“It’s the fucking solstice,” she tells them. “Shortest day of the year. Poof! Gone. Whoops!” She gestures with the cup in her other hand and splashes whiskey and ginger ale onto the floor. They’re sitting inside now, in the lobby, in the tent, wrapped in blankets. The Hotel’s heat hasn’t been turned on yet.

“That means it’s the longest night,” Cass observes. She’s sitting next to Lulu. They’re wrapped up separately and Cass is very drunk, leaning heavily against Lulu’s side. The silk of her hair brushes Lulu’s collarbone, tickles her cheek. Lulu thinks she must be imagining that she can feel some warmth radiating from Cass’s body to hers through so many layers of fabric.

Ryan’s voice keeps echoing in her head: the idea that Cass feels something the same way she feels something. Even if she’s just an experiment, a convenience, the only girl in their private school web who’s stupid enough to have basically sent a coming-out announcement to the whole damn internet. Even if it’s nothing more than that. It’s like someone’s opened a door just a crack—not enough to walk through, but enough to spill light into a very dark room.

Cass likes girls.

Cass could like Lulu.

“What are we going to do with it?” Owen asks.

“You’ve been here, man, this is what we do,” Ryan says. “This is pretty much—this is pretty much it.”

“We should play a game or something,” Kiley says. “You guys know kings?”

“Too complicated,” Owen says. “And anyway, kings is just an excuse to play truth or dare. Why don’t we just play truth or dare?”

“God, Owen, how old are you?” Kiley pokes him. “Do you think this is a middle school sleepover or something?”

“Fuck yes. And I say we play spin the bottle,” Owen says. “Seven minutes in heaven.”

“The ratio here isn’t right for any of that,” Kiley says. “Two boys, three girls. Although—I guess Lulu wouldn’t mind.”

Lulu blanches.

Cass says, “What?”

Kiley laughs. “Oh, sorry,” she says. “But, like, do you not even know what Lulu’s really famous for?”

Cass sounds very uncertain when she says “No?”

“Luckily for you, the internet never forgets.” Kiley taps at her screen and then hands her phone to Cass. “Here,” she says. “Look. You can see.”

The volume must be all the way up. Lulu watches the screen’s blue glow playing on Cass’s face, that inhuman light, and hears the soft slur of her own giggle, the way it trips into a hitch in her breath. She looks down. She clenches her fists.