“Anyway,” Cass says. “It sucks that Ryan got to ruin Flash for you. I mean, not that it’s like a super-tragic loss or anything, but you were so—I don’t know. You were good at it. Is that a weird thing to say? I felt like you cared about it. Like it was so part of who you were.”

“That’s who I was? That’s sad.”

Cass rolls her eyes. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

Lulu tilts her head up to the sky. It’s pale, undifferentiated blue above her, going dingy and dim with gray at one edge as the sun fades behind the hills. “I don’t know that,” she says, at last. “I don’t know how you think about me. Especially since we—whatever. Broke up.”

“Did we?”

“The last time we talked felt pretty final.”

Cass sighs. “I didn’t mean for it to be that way. Necessarily.”

“What did you mean for it to be like?”

Cass twists her mouth into a complicated shape. “I mean, it wasn’t even personal. I didn’t break up with you; I broke up with everyone, basically. I was just so angry and sad. I just didn’t have the energy for anything. I couldn’t make any decisions. I couldn’t handle anyone else’s feelings. I could barely fucking handle my own.”

Lulu tries to imagine what it’s like to have such a certain sense of yourself that you can walk away from other people’s feelings: to not always be thinking about them, or imagining them, or trying to shape yourself around the fact of them. That’s what she meant to say to Bea, when B asked her about staying on Flash. It’s Lulu’s way of asking someone else to answer a question she can’t seem to stop asking: Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? Am I still doing okay?

“Talk about selfish,” Cass is saying. “I was mad at you, but I was also—it was easier to be mad at you than at Ryan. To make sure to be mad at you so I didn’t have to feel anything else. After, it was like I wasn’t even there. Like my skin was a shell, and I was a ghost floating inside of it. Like I was nothing.”

She swipes the back of one hand against her cheek where a tear was starting to fall. “Which, like, I didn’t want to—nothing really changed, you know? They’re just pictures. He didn’t really take anything important, even. Not in the way that, you know, he could have. This video. Or something else.” Cass might be crying, but Lulu doesn’t know, because her face is tilted to the ground.

Lulu doesn’t touch her. “Do you want,” she starts. “We could go inside and talk a little bit more.”