As if on cue, her phone vibrates on the table. She and Lulu both break into peals of laughter.
“He’s so predictable,” Lulu says.
Bea nods like, Well, yeah. There’s value in predictable, and they both know what it is. Rich is definitely someone who follows the rules.
“He says they all passed out at Patrick’s last night,” Bea reports, and she doesn’t have to clarify who we is for Lulu to know who she means. Rich, their friend Jules, and probably Owen too. “They’re thinking about breakfast. Would it be, like, way too weird if I invited them over?”
Lulu shrugs.
Bea puts her phone down more decisively this time. “You know this is up to you, Lu. I’m not bringing people to your house if you don’t want them here. I just thought, I don’t know. You might want to.” There’s a phrase that’s left unsaid in Bea’s sentence: You might want to see people again, be social, pretend things are fine, talk to Owen. Stop being such a recluse.
Lulu knows she’s being unfair by not giving a straight answer. Bea’s trying to be a good friend. It’s not her fault that Lulu just wants someone else to make this decision for her so that she won’t have to be responsible for whatever the consequences turn out to be.
She doesn’t think she’s wrong that Owen’s been looking for a way to un–break up with her for the last few weeks. He’s definitely been trying to talk to her about something, and what else could it be?
It’s just that at no point, in all of those days and nights, has she been able to figure out if she wants to let him or not.
It seems like the right thing to do.
She liked dating Owen the first time. Why wouldn’t she like doing it again?
She would definitely like how much easier it would make her life.
“No one will think less of you,” Bea says, a little softer. “It’s not like he— Everyone knows you guys were in love. I don’t think you should be embarrassed to take him back.”
Again, Lulu knows what Bea isn’t saying: It’s not like he embarrassed you. Of course it wasn’t. It was Lulu who hurt and embarrassed Owen, so badly that he ended things.
But maybe he’s over that, and now he wants things back the way they were.
“He was knocking on doors looking for you last night,” Bea says. “He was the one who found me, and told me you were, like, actually gone.”
“Found you—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Bea says. “We had not considered that we might want to make sure we’d actually locked the door of the room we were using.”
“I don’t want to think about it either,” Lulu says. “Anyway, of course it’s fine. Invite them over. It’s always fun to have them here.”
The boys used to come over a lot back when she and Owen were still together. Lulu and O would make out in the grass while everyone else kicked a soccer ball around the backyard.
“I really need to shower before they get here, though,” Lulu says.
Bea is looking at her phone again. “Rich wants to know if you’re the kind of Jews who eat bacon.”
They are in theory, but Lulu knows her stepmom’s shopping habits and her dad’s cholesterol. There’s no way there’s any bacon in the house right now.
“Tell Rich that beggars can’t be choosers,” she advises. “But he’s welcome to bring his own.”
* * *
The boys take up so much space. Jules had to go home, but Patrick comes with, so it’s him, Rich, and Owen in the kitchen, sitting on the countertops and heckling Bea while she scrambles more eggs, these ones with their yolks.
Lulu swats Patrick’s calf and says, “Get down.”
“What, are your parents home?” he asks.
When have her parents ever been home? “They’re probably at Olivia’s soccer game,” Lulu says, which, now that she thinks about it can’t be true, because it’s a Sunday, but whatever.
“It’s so weird that you have a sister who’s twenty-one and a sister who’s five,” Patrick says. God, he has no tact.
“Six,” Lulu says, and then, “Half sister,” like either of these things matters to anyone but her. As if to prove her point, Patrick’s already turned away, in the process of doing something weird and violent to Rich’s upper thigh.
So she’s surprised to hear Owen pick up that piece of the conversation after her. “Half sister, Patrick,” he repeats. “You know that.”
Patrick nods. “Right,” he says. “Half sister. And your stepmom is hot.”
“Isn’t that the point of stepmoms?” Lulu asks.
Bea turns around from the stove. “You want to make more OJ, Lu?” she asks.
Lulu hates that Bea can tell she needs an out.
“I can get it,” Rich says. He’s moved so he’s standing next to Bea at the stove, like she might need his help scrambling eggs. It would be sweet if Lulu were in a better mood.
“We have to pick more oranges,” Lulu explains to him. “I’ve got it. I’ll be right back.”
It’s early afternoon already, and outside, the sun is warm through her clothes. Lulu thinks of stepping out of the car at The Hotel last night in her impractical outfit—a thin dress, no jacket—and the bite of the air against her skin. The way she felt exposed to some darker kind of night. Now the world seems tender again, offering up soft ground, green grass, sweet fruit.
The orchard isn’t really big enough to be an orchard, technically—it’s just a loose cluster of a half dozen or so trees (oranges, lemons, and a lone avocado) and stone benches that sit, quiet and solid, under their branches.
Lulu hears Owen before she sees him. He’s quiet too, barefoot like she is, but Lulu has spent years and years in this space when it was truly empty. She knows what it sounds like the moment someone else arrives.
He’s carrying a bowl. “I didn’t know if you needed something for the oranges,” he says. “To put them in.”
“Oh,” Lulu says. “Yeah. That’s smart, actually. Thanks.”
Owen places the bowl on one of the benches, and Lulu puts the oranges she’s already picked into it.
“It was also a good excuse,” Owen says. “To. Um. Talk to you.”
How long have they known each other? Lulu watches the way the light filters through the trees’ leaves, falling on the mess of his sandy hair, and does the math: since the first day of seventh grade. It was five years in September, then. Like, basically a third of her life so far.