Bea nudges her shoulder. “If this stuff is what these people think is appropriate for company, can you even imagine what they keep in their bedrooms?”
“Ooooh,” Lulu says. “Are you suggesting we find out?”
Bea widens her eyes like, Who, me?
“C’mon,” Lulu says. She and Bea lope away giggling. She hopes Kiley is watching them disappear and wondering what they’re up to. Imagining that it’s something super exclusive and cool.
Isabel’s parents’ bedroom is on the second floor, and Bea was right to guess that it would be weird. It looks like a vampire’s lair: Their round bed sits on a mirrored pedestal, covered in pristine white sheets, and everything else in the room is glass or crystal or bone, except the curtains, which are deep, purple velvet.
“Oh my god,” Bea says, turning in a circle. “Oh my fucking god.” She dashes over to the window and wraps herself in a curtain, fashioning it into a heavy-draped dress. “This is glamour,” she announces in a husky voice.
“Daaahling,” Lulu intones. “You are everything right now. You are the earth. You are the moon. You are a moondrop dancing with a god in the night.”
Bea laughs and lets the curtain drop. “What are you even talking about,” she says. “You’re a nut, Lu.” Before Lulu can answer, she goes on. “This is so wild. Can you imagine having parents who live like this?”
Lulu shudders at the thought.
“Oh no. Oh no,” Bea says. She points, and when Lulu turns around she sees it: a sculpture of a naked woman, but she has two rows of teeth where her legs should be.
“Gross!”
“Tell me about it.”
Lulu goes over to inspect the thing. The woman is arranged in one of those improbable comic book poses, boobs thrust forward, waist turned at an angle. Lulu tries to mimic it with her own body, but it’s basically impossible.
“No,” Bea says. “It’s like this, see?” She tries to out-pose Lulu, but her legs get tangled as she tries to step around the curtain. She windmills her arms, teetering, before toppling over. From her crash landing on the ground, Bea sticks her tits up as far as she can. “Closer?” she asks. “This looks hot, right?”
Lulu is laughing too hard to reply. She pulls out her phone and takes a video of Bea squirming.
“You animal!” Bea yells.
Lulu writes @beatrizzzo is art over it and presses SEND with a flourish. Bea has her phone out now, and she’s taking a picture from the floor, which has to be a hideously unflattering angle.
“You!” Lulu reaches to grab Bea’s phone, but Bea pulls her down too. Lulu thumps next to her ungracefully, still laughing.
She looks up and sees Kiley in the open doorway, staring at them.
“Hey,” Kiley says. “I thought I heard voices. I was just going to get something from Isa’s room.”
Bea leaps to her feet. “Oh, yeah, us too,” she says. “We uh . . . didn’t know if this was it.”
It’s a bad lie, but Kiley is too drunk to notice. They’ve only been there an hour or so, but she’s already looking pretty sloshy, the alcohol loose and glistening under her skin. “No,” she says. “It’s over here.”
“Great!”
Now there’s nothing to do but brush themselves off and follow her.
Kiley looks at the phone still in Lulu’s hand. “Is it true that you have, like, five thousand Flash followers?” she asks.
Lulu says, “Whoa. Um. Yeah.”
She doesn’t know how to feel about that number. It’s sort of a lot, and sort of not, really. It’s not like anyone’s offering her sponsored content deals or auditions for television shows on the strength of it, anyway. She’s definitely not a Kardashian, or some famous heiress or Instagram model. Mostly it’s just that Owen’s dad is famous, like seriously famous, like eventually-definitely-gonna-be-in-the-rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame famous, and so people care about Owen, and then, for a while, people cared about her.
And then there was that other thing.
As if on cue, Kiley says, “You always do such cool stuff. It’s not surprising. I didn’t see the one with Sloane—”
“We’ve gotten some pretty good stuff here tonight,” Bea says, cutting her off. “With the, um, we were posing with some of the art. I think maybe this is Lu’s finest work yet.”
Lulu shoots her a death glare, and Bea smiles sweetly.
“Sorry,” Kiley says. “Am I asking too many questions? Am I too drunk?” She leans in conspiratorially. “I’m still figuring out getting—ummm—drinking—how to get drunk right.”
“You’re fine,” Bea says. She puts a hand on Kiley’s arm. Lulu wishes she were less annoyed by that. The part of her that can’t bring herself to be rude to Kiley wants Bea to do it for her. “How do you know Isabel?”
Kiley opens a door that leads into a much more normal-looking bedroom. “From, uh, we used to go to the same ballet studio,” she says. “When I did ballet. Oh, look, there’s the vodka.”
Bea and Lulu are still in the hallway. Bea knocks her shoulder against Lulu’s. “Whatever,” she murmurs. “She’s a baby.”
It doesn’t matter if Kiley is cool or not, Lulu thinks. She’s really just very pretty, and she doesn’t have a history with anyone here, which means she has what Lulu wants: the ability to get drunk unself-consciously, and meet someone new, and feel like she belongs places. To be excited, and exciting.
The stuff they’re drinking downstairs is cheap shit—Romanoff or something—but a bottle of Grey Goose is sitting on Isabel’s desk with a Post-it next to it, a smiling face drawn in Sharpie. Kiley dumps her cup in the sink of the en suite bathroom; as Bea and Lulu walk into the room, she returns with it empty, and fills it back up. She grimaces when she takes a sip of straight vodka. “Ugh,” she says. “Blech.”
Lulu gives Bea her cup to deal with and wanders around, pretending to be casual. It’s easy to find what she’s looking for, though: A stack of Lowell yearbooks is crammed onto the bottom shelf of Isabel’s bookcase. She recognizes Cass right away. Cassandra Velloro, third from last in the junior class, looks as flat and uncomfortable as every other kid in the surrounding pictures. Lulu tried to find Cass online, but it was hard without a last name. This will definitely help.
Bea peers over Lulu’s shoulder. Lulu flips the page quickly, so she can pretend she’s just skimming.
“Looking for your next boyfriend?” Bea asks.
Lulu shrugs and snaps the book shut. From the corner of her eye she sees Kiley’s head tilt minutely toward them. She’ll do whatever she wants to with Owen, Lulu knows—an older girl with some social seniority just isn’t enough to deter you when a cute older boy is dangling himself in front of you. But if Lulu is moving on, that gives Kiley permission to go after Owen without worrying what it looks like.