Evidence.

She and Owen had been dating for nine months when she proposed the idea of the girls. At the time it seemed brilliant. Things had been a little quieter between them, almost even sometimes a tiny bit strained, and Lulu had thought that here was a new thing she could offer to keep him interested. It would be sexy and wild, something he wouldn’t get from anyone else: Lulu kissing a girl, and him watching.

It would make him look at her all over again, the way maybe sometimes she’d seen him looking at other girls, lately, just for a second, without even knowing he was doing it probably. It would make other girls part of their relationship instead of a threat to it.

It wasn’t like he’d never seen her kiss a girl before, before they were together. Owen hadn’t seen the beginning of it, how it started in the sixth grade, when it was just lessons, Lulu at sleepovers offering to teach and be taught. But he’d seen the end result, which was that, as a teenager, it had become her party trick.

They would be sitting around drinking and someone would bring it up. Lulu would monitor a girl’s reaction: whether she got flustered, or curious. If she was curious it didn’t take much coaxing. Lulu just had to be casual about it, laughing, playful, and together they’d watch how much the boys loved it. She would kiss a girl until a boy got up between them, and laid claim to whoever it was he’d decided he wanted to kiss for himself.

It was the kind of behavior, Lulu discovered, that if you didn’t explain, people would happily explain for you. If you didn’t tell everyone right away that you were questioning, or queer, or bisexual, or any of those other too-clinical, too-certain words, and especially if you were a girl with long hair and a lot of pink in her wardrobe and a lot of followers on social media—well, they already knew what kind of girl she was, so they knew what to think of her. Everyone knew that Lulu Shapiro would do anything for attention.

Lulu always wanted to correct them, to say that, in fact, she did it as a dumb bit of misdirection. It was easy for her to let people know that she liked kissing girls; who wouldn’t? Kissing was fun, and easy. Kissing girls made Lulu seem like someone who was fun and easy. Kissing girls in public was a way of showing a side of herself people were interested in seeing, and at the same time making sure they’d never look closely enough to see any of the rest of it.