After a moment, Naomi hugs Lulu back. “I will say that while she was driving me, Mom made an extremely upsetting remark about how I didn’t want to ruin my lady parts by giving birth this young anyway, so, like, she’s still very much Mom,” she adds, because Naomi is incapable of just having a moment. That’s fine. Lulu can live with that. “But she can be surprisingly all right about things when you need her to be. Way better than Dad is, anyway.”

Lulu lets her sister go, dodging out of their embrace to snag a box of cereal Naomi was about to put in the cabinet. It’s been an emotional day; she deserves a bedtime snack.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says before she goes.

Talking to Naomi takes some of the air out of Lulu; it punctures the cloud that carried her from Cass’s house to her own, and she goes about the business of brushing her teeth and washing her face like any other night.

But then, in the morning, in her terrible tiny bed in her mother’s dead-air apartment, there’s a Flash from Cass on Lulu’s phone. In the picture, Cass is lying in bed in a pool of white sunshine, the hollows of her throat cast in deep blue shadow. The imprint of Lulu’s teeth is the faintest possible lilac, just above her collarbone. You’re going to have to be a little more careful with me, the caption says.

The way Lulu’s breath catches tells her everything she needs to know about how far gone she is already. She closes her eyes and presses her hands to her face, helpless and happy about it. You’re going to have to be much more careful with me, Cass, please, she thinks, but doesn’t send.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

SO MUCH ABOUT this is unfamiliar, but certain things stay the same. When Cass texts Hotel today? the next morning, Lulu writes back:

I think I’m gonna stay home today—got the apartment to myself
You can come over if you want

Okay, Cass says.

They both know that Lulu means Come over and kiss me.

Cass does.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

LULU WAKES UP on Christmas morning and sees that Bea has tagged Kiley in one of her Flash posts—some inside joke she doesn’t even get. Her stomach clenches and her toes curl. So she’s already in a bad mood when she sees she has a message from Cass that says, I’m worried about Ryan.

Lulu’s immediate mental response is why, which makes her feel like an asshole. Maybe something really is wrong. So she writes back, What happened???

Nothing is wrong, though, because of course it isn’t. Cass says: