stairs and face him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
OWEN IS SITTING on the floor in one of the empty rooms. His phone is out on the floor next to him, but he isn’t touching it. He’s just sitting there.
“Hey,” Lulu says. “Is it okay if