Lulu doesn’t know where Cass is going with this, so she waits.

“We were going to dinner or something, and he didn’t even look for parking. Just pulled up. Handed over the keys.”

Cass drives quietly for a while.

“I just kept thinking about the guy who opened the door for me. What I looked like to him. What he imagined or even just, you know, assumed about me. If he could tell I wasn’t rich like Ryan, or if he couldn’t. If I was blending in, and if I even wanted to.”

Lulu has had plenty of these thoughts herself. “He probably didn’t think about you at all,” she says.

“Probably not,” Cass agrees. “But it was still—I—it was the first time I understood that other people were going to see me and assume things about what I had, what I was like, that weren’t true. And there was nothing I could do about it. It’s obviously not the worst thing in the world. But it is weird.”

“People tell me all the time my life’s not normal,” Lulu says. “But no one has ever told me what normal actually is.”

“Well, off the top of my head, normal definitely isn’t knowing a half dozen people whose family names are on buildings,” Cass says. “And normal isn’t how everyone knows everyone, how you’re all always talking about how we met through JTD, The Center, Marlborough, Lowell, that summer program in Cambridge, and like, I don’t even know if you mean the Cambridge in Boston or the one in Europe. It’s like your entire childhood was a very successful networking enterprise.”

“I guess what I wonder is: Isn’t it a type of normal? If it’s what’s normal for me?”

Cass doesn’t answer. She pulls the car up to a curb. A lush stand of low palms and tall cacti form a hedge that hides the entrance to what must be Ryan’s house.

Cass undoes her seat belt. She looks pale. “You don’t have to come in,” she says.

“Don’t be dumb,” Lulu says. “Of course I’m coming.”

There’s no bell on the gate to Ryan’s house—not even a keypad. Over their heads, an orb regards them with dark, glassy silence.

Lulu looks up at it. “Hello?” she says.

“I think it alerts someone when there’s movement,” Cass says. She fidgets. Lulu wants to put an arm around her, but she doesn’t. Who knows who’s watching.

An intercom buzzes to life. Lulu can’t even see where the sound is coming from.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice says.

Cass says, “Hi, I’m—we’re—um—we’re here to see Ryan?”

“What’s your name, please?”

“Cass. Cassandra Velloro.”

Cass nudges Lulu.

“Lulu Shapiro,” Lulu says.

Silence.