Lulu takes a picture of the sky and writes back, Free from finals for the day:) :) :)

Cass gets back to her almost immediately. ME TOO, she says. Want to go to the beach?

Lulu doesn’t even really think about it. Yes.

Bea grabs her phone out of her hands. “What’s this!” she asks. “What’s that look about, Lu—” but the Flash has already disappeared. It doesn’t matter. Lulu’s heart is already kicking against her ribs, and her hands move panic-fast. She tugs her phone from Bea’s grasp so hard that it goes flying, landing on one corner of its case before settling, faceup and undamaged, on the ground. Thank god.

“Whoa,” Bea says. “Sorry, Lu.”

Lulu picks the phone up slowly, all of the hot curdled Sloane shame joining with a rush of new embarrassment: at the idea that Cass was even—that there’s something to even be embarrassed—that Lulu’s face was doing something.

“It’s nothing,” she tells Bea, because she can’t come up with a more convincing lie.

Bea assesses Lulu for a long moment before she says, “Okay.” She lets Lulu put her phone in her bag and rearrange her hair. “Froyo?”

This is their post-finals tradition. For every test, a scoop of vanilla with rainbow sprinkles eaten on the sun-warmed hood of Bea’s Audi in a strip-mall parking lot.

“Shit,” Lulu says. “I mean, I guess it wasn’t nothing. I was making plans with someone.”

“Someone who?”

“My friend Cass,” Lulu says. “We met at Patrick’s party the other night—remember, the girl who took me to that weird hotel? And she was talking about going to the beach, and I said I would. I just wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry, B.”

“You have to go right now?”

Lulu looks down at her phone. Cass has written back, Meet me in Malibu in 30-45? Point Dume?

She should go get frozen yogurt with Bea and then go home and study for the rest of her finals. She should stick around and say hi to Owen, remind him how much fun they had the other night.

She’s not going to, though.

“I’m so sorry,” Lulu says again. “Rain check? Double scoop tomorrow?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SUNLIGHT IS WHITE through the windshield as Lulu drives the 101 through the Valley, passing Sherman Oaks, Encino, Tarzana, and Woodland Hills before she hits the rows of luxury car dealerships that mark the beginning of Calabasas. It’s been a dry winter and the land is brown, mostly, occasional patches of green scrub sitting low against the shocking blue of the sky.