Page 106 of Dream On, Ramona Riley

“I don’t know!” Ramona said, her voice reaching screeching levels. “Why would she not be in her own fucking house when I woke up?”

“Okay,” April said calmly, presenting her palms. “Okay, you’re right. Maybe she fell in the lake.”

Ramona threw her bag’s strap over her shoulder, headed for the door. “Someone must’ve seen her. She’s Dylan Monroe. She can’t go anywhere without a camera pointed at her face.”

“Hey, hang on,” April said, standing up too. “We’ll come with you.”

“What?” Leigh said.

“We’ll come with you,” April said again, glaring at Leigh.

“Right. Yes. We’ll come with you,” Leigh said, though they didn’t budge from the chair.

“Just let us get dressed,” April said, grabbing Leigh’s arm and pulling them up.

“Fine, but hurry,” Ramona said as she tried calling Dylan again. She wouldn’t mind someone going with her, to be honest. She felt a little shaky, adrenaline and worry and Dylan’s phone going to voicemail over and over again coalescing into a terrible, awful combination.

Chapter

Twenty-Seven

Predictably, brunch hadturned into a complete clusterfuck.

Dylan had tried to get them to go out of town, maybe call a Lyft and head to a nice little roadside diner off the interstate, frequented by truckers too tired to notice Jack and Carrie in all their glory. But no, they’d barely turned onto Lake Street when Carrie spotted Pierce Apothecary, a nice restaurant that did brunch every day in the summer until three p.m.

So now here Dylan was, sipping on Bellinis while every single eye in the place stared at them, along with a constant stream of patrons stopping by and telling Jack and Carrie how much they loved their music and howCitrine—Evenflow’s debut album, which rocketed the band to fame in the early nineties—changed their life or saved their life or made their life worth living or some shit.

Then they had to fawn over Carrie next, who of course came second aftertheJack Monroe, and people always had to mention something about how hard it must’ve been raising a child back then, and how lovely Dylan turned out, and Dylan wanted to screamFuck youat the top of her lungs, both for Carrie’s sake for alwaysbeing seen as a mother first and a serious musician in her own right second, and for the fact that ithadbeen so hard to raise a child back then her parents essentiallydidn’t, and Dylan hadn’t turned out lovely at all.

She’d turned out a complete dumpster fire who had to literally sink her teeth into her lower lip to keep from cussing out her parents’ adoring fans in the middle of a small New Hampshire town.

Add all this together with leaving Ramona in her bed and not knowing Ramona’s number so she could text her from her mom’s phone, and it amounted to Dylan polishing off an entire bottle of prosecco—very little peach juice added—all by her lonesome.

“Maybe you should slow down, darling,” Carrie said during a rare lull between adoring fans.

“Slow what down?” Dylan said, topping off her glass with the last of the wine. Her head was already fuzzy, and she knew, way back in the tiny corners of her brain, that her mother was probably right, that she didn’t make the best decisions when intoxicated, but the numbness felt goddamn great right now, and if she didn’t embrace it, she’d feel way too much and probably end up on top of the table shooting finger guns with her middle finger at the entire town of Clover Lake anyway.

She was a mess sober, and she was a mess drunk.

How lovely she’d turned out indeed.

“So, Dill Pickle,” Jack said, shaking some hot sauce onto his now-cold egg white omelet. “Tell us how the film is going.”

“Oh, swell,” she said, letting the wine’s bubbles pop down her throat. “Just swell.”

“How’s Blair?” Carrie asked, tearing into a piece of bacon with her teeth. “She’s so beautiful, that girl.”

“That she is,” Jack said. “We always thought you might end up with her, the way you two danced around each other duringSpell Locked.”

“Spell what?” Dylan asked.

“SpellBent, sweetheart,” Carrie said.

“Sure, that’s what I said,” Jack said, then winked at Dylan, who decided not to correct her parents on either of their completely wrong points. Not like she’d spent six whole years onSpellboundor anything. No big deal.

The server put down another bottle, which Dylan immediately tipped into her glass, sans any peach juice this time.

“Dill,” her mother warned. Her mother, who’dlearned her lessons the hard wayand who only ever drank club soda with blood orange slices and coconut water.