“I’m just trying to figure out where I am first,” Lulu says. “It’s like, process of elimination, almost? Like, here’s not-me. Here’s not-me. Here’s not-me. But also: Here’s what I see. Here’s me from the inside. Not out.”

“You’re the—like when you look at a Magic Eye thing,” Cass says. “You stare at that center dot and the design comes into focus around it. These pictures are the dot. Your life is the design.”

“That’s a way of thinking about it.”

“You’re the one in Cinema Studies. You’re the one who should have the theories.”

“I’m just trying to figure out how to live in the world,” Lulu says.

Cass quirks her mouth, wry, and takes a long sip of coffee. “Tell me about it,” she says.

That night Cass sends Lulu a picture of her empty sneakers, tongue loose, laces tangled. In the morning, a close-up of the damp fibers of a towel.

Am I getting the idea, she asks.

If you’re doing it it’s your project, Lulu writes back. But I mean, I think so, yeah.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

FOR WEEKS AFTER, that’s how they talk—by sending images back and forth of spaces their bodies used to occupy, and don’t anymore. The funny little pockets of emptiness that they find during the course of their days. Lulu learns more about Cass than she actually knew when they were hooking up: that she sits in the back of every classroom, and what the insides of Lowell’s classrooms look like. How long she sits in traffic on the drive home from school, some days. How often she eats dinner alone.

It’s a peculiar kind of intimacy, but it’s theirs: something they build together, a way of allowing each other a privileged view into the mundane particulars of their lives.

Lulu also starts putting some of her videos together—a collection of clips from her Flash, which, ironically, she has to pull from that dumb fan site, and then some of these.

She quickly learns that these compilations can’t be too long, or they feel disjointed. What she ends up with is usually no more than a minute. The first one she’s happy with starts with one of the first private videos she took, the one of her hair on the shower wall, which is mildly gross in a way she kind of likes. It ends with a Flash of Cass on New Year’s Eve, catching her eye from across the party. Lulu registers lululooks.com. After she’s made Bea tell her about a thousand times that she’s not ruining her life, she posts the video as a file called WHAT I LOOKED AT WHILE YOU WERE LOOKING AT ME.

She sends it to Cass too, with a note: Thanks for helping me start to figure it out.