You’re hedging, Lulu thinks, but she doesn’t want to push the conversation out of the casual zone. She doesn’t know Cass well enough for that yet.

“That seems nice,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to have a guy friend who was just—who was only that. Or maybe an older brother, I guess? Best of both worlds, right? Someone who can tell you what the hell dudes are thinking, and also, you can date his friends.”

“You clearly don’t have an older brother.”

“You do?”

“This is his, actually.” Cass tugs the sleeve of the oversized plaid flannel she’s wearing. “So he is good for that. He would rather eviscerate himself than talk to me about dating, though, and he’d certainly eviscerate his friends for looking at me twice.”

“Eviscerate,” Lulu says. “That’s a good word.” She feels self-conscious. Maybe Cass is super smart. Maybe she’s about to discover that Lulu’s not. St. Amelia’s is a good school and everything, but Lowell kids can be kind of on another level.

Cass doesn’t dwell on her vocabulary, though. “You have a brother, you learn how to describe all kinds of gross shit,” she agrees. “Anyway, Ryan is—I mean, we’re not anything. But he can, I guess he can be a little possessive. I understand why people get the wrong idea about us.”

“He does seem . . . intense.”

“He is,” Cass says. “About everything, actually. Not just me. But it’s a whole thing with him. His family . . . if I’d grown up with his parents, I’d be intense too.”

“What are they like?”

“Ryan’s dad was almost kidnapped when he was a kid. You know that story?”

It’s one of the things that came up when Lulu was googling the Riggses, Roman Senior’s near abduction. He was ten when it happened, old enough to understand, and to have been terrorized by the fear of it happening again ever since.

“It fucked up his whole life,” Cass continues. “That’s why Ry was homeschooled until he was fifteen. They raised him to believe that he had to always be on the lookout for people who were trying to take things from him. Who were only interested in him because his last name is on a lot of buildings.”

It’s funny. Lulu has lived her whole life around rich people; she is rich people, technically, she’s pretty sure. But she’s not the kind of rich that Ryan is, or even Owen—lasts-you-generations-type money. Famous-last-name-type money.