me you were into girls, were you, until Kiley forced the issue—”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, and who texted first?”
Lulu puts her head on the table. Its surface is hard and cold. She likes that. She likes that it’s exactly and only what it is.
“Okay,” Lulu says. “I already told you: I’m bad. I’m the worst one. What do you want from me, Cass?”
Cass doesn’t say anything for a while. She drinks her coffee. Lulu thinks this is the longest she’s sat with someone in—she can’t remember how long, where neither of them is saying anything, or looking at her phone.
“I read the book you got me,” Cass says, finally. “For Christmas. Have you read it?”
“No,” Lulu says, and thinks, Another strike against me.
“It’s beautiful,” Cass says. “But mostly it got me thinking. Do you know how many adaptations of the Bluebeard story there are?”
“No.” And another.
“A lot. There are . . . a lot. Just like, all of these retellings of this story about a man who compulsively kills women. Who murders them. That’s what we watch for fun. That’s the story we’ve been telling each other as entertainment for hundreds and hundreds of years.”
“She gets away in the end,” Lulu says. “Slays the monster. Lives happily ever after in the castle.”
“First, though, she has to escape.”
“I don’t know what you want from me, Cass.”
“I don’t want anything,” Cass says. “From anyone. Or I just—god. I just want it to stop.”
She puts a ten down on the table and leaves.
* * *
Back in her car, Lulu does what she always does when she feels like she’s dissolving. She flips the camera in her phone on and takes a selfie. It looks like all her other selfies: She knows exactly how to angle her chin to catch light on her cheekbones, to make her mouth look full and her eyes look wide. Usually it helps make her feel solid again: taking a photo, and posting it, and knowing exactly how everyone else is seeing her. Being able to look at herself the way everyone else in the world does.
But today the image on the screen doesn’t make her feel any better. Lulu recognizes the girl in the picture, but not the one sliced into pieces by the rear- and side-view mirrors, reflecting off the windshield’s glass. She doesn’t understand what she’s feeling, sitting here, coming and coming apart. The girl in the pictures has nothing to do with her today. She’s untouchable, and Lulu—everyone’s had their hands all over Lulu, haven’t they.
Lulu puts the car in gear and starts driving.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
THE HOTEL BEARS all the signs of a long, late party. The catering company took the glassware and the linens, but the lobby is still forested with bare tables, and the walls are lined with empty bottles and abandoned jackets and wraps. The front steps are covered in cigarette butts.
The lobby door is open and even though it’s sunny outside, inside it’s all blue chill. After Lulu left, someone plugged in a projector down here, and the images from upstairs blinked onto one of the lobby’s bare walls while guests danced. Lulu watched Flashes of it this morning. Thanks for nothing, #TheFutureIsRigged.
Ryan is exactly where he was the first time Lulu showed up here: in room Four. This time, though, he’s in bed, asleep. He doesn’t stir when Lulu opens the door. She stands there, looking at him.
He’s sweet in his sleep just like everyone is, slack and young looking, pale and vulnerable. The thought comes to Lulu: I could do anything I want to you. Anything at all. Is that what he felt every time he saw her and Cass wander away from him, thinking they were alone, and knowing better? This surge of sick, seductive power?
She kicks his bed to wake him up.
Ryan spasms, startled, but he recovers quickly. He’s shirtless, passed out in last night’s jeans. As soon as he’s fully conscious he looks dangerous again, rich and handsome, rumpled but unfazed. “Shapiro,” he says. “What’s up.”
“Yeah, I don’t know, Ryan. What is up?”
Lulu’s mind is spinning. What does Ryan value? What does Ryan need? She has no answers for these questions. God, what an idiot she’s been. She showed him exactly where she was vulnerable—with Owen, with Cass—and all he ever showed her was this place where she could act out her fantasies, and let him watch them unfold. She can’t believe that she let herself forget, even for a second, that she was playing a game.
The