CHAPTER ONE
Lulu arranges the image before she turns the camera on herself. Patrick’s mother is kind of a monster, but at least she’s the kind who makes sure all of the lighting in her house is flattering, even in rarely used guest bathrooms. You have to give her credit for that, Lulu thinks.
The light in here is so even that it almost seems sourceless. The shell pink of the wall is suede-soft, and it makes Lulu’s hard-earned winter tan glow golden in contrast. Everyone who’s not at the party will wonder where the hell she is when they see this.
So will the people who are here, actually. She didn’t tell anyone that she was going upstairs, and most of them don’t know the house well enough to recognize this room without context. The image will pop up on their screens at some point tonight, and they won’t be able to identify where she was when she took it.
They won’t ask. That’s a thirsty move, and they’re all supposed to be better than that. The idea of parties like this one is that you only get invited if you act like the invitation doesn’t matter to you.
Lulu explained this to her older sister once.
“Doesn’t it gross you out?” Naomi asked. “Treating your life like it’s a game?”
“Don’t you like to know the rules?” Lulu asked her in return.
Lulu was fifteen then, spending her afternoons riding around in Kingsley Adams’s BMW, learning how to smoke weed and how to drive stick, and how to tell if a boy liked you or just liked the way you looked next to him, stoned and pliant, riding shotgun.
She was wrong about how much King liked her, as it turned out, but right about the rules in general. There were rewards for knowing what they were and following them carefully. Rewards like when Lulu leaves a party to be alone for a little while, people assume that it’s because there’s something wrong with the party, instead of thinking there’s something wrong with her.
Lulu is pleased when her image blinks onto the screen. It looks like she imagined it: Her long dark hair is caught up in a messy topknot, pinned in place by a slash of gold. Bea made her laugh so hard she cried earlier, when the sun was still up and the world still seemed interesting, so her eye makeup is a little smudged in a way that suggests she’s been having too much fun to bother fixing it. She gave Owen his ring back but kept the chain she wore it on. Its empty curve dangles below the frame, where it won’t give too much away.
Lulu closes her eyes, opens them, and snaps herself in the act of looking up, so that the picture looks like it’s been taken by someone standing over her, catching the edge of her attention. Then she takes a movie: her looking at the camera, and then laughing, and then looking away. She thinks maybe she should be embarrassed—it’s kind of cheap, just her flirting with herself—but whatever, because it will also work.
She posts the files and then settles on the stool at the edge of the bathtub to thumb through the rest of her Flash timeline. She can probably kill at least another fifteen minutes before anyone thinks to come looking for her, and hopefully that someone will be Owen or Bea. If it’s Bea, she can talk her into leaving—going home and going to sleep.
If it’s Owen, she won’t have to work very hard to give everyone something new to wonder about.
When the bathroom door opens, though, Lulu doesn’t recognize the girl who walks through it.
“Shit,” the girl says, even though Lulu is fully clothed and sitting like four feet from the toilet. “I’m so sorry. Shit, shit, shit, sorry.”
Her hair is curly and copper red, and she’s milk pale, freckle-sprinkled, very thin. She flushes pink and takes a step backward, knocking into the open door. “Ow,” she says, and then, again, “Sorry.”
Lulu can’t help but be charmed. “It’s fine,” she says. “I mean, I’m not, like, using it. The room. I’m just taking a break. You can—” She starts to stand.
“No!” the girl says. “No, honestly, I’m—I was going to do the same thing.”
She’s still flushed, but smiling now too. Lulu, who endured years of middle school orthodontia, admires the almost aggressive evenness of her teeth.
“Kind of sucks down there, huh,” Lulu says. She sits again. “But Patrick’s parties are always like this, don’t you think? He likes getting shit-faced so much that he forgets there are other things we could be doing. Like, anything else. I’d play cards right now. Boggle. Anything but sitting around doing shots.”
“This is my first,” the girl says. “Party. Here, I mean. Not, like, my first party ever.”
“Thank god,” Lulu says. “I would hate for this one to ruin your opinion of them.”
The girl laughs. “I’m Cass,” she says. “By the way.”
“Lulu,” Lulu says. She doesn’t offer her hand, and Cass doesn’t either. Lulu can’t decide if Cass recognizes her or not, and it would be way too narcissistic to ask.
