But her name kept coming up all the time after we saw her in the store. For five months it was like she was always with us. We went to a movie and when we were buying popcorn the guy at the popcorn counter asked Sergei if I was his sister. And then he asked if Sergei had seen Lulu lately, said how Lulu was so hot and he couldn’t believe he let her get away. That guy was lucky I didn’t come around the counter and stick his face in the boiling hot buttery topping, because nothing would have made me happier than seeing his skin blister and melt. I was so pissed I walked out of the theatre and threw my popcorn all over the parking lot. Sergei tried telling me the guy was just an idiot, and he was jealous because my father was a rich politician.

Once I went with him when he was buying groceries for his grandmother and there Lulu was at the end of the aisle, all little and cute, waving at him like she was sitting on a float in a dumb parade. I wanted to bash her head in with a can of peaches. And Sergei’s grandmother, she just loved Lulu, asking about her whenever I was there, like she was disappointed every time I came in the door. She even called me Lulu once. I almost lost it, but Sergei corrected her and told her I was Isabella. Oh yes, she said, but I could tell from her voice she was let down, like she was hoping if she counted to three I’d transform into that stupid Lulu.

“I thought you said you never went out with her,” I asked him. “So how does your grandmother know who she is?”

Sergei said he drove his grandmother to some social club for old people at the nursing home, and Lulu would do crafts with them sometimes or read to them. He said she played the flute and would do little concerts.

Lulu, Lulu, tweeting away on her flute, like some bird that won’t shut up. She was just doing whatever she could to get Sergei back — and he was defending her.

I couldn’t stop thinking about her, asking him about her. I told him I wasn’t going to have sex with him anymore, how it was over unless he got rid of her. I just wanted him to tell her to leave us alone. To take a stand. I wanted her out of our lives. Sergei kept saying she wasn’t a problem, I should just forget about her. Well, how was I supposed to do that with her popping up everywhere we went? How, I asked him, was I supposed to believe him? How was he going to prove she wasn’t a problem?

I told Sergei that if he didn’t get her to stop bugging me I’d tell my father he’d been coming over every night for months, and I’d tell the police he was a drug dealer. And no more touching my body. No more Wicked Witch of the West ever again, just Dorothy, and Dorothy isn’t any fun. He kept saying it was all in my mind, that I was getting totally paranoid and neu­rotic. Our town was so small we were bound to run into her sometimes, he said. She wasn’t stalking him and he wasn’t lying or hiding anything. But I could tell. I just have this extra sense. I’m not like other people.