Look - Zan Romanoff Page 0,7
spent years and years in this space when it was truly empty. She knows what it sounds like the moment someone else arrives.
He’s carrying a bowl. “I didn’t know if you needed something for the oranges,” he says. “To put them in.”
“Oh,” Lulu says. “Yeah. That’s smart, actually. Thanks.”
Owen places the bowl on one of the benches, and Lulu puts the oranges she’s already picked into it.
“It was also a good excuse,” Owen says. “To. Um. Talk to you.”
How long have they known each other? Lulu watches the way the light filters through the trees’ leaves, falling on the mess of his sandy hair, and does the math: since the first day of seventh grade. It was five years in September, then. Like, basically a third of her life so far.
“About what?”
“I’m sorry,” he says, “to start with. The way I ended things . . . I’m not proud of it.”
Owen didn’t ghost her, but he came close. He told her he didn’t want to talk about what had happened on the phone, and then he didn’t try to make plans with her when he got back to LA. Finally, desperate, she called him the night before school started.
He said, “I can’t do this anymore, Lu.” He probably said other things too, but that’s what Lulu remembers: the word can’t, and how tired his voice sounded, and how much her heart ached, like it was exhausted, like all it wanted was to be allowed to quit beating for a while.
Now he says, “You were, like, really important to me, and I hope I didn’t make you feel, just because it ended badly, that I hadn’t—that I didn’t—that—that wasn’t true.”
This does not sound like a prelude to an offer of the two of them starting over again. Lulu feels her defenses rising as surely as if they were physical walls going up, locking firmly into place.
“You don’t have to apologize to me,” she says. “I mean, since you’re here and everything. I feel like it’s obvious that I’m okay with you. Don’t worry, O. We’re good.”
“I’m glad,” Owen says. “But I also—I know there’s no good way to break up with someone, but I wish I hadn’t gone dark on you like that. I just needed some time, you know? I needed a minute to figure things out. But lately I’ve really been missing you, Lu. And I want us to try being friends again, if you’re interested in that.”
Lulu doesn’t know what to say.
“I get that I can’t, like, ask you for anything. So I’m not. I’m just saying: If that’s something you want, that’s something I want.”
Lulu nods. She turns back to the trees. It’s their season, and there are so many ripe oranges that she doesn’t even have to go looking for them. When she reaches, they fall right into her hand.
Owen is offering her something. It’s not what she imagined or guessed, but it’s something.
The problem is that it’s something new. Lulu has no idea what it would be like, what it would mean for them, to be friends. She could probably figure out the best way to play this, but she needs much, much more time. She feels undone by the scope of possibility, the idea that there’s some halfway point between being nothing to each other and being them again. The idea that he could want her, but not like that.
She doesn’t want to lose him, though. She knows that much.
She says, “You can help me with this, for starters.”
“Sure,” Owen says.
If they were—when they were—he would have razzed her about not answering questions, about being evasive, the same way Bea was giving her shit earlier.
Lulu thinks, Serves him right, that he can’t be familiar with her anymore. He can’t ask for more than she decides to give him.
On the other hand, now he’s just another person she has to keep a wall up with. And she already has so many of those.
CHAPTER FOUR
LULU DOESN’T TELL anyone about the specifics of her conversation with Owen. Bea is too distracted by Rich to ask on Sunday; by Monday, all anyone’s thinking about is finals, which start next week.
But the sense of detente between them seems to filter through their friends, and resettle some of the fracture their breakup caused in September. Lulu finds herself sitting at tables with the boys during lunch again. On Wednesday, Rich asks her to share her calc notes. On Friday sixth period, Jules texts her that they’re going up to the