It seems like she probably doesn’t; she isn’t watchful around Lulu the way girls who know her from the internet sometimes are. They usually don’t say anything, but their eyes jitter across her body restlessly, trying and failing to look away.
Cass slumps down to sit with her back against the counter, stretching her legs out on the fluffy rug in front of her.
No one cares that much about you, Lulu reminds herself. She’s the one who cares way too much about everyone else.
Speaking of caring, she can’t stop herself from doing her usual assessment: Cass is wearing slightly too much mascara, a thin white T-shirt, and tight black jeans Lulu doesn’t recognize the brand of. The soles of her flats are scuffed with patterns of wear. Lulu can’t decide whether Cass is trying and kind of failing, or if maybe she doesn’t even know she should be trying.
When Cass pulls an iPhone with a cracked screen and no cover out of her pocket, a third possibility occurs to Lulu.
Is it possible that Cass just doesn’t care about trying either way?
“Do you and Patrick go to school together?” Lulu asks, trying to triangulate.
“Yeah,” Cass says. She frowns at something on the phone and swipes it away dismissively. Then she looks up at Lulu, her face glowing faintly blue from its light. “How do you know our host?”
“Elementary,” Lulu says. “JTD.”
So Cass goes to Lowell. She doesn’t look like the Lowell girls Lulu’s met. There’s usually a particular put-together sheen to them, she thinks. Something about Cass strikes her as raw. She’s not undone on purpose, like Lulu’s own carefully careless bun. But there’s something about her that’s just—
“I didn’t grow up here,” Cass says.
—what it is, Lulu thinks. She asks, “When did you move?”
“To LA? When I was twelve. I transferred to Lowell when I was a freshman.”
Lulu gets distracted by her phone, which is lighting up with notifications: people liking her post, and replying to it, and sending her videos of their own. She’s getting to the point, follower-wise, where she’s going to have to turn notifications off soon. Every time she posts anything, there’s a flood of this, just nonsense—girls she doesn’t know asking her where she got her jewelry and makeup and boys sending her snaps of themselves shirtless in their bathrooms, trying to look hard-eyed and distant.
If Naomi were here, she’d be asking Lulu about this too probably: Why do you keep doing it, Lu?
Lulu wouldn’t have a good answer for her.
She puts her phone down. “Do you like it?” she asks Cass. “Los Angeles?”
“Not really.”
Lulu doesn’t catch herself in time to not roll her eyes.
“Oh,” Cass says. She leans forward just slightly. “So it’s like that.”
“It’s not like anything,” Lulu says. She lolls her head against the wall behind her, to make sure they’re both clear on how much space there is between them. “Whatever. Why would I care?”
“Oh.” After a beat, Cass leans back too.
Lulu should leave it at that. She should go downstairs and be social and stop sitting alone like a weirdo. She should go back and pretend everything is normal, so that at some point, everything will be normal again.
Instead, she says, “I think you have to give it a chance.”
“Oh?”
“I mean, I don’t know. It’s just such a big city, and it’s so weird. I feel like it takes a while to figure it out. And people always come in with these ideas about what it is, or what it should be. It’s so exhausting. Like, just because you’ve seen it on TV doesn’t mean you know anything about it, I guess. Is all.”
“I guess. Is all,” Cass says, imitating the fall of Lulu’s voice at the end of her monologue. She nudges the toe of her shoe against Lulu’s ankle, to let her know she’s only teasing.
Despite herself, Lulu laughs a little bit. She tries to mask it with a shrug.
“But no, I get that,” Cass continues. “That seems fair. I guess I just haven’t found the parts of it that I love yet, really.”
“Nothing?” Lulu asks.
She risks looking up. Cass is leaning forward again, intent, unembarrassed.
“There’s this one spot,” Cass says. “It’s sort of amazing, actually. I could take you, if you want.”
Lulu’s phone flashes with a message from Bea.
Where the hell are you girl??
Don’t make me wander through this whole horrible fake castle on a search. Come back!!!!!
And then: O says he might be leaving soon.
Lulu knows exactly how the rest of her night will go if she leaves Cass here and walks back downstairs to the living room. Owen will be drunk; probably a little sloppy. Maybe he’ll try to talk to her, or kiss her or something, and she knows perfectly well that she should let him. She should. That would be a big step toward normal: bringing Owen back into her life.
