Look - Zan Romanoff Page 0,95
show of tipping a splash of almond milk into Cass’s coffee, the way she knows she likes it. She delivers them to the table with a flourish.
“I am kind of curious about them, though,” Cass says. “The videos. If you don’t mind talking about them.”
“Did I tell you about Mr. Winters?”
“No. I don’t think so?”
“My Cinema Studies teacher.”
“I can honestly say I don’t think you ever told me you were taking Cinema Studies.”
“Oh. Well. I am.”
“Makes sense.”
“Yeah. Anyway, our midterm project can be a creative submission. And he knows Ryan—his family. He’d said something about liking me as Ryan’s model. So I sent him the thing I made, the first one, for a grade.”
“Daaaaang.”
“I know, right? I’m a whole new Lulu.”
“What did he say about it?’
“He’s not that stupid. He gave me an A and moved on.” Lulu shrugs. “But then it started to seem kind of cheap to me, because, like, that was not actually a movie, or a thing about movies. And so it got me thinking: What would it mean to do my own work? Really do it? In a way that was deliberate, and intentional. Not, like, fooling around on Flash and being dumb.”
“Those weren’t—”
“I wasn’t serious about them,” Lulu says. “I’m, um. I think I’m being serious about this.”
“You seem serious. Or at least productive.”
“They’re boring, right?”
“I don’t know what they are,” Cass says. “Honestly. It’s hard for me to imagine what it would be like to watch them if I didn’t know you. If I couldn’t picture you just outside of the frame.”
“That’s sort of the point, I think,” Lulu says. “To look at how many places in the world my body has made an impression. Just an ordinary one. How many places it was, and isn’t anymore. It’s like—sorry, this is so pretentious—but it’s like, how can I construct a self-portrait that I’m not in, if that makes sense.”
Cass mulls this over. “It almost sounds like you’re trying to pull some disappearing trick,” she says. “To be in a place, and also not be, at the same time.”
“I’m just trying to figure out where I am first,” Lulu says. “It’s like, process of elimination, almost? Like, here’s not-me. Here’s not-me. Here’s not-me. But also: Here’s what I see. Here’s me from the inside. Not out.”
“You’re the—like when you look at a Magic Eye thing,” Cass says. “You stare at that center dot and the design comes into focus around it. These pictures are the dot. Your life is the design.”
“That’s a way of thinking about it.”
“You’re the one in Cinema Studies. You’re the one who should have the theories.”
“I’m just trying to figure out how to live in the world,” Lulu says.
Cass quirks her mouth, wry, and takes a long sip of coffee. “Tell me about it,” she says.
* * *
That night Cass sends Lulu a picture of her empty sneakers, tongue loose, laces tangled. In the morning, a close-up of the damp fibers of a towel.
Am I getting the idea, she asks.
If you’re doing it it’s your project, Lulu writes back. But I mean, I think so, yeah.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
FOR WEEKS AFTER, that’s how they talk—by sending images back and forth of spaces their bodies used to occupy, and don’t anymore. The funny little pockets of emptiness that they find during the course of their days. Lulu learns more about Cass than she actually knew when they were hooking up: that she sits in the back of every classroom, and what the insides of Lowell’s classrooms look like. How long she sits in traffic on the drive home from school, some days. How often she eats dinner alone.
It’s a peculiar kind of intimacy, but it’s theirs: something they build together, a way of allowing each other a privileged view into the mundane particulars of their lives.
Lulu also starts putting some of her videos together—a collection of clips from her Flash, which, ironically, she has to pull from that dumb fan site, and then some of these.
She quickly learns that these compilations can’t be too long, or they feel disjointed. What she ends up with is usually no more than a minute. The first one she’s happy with starts with one of the first private videos she took, the one of her hair on the shower wall, which is mildly gross in a way she kind of likes. It ends with a Flash of Cass on New Year’s Eve, catching her eye from across the party. Lulu registers lululooks. After she’s made Bea tell