feel betrayed. “—a dude,” Lulu finishes. “The um. The person, she isn’t a dude. She’s, you know, a girl.”
“Oh.” Naomi considers this. “Rebound chick, I guess?”
“I guess.”
“That’s fun. Who is she? Do you liiiiiike her?”
“Ugh. Naomi.”
Naomi holds up her hands. “I’m just trying to engage with you,” she says, the air quotes she wants to be making around “engage with you” almost audible. “Since Mom isn’t around to do it. Oh, hey, does Mom know?”
“Know what?”
“Let’s try, what does Mom know?”
“Not much.”
Naomi makes a face at Lulu.
Lulu relents. “I told you,” she says. “She and Dad didn’t see the video.”
“You could have come out, though. Separately from that.”
“Well, I didn’t. I’m not really into that whole”—Lulu waves her hands around helplessly—“extravaganza. Anyway, you didn’t think I would tell her and not you, did you?”
Naomi shrugs.
“Also, you think she would have known and not called you? God, you know she would flip her shit.”
“You think so?”
Now it’s Lulu’s turn to shrug. She hasn’t ever thought too deeply about it, but when she does, she’s never been able to figure out whether her mom would have a problem with her liking girls or not. Her mom’s not a homophobe or anything, but having a gay-ish daughter is different from having, like, a gay friend. As far as Lulu can tell, mostly what her mother wants for her to is to marry rich, the way she did. Lock in those community property assets early. Make sure you always know where the money’s coming from.
She tries to imagine joking with her mother that she can live off of some woman’s divorce settlement as well as any man’s, now that gay marriage is legal, and can’t.
“She took me to get my abortion,” Naomi says. “And didn’t give me any shit about it. And I’m guessing, from the look on your face, she didn’t tell you.”
Of course she didn’t. As far as Lulu knows, Naomi has never had a serious boyfriend. It’s nearly impossible to imagine her, straightlaced sister accidentally getting pregnant, and then asking their mother for help—much less getting it.
Those must have been the bad nights Naomi was talking about.
There must be some kind of look on Lulu’s face, because Naomi says, “I’m fine.”
Lulu nods.
Naomi laughs. “No, really. It wasn’t that big of a deal. It doesn’t have to be, you know. I didn’t want to be pregnant. And then I wasn’t.”
“I know,” Lulu tells her.
“It was a dumb mistake. Everyone makes them.”
“I didn’t know you did.”
“I told you.”
“I believe you now.”
“Good.”
Naomi gets this funny, firm, that’s-enough-of-that look on her face, like she’s buttoning up the conversation, and herself. Impulsive, Lulu launches herself at her big sister and wraps her in a hug.
After a moment, Naomi hugs Lulu back. “I will say that while she was driving me, Mom made an extremely upsetting remark about how I didn’t want to ruin my lady parts by giving birth this young anyway, so, like, she’s still very much Mom,” she adds, because Naomi is incapable of just having a moment. That’s fine. Lulu can live with that. “But she can be surprisingly all right about things when you need her to be. Way better than Dad is, anyway.”
Lulu lets her sister go, dodging out of their embrace to snag a box of cereal Naomi was about to put in the cabinet. It’s been an emotional day; she deserves a bedtime snack.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says before she goes.
* * *
Talking to Naomi takes some of the air out of Lulu; it punctures the cloud that carried her from Cass’s house to her own, and she goes about the business of brushing her teeth and washing her face like any other night.
But then, in the morning, in her terrible tiny bed in her mother’s dead-air apartment, there’s a Flash from Cass on Lulu’s phone. In the picture, Cass is lying in bed in a pool of white sunshine, the hollows of her throat cast in deep blue shadow. The imprint of Lulu’s teeth is the faintest possible lilac, just above her collarbone. You’re going to have to be a little more careful with me, the caption says.
The way Lulu’s breath catches tells her everything she needs to know about how far gone she is already. She closes her eyes and presses her hands to her face, helpless and happy about it. You’re going to have to be much more careful with me, Cass, please, she thinks, but doesn’t send.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SO MUCH ABOUT this is