“Soooooo mysterious,” Molly sighs. “Whatever. Go ahead.” She skips back to the bench where her friends are waiting.

Lulu looks at Kiley expectantly.

“I don’t even know the answers to most of her questions,” Kiley says. “I don’t know why she keeps asking.”

Lulu shrugs. “Tell her whatever you want,” she says.

“Look, Lulu, I apologized—”

“I’m not mad at you anymore.” At least Kiley did what she did on impulse. She didn’t spend weeks plotting and planning to fuck Lulu over as thoroughly as possible. And anyway, that video was already out there. Lulu put it out there herself.

Lulu glances over and sees that Molly is still watching them. “Can we walk?” she asks.

“Sure.” Kiley falls into step with her as they turn away from the girls and the food court and head off in a random direction.

“What did you want to say?” Lulu asks.

“Oh, nothing,” Kiley says. “I just figured you didn’t want to talk to Molly.”

“How did you guess?” Lulu catches Kiley’s eye, and they both laugh, and then look away. “I didn’t know you two were friends,” she says after a minute.

“Same ballet studio,” Kiley says. “When we did ballet. She quit before I did.”

“Right. When did you stop?”

“Last spring.”

Lulu had forgotten what it meant to be out in the world. She had imagined having to talk to people, but instead, she can ask Kiley to talk to her, and that means not having to listen to the inside of her own head.

“Why?” she asks.

“Do you really care?”

“I don’t want to talk to myself any more than I want to talk to Molly.”

“In that case. Um, I guess the short version of the story is that I had basically never not done it, and I wanted to know what it would be like to stop.”

“Can you start again if you want to?”

“In theory. I’ve already lost a lot of time.”

“Did that scare you? Giving it up?”

They pause in front of a store that appears to sell an array of shapeless, colorless garments. Lulu doesn’t even know what they are: dresses? Tops? The salesgirl inside is almost inhumanly beautiful. Kiley examines her reflection in the plate glass window.

“Of course it did,” she says.

They move on, walking in silence. Then Lulu says, “You said, before. You said that sometimes, you just felt like being mean.”

Kiley sighs. “Yeah. Especially if—when I get tired of being the different one. The youngest at these parties, the only black girl, the one who has to explain—see. Just like this. I try to be nice. Sometimes I’m not.”

“I feel horrible,” Lulu says. She thought she could get away with saying it out loud and sounding—something, okay, maybe, but her voice betrays her and comes out harsh, broken and raw. “I feel fucking horrible all the time.”