“I’ve always wanted to learn to surf,” Cass says, “if you could be convinced to try again.”

“Yeah,” Lulu says. “I mean, I actually bought a wet suit and everything. So I probably should.”

“We can find someone cool to take lessons from,” Cass says. “It won’t be warm enough until, like, July, but—” Lulu lets that we rattle around inside of her, trying to find a space to rest in her body.

“I’m really bad,” she says.

“I’ll be worse,” Cass says. “I do not have the guns for it, let me tell you.”

“You’re saying I’m built for power?”

“Lulu,” Cass says. “No one is ever calling you fat. You know that, right?”

Ryan got up a few minutes ago to go to the bathroom; when Lulu turns she sees him standing just behind them, watching the little group they make without him, hovering as if uncertain.

Cass distracts Lulu by poking her in the hip. “Maybe I’ll start calling you fat,” she says. “Reverse psychology. Just tell you a thing that’s obviously not true until you get so frustrated—”

“I love this,” Owen says. “You hear that, Kiley? Next time you refuse to eat a croissant, I’m not gonna try to talk you out of it. And then you won’t have any delicious pastry, and you’ll be sad, but I’ll have more, so I’ll be very happy. I love this plan, Cass. Very smart.”

Lulu doesn’t know what to say. She knows she isn’t— technically, she’s not fat. That’s just a numbers thing. But that’s the word she knows to express that she’s unhappy with her body, that she’s always been unhappy with it, in a white-noise kind of way, a mantra that’s been playing so long she almost never remembers to hear it properly anymore. She remembers Kiley asking her about what she ate at temple a few weeks ago. Who doesn’t think about that stuff? What would it even be like to live in your body and not worry about its size?

“Girls thinking they’re fat is so exhausting,” Ryan says over her shoulder. Lulu turns and finds that at some point while she was distracted, he pulled out a camera. He’s snapping a picture of them, all of them, together like this.

Lulu is helpless against imagining how it will look: her body, unposed. She straightens up, tries to make herself longer and more elegant. She realizes after she’s done it that it might look to Cass like she’s pulling away from her, like once she knew she was going to be photographed, she didn’t want Cass in the same frame.

“Girls. Really, Ryan?” Cass asks. She turns away from Lulu and Lulu doesn’t know if that means anything or not.

“Hashtag notallgirls,” Kiley says, holding up her fingers to make the crosses of the hash.