“And then when the thing happened with Sloane, the way you handled it—you were so brazen. Not everyone could have done that, I think. Handled it well. Handled it at all, even. So, like, not because you’re popular, and not because you’re older, but because you’re you, I wanted to say that I hope that whatever happens with Owen and me—I hope you won’t hate me.” She laughs. “Let’s start there, I guess.”

Lulu is breathless. A small piece of her is in awe of Kiley’s monologue, the apparent uncalculated truth she just put out there, the sort of basic human semi-decency of what she just said.

“I don’t hate you,” Lulu says. “I don’t, um. I don’t know how I feel about any of it yet.”

“Like I said, maybe there’s nothing for you to even be feeling things about,” Kiley says. “But I like him. And as long as he keeps liking me—yeah. I don’t imagine you’re going to want to be friends with me. But I really don’t want you as an enemy if I can avoid it.”

Lulu forgets, sometimes, that there are people who think she’s powerful, that because she has these Flash followers and because she knows how to play by the rules so well, they think she could actually do something to them if she wanted. She gets so obsessed with people liking her that she forgets that she could decide not to like them. She could turn against them. She could probably turn other people against them too.

It doesn’t feel good to imagine hurting Kiley, starting a rumor, spreading some little bit of poison. But at least it feels powerful; it fills in the icy, empty pit that opened in her stomach when Kiley said Owen’s name like he was someone she knew. The idea that Lulu could do something—exact revenge—gives her enough space to feel like she doesn’t have to.

Because the real power move is to say “You’d have to do more than hook up with my ex to become my enemy.” Like Lulu’s got boys and social capital and generosity to spare. Like she isn’t dying at the idea that all she can do is be generous, and pretend she’s letting Owen go, when really he’s the one who doesn’t want her back.

CHAPTER NINE

THE WHOLE STUPID point of Flash was that it didn’t archive anything. That was the idea, anyway. You uploaded pictures or video snippets, either for general public consumption or to a few select friends, who could watch them once, and then never again.

Lulu knows it was stupid to believe that was possible, that anything on the internet could live and then actually die. Or not die, she thinks now, because the dead don’t disappear either, do they. They leave corpses too. Traces.