Page 101 of Hotter in the Hamptons

Lola ached to hug her. Instead, she stayed put, trying to respect the clear boundaries Aly was projecting.

“Let’s cut to the chase,” Aly said. “I know he spent the night. I know you’re here to tell me you’re getting back together with him. Don’t waste your breath.” Aly leaned against the side of the house, as though she were trying to do that signature too-cool thing she liked to do. “I’ve been through this before. I know how it ends.”

“No,” Lola said. “You’re wrong.”

“About which part?”

“He spent the night, but nothing happened. I wouldn’t do that to you. I’m here because of the Stepped Out post.”

Aly folded her arms across her chest and started laughing.

It wasn’t her real laugh, though. It was something meaner, colder. Lola wanted to recoil.

“Lola, who fucking cares about a Stepped Out post?”

Lola was stunned. “What?”

“You and I areknown. We went out in publictogether. What did you expect?”

Lola was pissed off now. “I expected to have my privacy respected. I expected to be able to choose how we were talked about and analyzed, how I wanted to define this.”

“Oh please.” Aly rolled her eyes. “You’re a public person. You gave up the right to privacy when you hit seven figures on Instagram.”

“I…don’t know if I agree with that,” Lola said.

Aly put her hands on her hips. “I can’t believe we’re talking about a post from some stupid fucking meme account right now.”

“It’s not just a meme account!” Lola cried. “I can’t believe you don’t care more about this. It’s my career. It’s my life, being dissected by vultures,again.”

“You don’t even want to be an influencer,” Aly shot back. “You hate that life. You haven’t tried at all this summer to get back to it. You don’t miss it at all.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Lola said, fury hot in her chest. “The reason I haven’t tried to work this summer is because I’ve been so busy falling foryou.”

“You don’t get to blame me for the fact that your life lacks direction.”

It was like getting slapped across the face. “My life doesn’t lack direction,” Lola protested, though she knew Aly was right—again. “You have no idea what I want.”

“You don’t either,” Aly said.

“Wow,” Lola said, her voice flat with anger. “So that’s what you think.”

“I think that I cared about you,” Aly said simply. “And I care about the fact that I just wasted my whole summer on something that you threw away.”

“I didn’t throw anything away,” Lola protested.

“This is my neighbor?” Aly said, mimicking Lola. “I know you never agreed to be my girlfriend, but I thought I was a little more than the girl next door.”

Lola’s vision blurred with tears. She wiped them away, not wanting Aly to see her fall apart. It was too vulnerable to cry when Aly was being so mean.

“Aly,please. I’m sorry. I don’t know why that came out of my mouth. I just wasn’t ready to tell him that I am in a relationship with the person who he thinks ruined his life. And anyway, if you cared about me, you’d care how much these photos have hurt me. This is the second—no,thirdtime I’ve been majorly called out in one summer. People keep picking me apart in public. Using my life—my real, actual life, complete with my mistakes and my feelings and my relationships—as fodder for fucking clicks. Do you have any idea how bad that feels?”

Aly didn’t seem to have anything to say to this. Instead, she looked at the ground.

Lola wanted Aly to understand how it felt like a slap in the face, how lost she felt, how, despite all the public criticism hurled her way, she was still the same girl with the same problems in the same place. But Aly didn’t seem to hear her. Aly was being defensive, not trying to work through this with Lola.

Here Lola was, coming to Aly with an open heart, and Aly wasn’t listening to a word she said.

She tried to feel empathy for Aly. She put herself in Aly’s shoes: Aly had a history of dating women who left her for men. Because of that, she was expecting the worst. And maybe, because she expected it, she was pushing for it—a self-fulling prophecy, just like when Aly ghosted her after Fire Island. Loladidfeel bad for her when she thought about it like that. But she could feel the ember of anger stoking in her belly. Because Aly was putting her personal history on Lola, a history that had nothing to do with her. It wasn’t fair.

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