“For now. Do you want to hear a story?”
“Sure.” Lulu settles back in her seat and cranes her head up so she can look out the window at the trees. She can’t tell whether the flashes of light she sometimes catches through them are lights that have been woven through the branches, or if she’s high enough up that somehow, she can see the stars.
“Avery Riggs built this place around the turn of the century,” Cass says. “You know the name, right? As in Lowell’s Riggs Science Center, or—”
“It’s the Riggs Library,” Lulu says. “At St. Amelia’s.”
Every private school child in Los Angeles knows the Riggs name; over the course of a handful of generations of increasingly lawless progeny, the family has donated a wing or at least a building to almost every campus improvement project in the city. Plus, one of the Riggs heirs, Roman, was in her sister Naomi’s class in high school—at least until he dropped out at the beginning of their senior year to run a start-up that became Flash.
“Exactly,” Cass says. “Avery was the one who made all of that money in the first place. He came out here at the very beginning of Hollywood to try to be a king of cinema. Movies didn’t end up working out for him, but real estate did. This place was his first big success.”
They come out of the tree canopy and all of a sudden Lulu sees it: The Hotel. Its white face is lit by the car’s headlights and Los Angeles’ ambient glow, and it looks almost luminous, gleaming, against the black of the hillside at its back. Floor-to-ceiling glass enclosing the first story shimmers. The floor above it is punctuated by the iron railings of balconies, dark against radiant white.
Cass doesn’t exactly park. She just pulls the car to a stop and turns it off. A black Range Rover is sitting right next to the front door, but no one’s in it. Since there doesn’t appear to be anyone else here, Lulu figures it doesn’t really matter where they leave the car.
“Is it . . . open?” Lulu asks.
“For us,” Cass says. She unbuckles her seat belt and opens her door. She stands and stretches into the night, raising her long, bony arms to the full white moon, which is sweet and heavy overhead. Her shirt pulls up so that Lulu can mark the points of her hipbones, and imagine the shadow at the curve of her waist.
Cass notices that Lulu hasn’t moved. “We aren’t going to get in trouble,” she says. “I promise.”
“I don’t know what kind of girl you are,” Lulu says. “But breaking and entering, that’s really not—”
“You aren’t going to get in trouble,” Cass repeats.
“How can you be so sure?”
Cass rolls her eyes. “We’re not breaking to enter. I had that code, didn’t I?”
Lulu gets out of the car.
This is what she’s been craving: something completely new. The night air is cold on her skin, sharp and shivery, and even with the moon it’s surprisingly dark. She’s out here alone in a place she’s never been with a girl she doesn’t know.
Anything could happen. Anything at all.
Lulu turns to Cass. “This is your favorite place in Los Angeles?”
“Shhh,” Cass says. She holds an actual finger to her lips.
Lulu pauses.
“Hear that?” Cass asks.
Lulu shakes her head.
“Exactly.”
“You like that it’s quiet?”
“I like that it’s private,” Cass corrects. She takes a step forward and starts to say “Look—” but that’s as far as she gets before a light on one of the balconies flips on, flooding them both in buzzing fluorescent bright. Lulu’s heart spasms in her chest. She ducks instinctively.
When she looks up, Cass is still standing, an arm thrown over her eyes. “Ryan!” she yells. “Fuck! That light!”
On the balcony there’s a figure in silhouette—a boy, Lulu thinks. He drags something heavy into place and stands on it, fiddling with the base of the lamp that’s hung there. “Sorry,” he calls down. “Sorry, Cass, I forgot about the motion sensors.”
“I thought you were going to turn those off!”
“I did in Three,” the boy—Ryan—says. “But then I fell asleep in Four.”
“Why don’t you turn all of them off?”
“Then what if some random creeps came sniffing around?”
“Are you just hoping to blind them to death?”
“The security cameras, Cass. Can’t record a creep you can’t see.”
The light finally flicks off, and the dark that follows seems to swallow them all.
“You still there?” Ryan calls.
Cass scuffs the toe of one of her flats in the dirt. “Be hospitable, you asshole,” she says. “I brought someone with me. Come meet your first real guest.”
“Come up,” Ryan says. “It’s fucking freezing out.”
Cass looks at Lulu. She’s shy, suddenly, for the first time all night. “We don’t have to,” she says. “I just wanted to show you— I didn’t mean to— You don’t have to—”
“What kind of boy is Ryan?” Lulu asks.
“Nice,” Cass says. A smile steals across her face: small, secret. Oh, Lulu thinks. “A nice one.”
“I like nice boys,” Lulu says. “And, whatever. What else am I doing tonight?”
“Good point.”
* * *
Ryan must be Ryan Riggs, Lulu realizes as they head inside and up the stairs. Roman’s little brother. He goes to Lowell too, so it makes sense that he and Cass know each other.
Lulu doesn’t know anything else about him, though, which is sort of unusual. Private schools in LA are a very incestuous little ecosystem: Colonies from elementary school spread and mutate into middle and high schools, so that everyone knows someone who knows someone else. But Ryan had a private tutor until his freshman year, and he hasn’t been around much since then. She doesn’t really see him out at parties, anyway.
The room Ryan fell asleep in is still heavy with the scent of his body, a warm, animal funk that makes Lulu think of Owen, and then makes her wish she hadn’t. The rest of the space is very teenage boy too: There’s a twin bed pushed against one wall, the mattress covered by a tangle of white sheets and a white comforter; a coffee table with a vape pen, a handful of empty cartridges, and a collection of lighters on it; then, on the floor, a stack of books and a stack of external hard drives, plus an enormous Mac desktop with a pair of nice speakers plugged into it. Not much else.