Look - Zan Romanoff Page 0,76
before she goes, in the hope that she’ll honestly be able to tell her mom that she isn’t hungry for dinner later.
“Lulu!”
Lulu hears her own name and whirls around, too surprised to pretend she’s not startled. Before she even really understands what’s happening, Molly Ketchum is flying at her, a blur of blond hair and enthusiasm, yelping, “Oh my god I was just talking about you! How are you? It’s been so much drama!”
“Hey,” Lulu says. “Yeah, huh. Drama.”
Molly lets Lulu go, but she stays close and tilts their heads together conspiratorially. “Kiley won’t say anything,” she reports. “I have questions, and she’s being all secretive, and I’m like, Kiley, Lulu and I have been friends forever, I think I can know what’s up.” She rolls her eyes.
Molly and Lulu have known each other forever—their moms met in some parent-and-me singalong group when they were babies. And they are friends, technically, though sometimes Lulu feels like that’s mostly so Molly can keep pumping Lulu for gossip.
“What do you want to know?” Lulu asks.
“Everything! You’ve been so mysterious. Are you and Ryan planning another show? Is that why you took your Flash down? Are you and that girl dating now? Or are you dating Ryan? Because I’ve heard it both ways.”
“I’m not dating anyone,” Lulu says.
“Oh my god, this is why you can’t listen to gossip. KILEY!” Molly calls to a group of girls who are sitting on a bench eating froyo. Kiley separates herself from the pack and comes over to them. Has she possibly gotten taller since the last time Lulu saw her? She looks lankier than ever, just, like, miles and miles of limbs.
“Lulu says she isn’t dating anyone. Which doesn’t seem like that big of a secret to me. So can you please tell Kiley there’s no need to be Fort Knox?” Molly asks.
“Actually,” Kiley says. “Can I talk to Lulu for a second?”
“Soooooo mysterious,” Molly sighs. “Whatever. Go ahead.” She skips back to the bench where her friends are waiting.
Lulu looks at Kiley expectantly.
“I don’t even know the answers to most of her questions,” Kiley says. “I don’t know why she keeps asking.”
Lulu shrugs. “Tell her whatever you want,” she says.
“Look, Lulu, I apologized—”
“I’m not mad at you anymore.” At least Kiley did what she did on impulse. She didn’t spend weeks plotting and planning to fuck Lulu over as thoroughly as possible. And anyway, that video was already out there. Lulu put it out there herself.
Lulu glances over and sees that Molly is still watching them. “Can we walk?” she asks.
“Sure.” Kiley falls into step with her as they turn away from the girls and the food court and head off in a random direction.
“What did you want to say?” Lulu asks.
“Oh, nothing,” Kiley says. “I just figured you didn’t want to talk to Molly.”
“How did you guess?” Lulu catches Kiley’s eye, and they both laugh, and then look away. “I didn’t know you two were friends,” she says after a minute.
“Same ballet studio,” Kiley says. “When we did ballet. She quit before I did.”
“Right. When did you stop?”
“Last spring.”
Lulu had forgotten what it meant to be out in the world. She had imagined having to talk to people, but instead, she can ask Kiley to talk to her, and that means not having to listen to the inside of her own head.
“Why?” she asks.
“Do you really care?”
“I don’t want to talk to myself any more than I want to talk to Molly.”
“In that case. Um, I guess the short version of the story is that I had basically never not done it, and I wanted to know what it would be like to stop.”
“Can you start again if you want to?”
“In theory. I’ve already lost a lot of time.”
“Did that scare you? Giving it up?”
They pause in front of a store that appears to sell an array of shapeless, colorless garments. Lulu doesn’t even know what they are: dresses? Tops? The salesgirl inside is almost inhumanly beautiful. Kiley examines her reflection in the plate glass window.
“Of course it did,” she says.
They move on, walking in silence. Then Lulu says, “You said, before. You said that sometimes, you just felt like being mean.”
Kiley sighs. “Yeah. Especially if—when I get tired of being the different one. The youngest at these parties, the only black girl, the one who has to explain—see. Just like this. I try to be nice. Sometimes I’m not.”
“I feel horrible,” Lulu says. She thought she could get away with saying it out