She hears Owen moving behind her, but then he stops. Probably coming to hug her, and then thinking better of it. It feels nice, much nicer than his offer to talk: his holding himself back, and letting her have this series of moments to herself.

She looks at the city underneath her, the sprawl of Los Angeles, the spread of the Valley, already turning burnished gold as the sun starts to fall behind the hills. She looks at all the places she could be, and isn’t.

She feels an echo of the thing she felt in the car with Cass, coming down from The Hotel on Saturday—that sense of displacement and of hiddenness. Like even if someone was looking for her, they wouldn’t know where to find her. Like at last, she’s somewhere private, and secret, and hidden, almost all the way alone.

Lulu watches the sunlight drift across the city. Owen is standing right next to her, but she’s still the only person who sees it from exactly that angle. She’s the only person who knows exactly how this moment feels inside of her skin.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

THAT NIGHT, LULU takes a video she doesn’t post anywhere. It’s simple, kind of dumb, even—just the steam in the air after she’s taken a shower, the swirl of shed hair she made on one wall so that it wouldn’t clog the drain. In the morning she takes another one: the rumple of her sheets and the impression her head made on the pillow.

At school she takes footage of her desk at the end of Spanish, and her plate after she’s finished with lunch. She doesn’t know what she’s doing with any of it yet, exactly, only that she likes recording what she sees, reminding herself that only she’s seeing it. She likes making a picture that’s specifically about herself, but doesn’t include her body in the frame.

CHAPTER FIFTY

IT TAKES A few days, but eventually Lulu starts sending the videos she’s taking to Cass: her clothes laid on the floor in the morning before school; a stack of her books with their pages marked for studying; a shot of an open book that’s near-neon with her highlighters and her notes.

All day long Cass doesn’t say anything. In the evening, just: So this is what you’re doing now, huh.

I think it’s a project, Lulu says. A proper Art Project. Mine, this time. Not trying to show the world what she thinks it wants to see from her, but showing it what she sees, instead.

Cass doesn’t ask her to stop, so she keeps sending them, day after day after day.

A week later, she asks, Do you know why you’re doing it yet?

I have some ideas, Lulu says. Then, daring: Want to get coffee and hear about them?