Cass turns to Ryan. “We can do your makeup if you want,” she says. “I bet Lulu could contour the shit out of you.”

“I have highlighter in my bag,” Lulu offers.

Instead, Ryan reaches down into the tray of paint and uses one finger to streak each cheek rosy. “How’s this for contour?” he asks.

“Very good,” Cass says approvingly. “I like a man who knows his angles.”

Ryan smiles, but when Lulu turns back to the patch of wall she’s been working on, he leaves, probably to go wash it off. She feels like she’s won some obscure victory, though she couldn’t say exactly what it was.

“I’ve been thinking about that conversation, actually,” Cass says to Lulu. “About how you asked what I thought of you when we first met.”

“You’ve come back around,” Lulu deadpans. “It was JAP-y bitch. I knew it.”

“Lulu!” Cass brandishes her roller at Lulu, but she isn’t really trying, and it’s easy to dance out of her way. “No,” she continues. “What I was going to ask was why you wear that stuff if you think it makes you look so dumb.”

Lulu paints a long stripe up the wall, pressing the roller from bottom to top. She looks at the pink streak she’s left in her wake. She says, “I mean, I don’t hate it or anything. But mostly it’s just easy: I can do it without thinking about it. And when I do, no one thinks too much about me.”

“It’s, like, private school girl camouflage.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay but so then: What are you hiding?”

Lulu doesn’t say anything. Cass uses her roller to go over Lulu’s line of paint, turning it darker and more solid.

“The fact,” Lulu says, “that I’m not very interesting.”

“I think you are,” Cass says. “Interesting.” The sun is already starting to slide in the western sky, and the room is suffused with a rosy glow that makes Cass’s cheeks look particularly pink.

Lulu shrugs.

“Okay,” Cass says. “Fine, don’t believe me. But I guess I should say—um—that you’re only kind of right. The first night when I met you? Your camouflage worked. At first, I didn’t notice you at all. But when I did, it was because of what you did. When I saw you sneaking upstairs—that’s when I started wondering what your deal was.”

Lulu forgets her self-pity instantly. She narrows her eyes. “Wait a minute! So when you found me, did you—”

Cass is definitely blushing now, the color coming on fierce and sudden. “I didn’t know you were in the bathroom,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to follow you in there. I just wanted to know where you were going. I wanted to know what else there was to do at a party like that one.”

“Not much.”