Lulu knows how to follow the rules, and she knows what happens when she does.
She feels the first edge of a hangover coming on: the throb of a headache, the curdle of nausea in her gut. It’s silly to think that leaving with Cass will allow her to escape her own body, much less her life.
But if she leaves, people really will have to wonder about her. They’ll ask questions, and they won’t know where to look for answers.
“Okay,” she says. “Why not? Let’s go.”
CHAPTER TWO
Cass’s car is a few blocks away from Patrick’s house, taking up half of the street behind the bend of a blind turn and sitting directly under a NO PARKING ANYTIME sign. “Whoops,” she says as she unlocks it. The car is a boxy Volvo, not ancient but definitely not new. Cass grabs an armful of stuff off the passenger seat and gestures for Lulu to sit.
She doesn’t consult her phone’s GPS, which impresses Lulu. “You know your way around this neighborhood?” she asks.
Cass shrugs. “Reception sucks in the hills,” she says. “And I have a pretty good sense of direction.”
“Oh,” Lulu says. And then, to have something else to say: “I don’t.”
“You seemed to know your way around that house pretty well.”
Lulu steered them down the way she’d come up, taking a back staircase and then a side door, slipping them out the front gate without anyone seeing them go. She messaged Bea: hey feeling weird heading out talk tmrw? Though Cass is right about reception: When she looks down now, she sees that it didn’t send. She hits RETRY.
“I’ve spent a lot of time exploring at Patrick’s,” Lulu says. “And houses are different, anyway. There are walls.”
“Yes, there are,” Cass agrees.
Lulu knows that was dumb, and she moves to explain, to defend herself—there are limits is what she means, there are borders to guide you—but Cass doesn’t seem to be dwelling on it. Instead she keeps driving, fast and certain, taking them up and up and up.
She says, “We’re not far from where we’re going, by the way. I didn’t just, like, lure you into my car on false pretenses.” She keeps her gaze on the road but raises an eyebrow suggestively. “I’m not that kind of girl.”
“Me neither,” Lulu says. Which—whatever. Whatever. That isn’t a conversation she needs to have with Cass right now, especially if Cass doesn’t already know.
“See,” Cass says. “Look, we’re here.”
Here is a dark gate so tangled in vines that at first Lulu isn’t even sure that there’s anything underneath them. Someone has cut away a patch, though, to allow for the swing of the hinge, and the metal glints faintly in the car’s headlights. Cass leaps out to tap a code into the keypad. The gate swings open at her command.
Beyond the gate is a long, tree-lined drive. Unkempt branches laced together overhead turn the night’s darkness dense with shadow. It should look menacing, but instead it’s dreamy. Cass gets back in and eases the car forward, her foot light on the gas.
The gate swings closed behind them.
“So this is the hotel,” Cass says.
“The Hotel? Is that, like, its proper name?”
“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.
Ryan doesn’t flick on the lights when they come in. Instead he goes out to the balcony, brings in an armful of candles, sets them on the table, and lights them.
“You’re getting very witchy, Ry,” Cass says.
“I’m learning about atmosphere,” he returns.
Cass sits on the floor like she did in the bathroom, this time with her back against the bed frame. Ryan settles himself next to her. He doesn’t touch her, but he could.
Lulu knows that distance well. It’s a suggestive positioning of bodies—close enough for warmth, but far enough that contact has to be intentional. It occurs to her that she’s definitely the third wheel in this extremely weird situation.
She sits facing them, cross-legged on the floor. Lulu is relieved when Cass pulls the vape off the table and charges it up before taking a hit. She inhales deeply, and exhales a curtain of white that obscures her face as it drifts toward the ceiling.
Lulu’s not usually much of a smoker—doesn’t like the heady, uncertain way it makes her feel, the unpredictable nature of her own self when she’s high—but at least soon they’ll all be messed up, and she can stop wondering if she should have left before they came up the stairs.
“I told you that party was going to suck,” Ryan says to Cass. Then, to Lulu, he says, “Oh, I mean, sorry, it was your friend’s thing, yeah?” In the candles’ flickering, forgiving light, Ryan looks searingly romantic. He’s dark haired and handsome, with high, finely cut cheekbones and a wide slash of a mouth.
