Lulu takes this in. “Does that mean when you brought me—” she starts. She can’t bring herself to say: that was the first time you’d done that. The night takes on a whole new cast. That Cass just brought her. And then let her bring Owen the next time.

“Like I said,” Cass says. “You seemed like an okay stranger.”

Owen settles himself next to them. Next to Cass, that is. Not Lulu.

“Are you going to learn to skate, Owen?” Cass asks.

“Nah.”

“Owen broke his arm skateboarding when he was ten,” Lulu reports. She still knows him so stupid well.

“Eleven,” Owen corrects.

“Ten,” she says. She wasn’t there, but this is one of the first stories Owen’s dad ever told her. “At your tenth birthday, when Gumball Eyeball came to play a backyard set and you fell in front of—”

“Ten,” Owen agrees. “And don’t make me relive it, god.”

He puts a hand over his face, dramatic. Lulu laughs. She can’t remember the last time they joked around this easily.

Cass can’t handle this news. “You had Gumball Eyeball play your birthday party?” she says. “My god, I would have died. I was so obsessed with them in elementary school.”

“I almost did die,” Owen says. “Kind of literally. I was lucky that the arm was the only actual casualty. I was so excited when they showed I just straight-up forgot I was on a skateboard. Gravity did not.”

“You must have some parents,” Cass says. Lulu wonders if she doesn’t remember Owen and Ryan meeting, talking about their dads. Or maybe she didn’t know to notice that type of thing—what someone might be sensitive about. Every little nuance of every conversation.

“My dad knows people,” Owen says.

“Hey!” Ryan calls from the pool’s belly. “I almost forgot. New rule. No parents at The Hotel.”

Cass looks around in mock confusion. “I don’t see any parents, Ry,” she says.

“You know what I mean. This place is going to be overrun with Riggses pretty soon, and until that happens, I want to be an orphan when I’m here. No parents. No family. None of that bullshit.”

Kiley leaps off the skateboard and does a spin. She lands on the balls of her feet, silent, like a cat. She raises her arms above her head, an easy stretch, and Lulu’s heart throbs and contracts at the idea of Owen and Cass watching her move right now. How beautiful she is; how easy she looks in the length of her body. Lulu has always wanted to be lanky like that, long and lean. It hurts to think about how much thinner she could be, if—if. She doesn’t want to do any of the ugly stuff that would get her there, but that doesn’t stop her from wanting the thinness itself.