“Something happened. No one died. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay.” There’s a pause. Then Naomi asks, “You want me to talk to you instead?”

“Sure.”

So Naomi does. She tells Lulu about her classes, and how she thinks maybe a grad student in one of her upper-level seminars is flirting with her. She tells Lulu about how the other night she and her friends went out to a bar and played pool. She tells Lulu a bunch of sort of funny, sort of boring stories, until Lulu’s lulled her brain into quiet, until, when there’s a pause in the conversation, Lulu says, “The thing is that it turned out that Ryan was spying on us.”

“I’m sorry,” Naomi says. “But what? And who? And what the fuck?”

Lulu tells her the whole story.

After she’s explained, Naomi says, “I’m so sorry, Lu.”

“What are you sorry for? You didn’t do it.”

“Of course I didn’t do it. I just didn’t want anything like this to happen to you.”

“Well, yeah. But it did.”

“Have you talked to someone? A guidance counselor or anyone?”

“No.”

“Oh Lu. I wish you would.”

“Well, I don’t want to.”

Naomi sighs. There’s a long silence. “I don’t want to tell you what to do,” she says. “I know that usually doesn’t work. But I just—I don’t want this to be your secret either. I don’t want you to live with this alone.”

“I don’t, though,” Lulu says. “You know. That’s why I called you. Bea knows. Cass—”

Cass knows. Even if they never speak again, they’ll have this between them. They’re the only people who know this specific betrayal, inside and out.

“Still,” Naomi says. “It’s different. But it’s up to you. As long as you know it’s an option.” And then, “God, no wonder Cass has been thinking about Bluebeard.”

“We didn’t die,” Lulu says. She doesn’t understand why she has to keep explaining this.

“No, of course not. But it’s—the things men do to women. The ways they think they get to be in charge of you. The way it never seems to stop.”

Those retellings too, which is what Cass was talking about: The way that, even when the physical violence stops, their stories get repeated, and reimagined. Again, and again, and again.

Naomi continues, “I will say, in that class, one of the things we talked about was how people read that story like it’s a warning to women—to trust your intuition and not marry creeps, or, if you do marry a creep, not to be curious about him. To leave things be. Which weirded me out, because he’s the villain. Whatever else happens in the story, he dies at the end.”

“That’s what I said! That’s what I’m saying.”