“There’s so much of me,” Lulu said, and in that one moment it felt true, and it felt possible. It didn’t feel humiliating to be so expansive. To want. To have. “I don’t run out, I’m not—”

Sloane kissed her. Lulu untangled one of the hands that was in Sloane’s hair. She filmed something. She didn’t look before she pressed SEND. Not at what it looked like.

Not at who she was sending it to.

It was Owen’s dad’s fans who’d started archiving her public videos. They were always looking for evidence: of Owen or his dad or the band, the pieces of their lives that brushed up against hers.

Later, when she emailed one of the big fan sites to ask them to take it down, just this one particular clip, they were adamant that it wasn’t porn or anything: just two girls kissing on a bed, fully clothed. It was almost sort of funny to see how chaste it looked if you didn’t know how it had felt.

It was painful like nothing else Lulu had ever known to watch the video and see at the last minute how Sloane looked up into the camera, smirking. How it made it look like something they had planned, had talked about, and had meant for everyone to see.

CHAPTER TEN

LULU SPENDS THE rest of the weekend studying. She has a B-plus average and every intention of keeping it up. She’s not like Bea, who applied early to Brown; Lulu has applications out at a handful of different schools, and they all seem fine to her. She figures the best thing she can do between now and when the letters come in the spring is try to keep her grades up and her options open.

These kinds of study binges are the only time she actively avoids her phone, in part because the post-test reunion with it is such a delicious reward. As soon as she’s done checking and rechecking her answers, she hurtles outside and lets her notifications wash over her in waves.

Flash is crammed with content from friends who don’t share her strategy: video of Rich flinging his notes into a backyard bonfire, his traditional start-of-finals ritual, and Jules filming Owen passed out, surrounded by highlighters and Red Bull. Bea quizzing their friends Amanda and Gina in super-slow-motion. And Cass and Ryan, hanging out at The Hotel.

It’s just a picture, not a video, taken sometime yesterday evening, probably: Cass’s phone camera capturing Ryan’s digital one, their lenses aimed at each other, Ryan’s hand already reaching out, oddly elongated by perspective, to tell her to stop. It stays on her screen just long enough for Lulu to register that it wasn’t a public offering—Cass broke the rules of The Hotel in order to send it directly to her.