Beyond the gate is a long, tree-lined drive. Unkempt branches laced together overhead turn the night’s darkness dense with shadow. It should look menacing, but instead it’s dreamy. Cass gets back in and eases the car forward, her foot light on the gas.

The gate swings closed behind them.

“So this is the hotel,” Cass says.

“The Hotel? Is that, like, its proper name?”

“For now. Do you want to hear a story?”

“Sure.” Lulu settles back in her seat and cranes her head up so she can look out the window at the trees. She can’t tell whether the flashes of light she sometimes catches through them are lights that have been woven through the branches, or if she’s high enough up that somehow, she can see the stars.

“Avery Riggs built this place around the turn of the century,” Cass says. “You know the name, right? As in Lowell’s Riggs Science Center, or—”

“It’s the Riggs Library,” Lulu says. “At St. Amelia’s.”

Every private school child in Los Angeles knows the Riggs name; over the course of a handful of generations of increasingly lawless progeny, the family has donated a wing or at least a building to almost every campus improvement project in the city. Plus, one of the Riggs heirs, Roman, was in her sister Naomi’s class in high school—at least until he dropped out at the beginning of their senior year to run a start-up that became Flash.

“Exactly,” Cass says. “Avery was the one who made all of that money in the first place. He came out here at the very beginning of Hollywood to try to be a king of cinema. Movies didn’t end up working out for him, but real estate did. This place was his first big success.”

They come out of the tree canopy and all of a sudden Lulu sees it: The Hotel. Its white face is lit by the car’s headlights and Los Angeles’ ambient glow, and it looks almost luminous, gleaming, against the black of the hillside at its back. Floor-to-ceiling glass enclosing the first story shimmers. The floor above it is punctuated by the iron railings of balconies, dark against radiant white.

Cass doesn’t exactly park. She just pulls the car to a stop and turns it off. A black Range Rover is sitting right next to the front door, but no one’s in it. Since there doesn’t appear to be anyone else here, Lulu figures it doesn’t really matter where they leave the car.

“Is it . . . open?” Lulu asks.

“For us,” Cass says. She unbuckles her seat belt and opens her door. She stands and stretches into the night, raising her long, bony arms to the full white moon, which is sweet and heavy overhead. Her shirt pulls up so that Lulu can mark the points of her hipbones, and imagine the shadow at the curve of her waist.