Look - Zan Romanoff Page 0,8

lookout to get drunk if she wants to come.

She doesn’t.

It would be easy to sneak off campus—technically she’s got Cinema Studies this period, but Mr. Winters is giving them “research time” to work on their midterm projects, so it’s not like anyone would notice if she left. The projects aren’t due until the beginning of next semester, which Mr. Winters thinks makes their lives easier but actually just extends their stress for another few weeks after finals are supposed to be over.

But Lulu doesn’t want to go hang out with her friends right now. What she wants, instead, is quiet. And she knows where to find it: Recently she’s claimed herself kind of a spot in a corner on the top floor of the library. She can go up there and post something to Flash, the way she did at Patrick’s party, so that on the internet it doesn’t look like she’s hiding out.

The space isn’t ideal for taking pictures, but she’s figured out how to make it work. The overheads are horrible fluorescents, but the windows are big enough to let some actual sunlight in, and the camera’s eye is so easy to trick once you know it. All she has to do is hide most of her face in shadow and she looks okay.

“One of my nannies taught me a game when I was little,” Lulu whispers to her phone. “Literary prophet, she called it. You ask a question, pull a book off the shelf, and let it fall open to a page that will have the answer you need on it.” The app blinks at her: full. Okay. They can only be like ten seconds long.

Lulu uploads that video fragment and starts another. She films her feet, clad in a pair of new boots, walking across the library’s industrial carpet floor. She asks her question before she chooses the book. “Why am I so fucking bored?”

Of course, she’s up in the science section, surrounded by textbooks. “Because it’s my biological destiny, apparently,” Lulu says, and slams the book closed. She snaps a few stills of the illustrated dissection diagrams and then a last black frame over which she adds the text: I GUESS JUST DONATE MY BODY TO SCIENCE WHEN IT WITHERS AND GOES OKAY.

It occurs to her then that, probably for the first time in her life, she actually has something she wants to look up in a book. There’s a small section on the first floor of the library dedicated to Los Angeles’ past, with a display table encouraging kids to read up on the history of St. Amelia’s Studio City campus and farming and water rights and whatever.

Of course, there’s also a couple of books about the library’s namesake: Avery Riggs.

Lulu did some cursory googling about Avery after her visit to The Hotel, to see if she could find more information about him and its history, but most of what she turned up was loose threads and weirdness: conspiracy theorists claiming he was illuminati, or that his wife was a vampire, or that if you draw a line between every building with his name on it in the city of Los Angeles you’ll come up with a pentagram or a map to a portal to hell.

Normally she would have left it at that—Lulu isn’t really that into history, even when it’s cult-conspiracy history. But the supernatural bent to people’s theories made her curious. She wants to know how Avery, who seemed basically kind of normal when he was alive, has a legacy that got so warped after he died.

The first book she pulls is called The Men Who Built Los Angeles, which only has one chapter on Riggs. Apparently his dad had a very big trust fund and an even bigger gambling problem; Avery was raised to believe he’d never have to work, and then, when he came of age, discovered that he if he didn’t, he and his mother and sisters might starve. He left the East Coast for Hollywood, hoping to remake the family name out there in the wilderness. But he wasn’t really a very good director, and after a while, no one would hire him.

He got lucky when he begged his way into a screening of a film called Bluebeard, an adaptation of the fairy tale starring a young actress named Constance Wilmott. She was still a teenager, and aside from her studio contract she had nothing. He married her even though it wouldn’t do anything for his “prospects”: a