spring, but it’s still a few months off.
“No.”
“That’s nice.”
“Mmmm.”
Cass’s backyard looks bigger without all of the stuff that was in it last time she was here, the couches and projector and screen, and all of those boys. She leads Lulu to a corner where apparently at some point someone tried to build a fire pit; now there’s just grass-free dirt and a circle of rocks. Cass has already laid down a tarp; she has a toolbox off to one side.
“So do we just go at it?”
“Hang on a sec.”
Cass sits on the tarp and opens the toolbox, pulls out a screwdriver. After a moment, Lulu comes to sit with her.
There’s a cover on top of the drive that she’s trying to pry off, working on unscrewing the screws. She does the first three before Lulu stops her.
“Can I do one?”
“If you want to.”
“I do,” Lulu says. “I just. I want to feel it come apart.”
Cass nods. She hands Lulu the screwdriver and the drive. “It’s sort of more prying than unscrewing.”
“Cool,” Lulu says. She tries to do what Cass did. It takes her a while too, but the screw pops loose, and there it is: the vulnerable inside of the thing. An object she can attack and destroy.
“Hah!” she says.
“Very nice.”
Cass is smiling indulgently and Lulu looks up at her and thinks, I want to kiss you. It reminds her of thinking it and trying to swallow it all those times before; it makes her realize how silly she was to imagine that this was something she could ignore, or deny. She’s never not going to want to kiss Cass when Cass is around. There’s no just friends about this.
But she did not come over here to make that point.
“There are discs inside,” Cass is saying. “See? Those are the things we want to ruin. That’s where the data is stored.”
They’re so small and ordinary looking. For a second, something in Lulu wavers. What did those little pieces of metal ever do to her? What does she really think she’ll accomplish by putting them in pieces? The world will still be fucked and Cass will still be mostly not speaking to her. Ryan will still be able to do this whole thing to someone else again.
But then she looks at Cass and remembers that there are other things in the world than pure justice, or vengeance. There’s her, and there’s Cass. There’s this one small thing they can do to make themselves feel safe.
The first fall of the hammer is tricky: the aim and balance, making sure the blow lands exactly where she intends to place it. Soon, though, the tool is light in her hands. Her body knows how to do this, when she lets it: to smash up ugliness, to erase the evidence of how much she gave away, and how that still wasn’t enough, so that even more had to be taken from her. It’s another way of saying no, and Lulu says it until she aches all through her palms and fingers, in the muscle of her shoulders and her bones.
* * *
When they’re done, Cass gathers the corners of the tarp and ties them together; she puts the whole bundle in a trash bag, and the bag in the can, out on the street, to be collected in the morning. “Well,” she says. “So.”
“Yeah,” Lulu says. “Okay.”
“Thanks for coming over,” Cass says. “I’m glad we got to do that.”
“Me too.”
“What are you going to do now?”
Lulu shrugs. “Go home,” she says. “My homework, I guess.”
“Oh, no, I meant . . .” Cass gestures at the evening around them with one hand, and laughs. “In general.”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither.”
For a bare moment, they smile at each other.
“I did delete my Flash account,” Lulu admits
“I did too.”
“Yeah. I, um, I realized I was tired of contributing content to the Riggs family.”
Cass grimaces. “Roman Junior! Jesus. He is, believe it or not, way worse than Ryan.”
“No, I believe that.”
“Or I guess actually he’s more obviously a creep? Maybe that’s better. Because I always knew to stay away.”
“Here’s some important work for the young women of the world to be doing—deciding which kind of asshole is the less-terrible kind.”
“You are a feminist now, Lu.”
“Books got to my head, I guess.”
“All that reading.” Cass reaches out thoughtlessly to ruffle Lulu’s hair.
Lulu holds perfectly still, hoping. Cass pulls her hand back.
“Anyway,” Cass says. “It sucks that Ryan got to ruin Flash for you. I mean, not that it’s like a super-tragic