“About what?”
“I’m sorry,” he says, “to start with. The way I ended things . . . I’m not proud of it.”
Owen didn’t ghost her, but he came close. He told her he didn’t want to talk about what had happened on the phone, and then he didn’t try to make plans with her when he got back to LA. Finally, desperate, she called him the night before school started.
He said, “I can’t do this anymore, Lu.” He probably said other things too, but that’s what Lulu remembers: the word can’t, and how tired his voice sounded, and how much her heart ached, like it was exhausted, like all it wanted was to be allowed to quit beating for a while.
Now he says, “You were, like, really important to me, and I hope I didn’t make you feel, just because it ended badly, that I hadn’t—that I didn’t—that—that wasn’t true.”
This does not sound like a prelude to an offer of the two of them starting over again. Lulu feels her defenses rising as surely as if they were physical walls going up, locking firmly into place.
“You don’t have to apologize to me,” she says. “I mean, since you’re here and everything. I feel like it’s obvious that I’m okay with you. Don’t worry, O. We’re good.”
“I’m glad,” Owen says. “But I also—I know there’s no good way to break up with someone, but I wish I hadn’t gone dark on you like that. I just needed some time, you know? I needed a minute to figure things out. But lately I’ve really been missing you, Lu. And I want us to try being friends again, if you’re interested in that.”
Lulu doesn’t know what to say.
“I get that I can’t, like, ask you for anything. So I’m not. I’m just saying: If that’s something you want, that’s something I want.”
Lulu nods. She turns back to the trees. It’s their season, and there are so many ripe oranges that she doesn’t even have to go looking for them. When she reaches, they fall right into her hand.
Owen is offering her something. It’s not what she imagined or guessed, but it’s something.
The problem is that it’s something new. Lulu has no idea what it would be like, what it would mean for them, to be friends. She could probably figure out the best way to play this, but she needs much, much more time. She feels undone by the scope of possibility, the idea that there’s some halfway point between being nothing to each other and being them again. The idea that he could want her, but not like that.
She doesn’t want to lose him, though. She knows that much.
She says, “You can help me with this, for starters.”
“Sure,” Owen says.
If they were—when they were—he would have razzed her about not answering questions, about being evasive, the same way Bea was giving her shit earlier.
Lulu thinks, Serves him right, that he can’t be familiar with her anymore. He can’t ask for more than she decides to give him.
On the other hand, now he’s just another person she has to keep a wall up with. And she already has so many of those.
CHAPTER FOUR
LULU DOESN’T TELL anyone about the specifics of her conversation with Owen. Bea is too distracted by Rich to ask on Sunday; by Monday, all anyone’s thinking about is finals, which start next week.
But the sense of detente between them seems to filter through their friends, and resettle some of the fracture their breakup caused in September. Lulu finds herself sitting at tables with the boys during lunch again. On Wednesday, Rich asks her to share her calc notes. On Friday sixth period, Jules texts her that they’re going up to the 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.