“I know, right? God, I love Bea’s backyard. It’s paradise, basically. Or it would be if they had a hot tub.”

“Very picky,” Cass says.

“We’re talking about paradise,” Lulu reminds her.

When Lulu and Jules have officially lost, she takes Cass to find Bea. That was the whole point of Cass being here, after all. But also, Lulu is curious. She wants to know if they like each other; if they can even get along. She doesn’t think Cass will really love anyone else at this party, but she’s proud of Bea. She wants Cass to know that if there’s anyone worth hanging out with here, it’s the girl Lulu has claimed for her best friend.

Bea is, after all, the first person who showed Lulu that you could make your own kinds of rules—that, once you understood how it functioned, you could adjust the optics and control a scene instead of just starring in it.

They were both in ninth grade when they started hanging out together. At first it was convenient: Lulu was dating King, and Bea was with his best friend, Seb. It was at a party like this one where they decided they actually liked each other. Seb was wasted and puking; King was taking care of him; the rest of the boys were ignoring them as off-limits, and the other girls were ignoring them as upstarts and usurpers.

Lulu had been angling for those girls, trying to convince them to take her in—she had a feeling the thing with King wasn’t going to last the year, and she didn’t want to lose her access to his friends and his parties and the aura of sophistication they lent her, which kept anyone from looking too close and seeing that she wasn’t nearly as cool as she was pretending to be.

So she didn’t want to be associated too closely with the other freshman at the party. She probably would have ignored Bea if they hadn’t ended up in the empty kitchen at the same time, refilling their drinks.

They were at a girl named Jordan Epstein’s house; her father was a famous director, and the kitchen windows looked out onto a terraced backyard, a hot tub spilling steaming water into the gleaming aqua of the pool below. It was December then too, another chilly night. In the living room they could both hear the party going on without them. Bea looked at the yard, and down at her cup. Then she cut a glance at Lulu.

“Fuck this,” she said, sudden and decisive. “Do you want to go swimming?”

“Now?” Lulu asked.

“Yeah,” Bea said. “Seb’s going to puke until he passes out; King’s going to be with him until that happens. And I can’t spend another hour being ignored in there. Why don’t we do something fun?”