“I’m so glad you’re taking an active interest in film history,” Mr. Winters says. “Especially this part of it. A lot of students aren’t as serious as you are, Lulu. They just want to watch the fun stuff. Not that this isn’t fun. It’s just not as obvious, I guess, why it’s fun.”

He’s always doing this—giving you compliments, like you should be really thrilled that he’s noticing you. It gives Lulu a slight but definite case of the creeps.

“Yeah,” she says. “Thanks.”

“Any particular reason you’re interested in the Wilmott story?” he asks. “Do you know Ryan?”

“Do you know Ryan?”

“His family,” Mr. Winters says. “His older brother, Roman—maybe five years older than you? He was one of my students my first year here. I met his mother at a parent-teacher conference, and we hit it off. They actually hadn’t ever seen the Riggs version of Bluebeard, and I got to introduce them to it. That was fun. We’ve been friends ever since. I do Thanksgiving at their house when I don’t want to go back home to my parents’. Always a glamorous evening. I love eavesdropping on their other guests.”

It’s weird hearing a teacher talk about having parents. Lulu knows he wants her to ask who the other guests are and what he’s heard, and she should, probably—ingratiate herself with him, why not—but she really doesn’t have the patience for it today.

“I don’t really know Ryan,” she says, which is true as far as it goes. She doesn’t, like, know him. “I met him the other night. I’m thinking about my midterm project for class, mostly.”

“Are you planning on writing a paper? I assumed you’d take the creative project option.”

Lulu shrugs and smiles. “We’ll see, I guess,” she says. “I should get back to studying, but—”

“If you want to learn more about Connie, there’s a podcast you should check out,” Mr. Winters says. “It’s called Beauty, Power, Danger, and it’s about women in the arts. Have you heard of it?”

Lulu shakes her head.

“They did an episode on Connie and Bluebeard at some point. I know the woman who hosts it a little bit—I wrote for her sometimes when she was an editor at the Weekly. Christine is . . .”

Lulu taps beauty, power, danger into the Notes app on her phone, and tunes out the rest.

Lulu has actually been pretty lazy about updating her Flash story lately, so lazy that she got a couple of messages yesterday asking her what was up. She feels self-conscious and then self-conscious about being self-conscious. She knows she shouldn’t care what these people think of her. She doesn’t even know most of them.