Usually Lulu would take this for a veiled insult and make a rude, dismissive face at Naomi, but if Naomi wants to hear about what’s going on in Lulu’s life, she’s going to have to get used to hearing about makeup.

“I actually enjoy it,” Lulu says.

“You enjoy it.”

Naomi stands in the bathroom door. She looks uncertain, actually, like she isn’t sure of her welcome in Lulu’s space.

“I like looking nice,” Lulu says. “I like figuring out how to look nice.”

“There isn’t one way?”

“How to make myself feel nice, maybe. Or how I want to feel. Which changes.”

Lulu’s finally picked an outfit: a pale pink dress that she usually wouldn’t pull out during the winter, but feels right, somehow, for tonight. She’s accessorized it with a bunch of gold rings, and her plan is to dust her eyelids and cheekbones with loose shimmering gold powder, to make herself look as soft and glowing as she feels all over. This will probably be something like her and Cass’s public debut. She wants Cass to be proud of her. She wants to be as beautiful as Cass, unaccountably, believes she is.

Lulu looks at the makeup bag on the counter, pens and brushes and pots spilling out of it, and at Naomi’s face, reflected in the mirror in front of her.

“You don’t just hang out with your friends like this? Do your makeup, get ready to go out?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Lulu, but I do not wear makeup.”

“I know you don’t at home. But at school? When you’re going to parties?” Lulu twists her head around to look at her sister. “Truly never?”

“I don’t know how.”

“Nao, it’s not hard.”

“You think that because you know how to do it.”

“The dumbest girls in the world know how to do makeup. Don’t you hardcore feminists think makeup was invented to keep women stupid and distracted or something?”

“Feminists think a lot of things about makeup,” Naomi says. “I think it’s okay to be interested in whatever you’re interested in.” She’s such a goody-goody, it’s truly incredible. “And,” she adds, “I think yours usually looks really nice.”

“Okay, well, if you want to see a master at work, watch and learn.”

Lulu showered earlier, so her face is bare. She puts on primer and dusts herself with a mineral powder foundation, which she can get away with because her skin has been behaving itself, mostly, recently. She blushes the apples of her cheeks pink and streaks the lines of her face with highlighter.

“See?”

“It’s like a magic trick,” Naomi says. “Watching you do it doesn’t mean I understand how it works.”

“It’s just angles,” Lulu says. “Colors.”

“Hmmmm.”