She doesn’t, though, because then he would ask why, and she wouldn’t have a good answer. She’s still filming herself basically every minute she’s not at The Hotel—when she’s getting dressed, or taking off her eye makeup, or little funny family things, like when she stops by her dad’s to pick up a sweater she forgot and Olivia is putting on a fashion show in their living room—so she doesn’t have that defense. She just doesn’t want to, is all.

For just a little while, she just wants to be allowed to forget that anyone is looking, or that anyone cares what she looks like.

Plus, she’s started listening to Beauty, Power, Danger from the beginning, and it’s giving her all kinds of weird ideas about images and who owns them, and how and why it matters. She doesn’t listen to it at The Hotel, but she’s started reading the things Christine L. Tompkins mentions in the show notes—online articles, and sometimes even parts of actual books. Lulu can’t believe she’s reading, like, academic texts over vacation, but then, they’re academic texts about interesting things: women and power and sex.

And she’s a feminist, right? Or she’s always thought she basically was, anyway. With Naomi for a sister you kind of had to be. But increasingly, Lulu realizes she didn’t really have a sense of what that meant, other than for her own limited, personal purposes: that she wanted to be allowed to wear pants and own property and go to school and stuff.

Now when she goes to the mall with Naomi to try to get their mom a Hanukkah present and a man walking by says, “Pair of you, look at you, nice-looking girls,” for no reason other than that he thought they might want to know what he thought of them, instead of ignoring him, brushing it off like she always does, Lulu thinks: God, what a fucking pig.

CHAPTER TWENTY

ON FRIDAY, RYAN has a project for the three of them. “What, you thought this would just be a free ride?” he says.

He’s wearing paint-splattered khakis and a T-shirt with a rip at the collar. Even Lulu has to admit it’s a good look on him: work-worn but not shabby. He’s still so young-prince handsome. Those cheekbones. On his way to hug Cass he comes so close that Lulu scents the sweat of him: the funk of boy-skin, some kind of cologne. Sandalwood, maybe? Probably expensive. He smells good.

He doesn’t touch Lulu. Instead, he says, “The painters fucked up the color in one of the rooms, and they can’t get back in time to fix it, so I figured we’d take a crack at it.”