“I thought it sucked too,” Lulu says. She reaches across the table and plucks the pen from Cass’s hand. She may not exactly know what’s going on here, but that doesn’t mean she can’t act like she does. That’s one of the rules: Behave like you belong. “And he’s not really my friend.”
“Why did you go, then?” Cass asks.
They’ve only known each other for half an hour, and once again, Lulu can’t seem to keep herself from telling Cass the truth. “Saturday night,” she says. “I don’t know, it was something to do.”
“Why did you go, Cass?” Ryan asks. “Because as I recall, you don’t think much of Paisley—”
“Patrick,” she corrects.
“Or parties in general.”
“Broadening my horizons,” Cass says. “And hey, look, I made a friend.”
Lulu’s phone buzzes in her bag. She pulls it out and finds that her message to Bea still hasn’t gone through. Instead, Bea sent her: not funny srsly where the hell are you.
Left on an adventure but got a little stranded. Can you come get me? Lulu writes back, relieved to see the delivery confirmation pop up almost as soon as she’s hit SEND.
“Hey,” Ryan says. “No phones up here. There’s only one rule at The Hotel—”
“I didn’t tell her,” Cass says apologetically. “Sorry, Lulu, this is Ryan’s, like, thing.”
“My friend was just saying she’s leaving the party,” Lulu explains. “I think she’s going to come get me. Give me a ride home.”
“You sure?” Cass says. “I got you here. I mean, I can—”
“Thanks,” Lulu says. “But I’m good, really. Can you give me the address to give to her?”
“What the hell was that?” Bea asks. Lulu watches Cass disappear as the gate slides closed behind them. Cass is so pale she looks like a ghost against the driveway’s dim. “Did you get a good Flash or two out of it, at least?”
Lulu blinks at her own reflection where it appears in the windowpane, shimmering under a passing streetlight. She realizes that The Hotel is the first place she’s been in a year, at least, where she didn’t take a picture or a video. Even before Ryan told her she couldn’t use her phone, it didn’t even occur to her to try.
“Wasn’t anything worth seeing,” she says to Bea. She doesn’t feel like getting into it right now—even though if anyone has gossip on Ryan and Cass, it would be Bea, who has gossip on everyone. Everyone who matters, anyway.
“Oh, you know you’re always worth seeing, baby,” Bea says. She reaches out a hand across the space between them, and Lulu leans gratefully into her touch.
CHAPTER THREE
Bea makes them both breakfast in the morning. It’s nothing complicated: scrambled egg whites, avocado toast. Lulu squeezes juice from oranges from one of the trees in the backyard. They eat at the little table in the kitchen, where the light is good.
“You look like a religious figure,” Bea says, her eyes fixed on Lulu’s image in her phone. “Like the Madonna bathed in God’s holiness or something. I think my aunt has this photo as a painting in her bathroom, actually.”
Bea’s parents emigrated from the Philippines; they’re pretty agnostic, but her extended family includes some of the most Catholic people Lulu has ever met. Which isn’t saying that much, but still. Lulu secretly loves the art in Bea’s family’s houses—she’s probably talking about her aunt Tereza, who lives in the Valley, in a sea of gold-leafed crosses—but Bea thinks it’s tacky.
“You would know, Beatriz,” Lulu says. “And, I mean, Jesus’ mom was a Jew too, right?” She tilts her head. “Wait, are you filming?”
“I was,” Bea says. She tap, tap, taps at the screen and puts the phone down. “Now I’m not.”
“Can I see?”
Bea rolls her eyes. “I muted the audio,” she says. “And you look great. You know I wouldn’t put up anything that made you look bad.”
“We don’t always agree on what that is, though.”
Bea scoots her phone across the table to Lulu. “You can delete it if you really want.”
Lulu flicks it back. She knows she’s been a little too sensitive about stuff like this lately. Who cares if there’s another unflattering video of her on the internet for a day? Wouldn’t be the first time. And Bea doesn’t even have as many followers as she does, which is sort of a shitty thing to think about, maybe, but it’s also true.
When she looks up, Bea is touching her fingertips to the faint violet of a bruise blooming just above her collarbone. Apparently the reason it took her so long to notice that Lulu had actually disappeared last night was that she and Rich, her on-again, off-again, were getting it on. Again.
Gross.
“Has he texted you?” Lulu asks.
“Not yet,” Bea says. “But I’d bet I hear something about that Flash in, like, the next five—”
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.
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