Page 20 of Dream On, Ramona Riley

Dylan nodded. “Screenplays, demos to give to my parents, portfolios of stage design—I don’t even do theater, but people see someone like me and think we’re made of fairy dust, I guess. I don’t know.”

Ramona was quiet beside her, frowning at the ground.

“It’s not just strangers either,” Dylan said. “Every ex or friend I’ve ever had wanted something from me.”

“That must be hard,” Ramona said, eyes still on the pine needles under their feet.

“It can be.” Dylan sighed. “Today, I just wanted to be…yeah,normal, I guess. Small-town Dylan.” She laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “I wanted to do one thing right.”

Ramona kept her hands in her pockets, apron slung over her shoulder. “So what’s something you do right?”

Dylan laughed. “Lately? Not a lot. I get angry the wrong way. I break up the wrong way. I scroll through Instagram the wrong way—”

“Instagram?”

“My manager confiscates my phone on the regular. It’s a whole thing.”

Ramona nodded, didn’t ask anything else about it, and Dylan sort of loved her for it.

“Anyway,” Dylan said. “We start filming tomorrow and I can’t even carry a plate of food twenty feet, so, yeah, my confidence is a little shot. Silly, I know.”

“It’s not silly,” Ramona said, bending to inspect a patch of blue-green mushrooms that looked like tiny cups spreading over a log, then taking out her phone and snapping a picture. “It’s natural to want to feel competent at things, no matter what it is.”

She squatted now, squinting at the mushrooms and clicking another picture, this one closer up.

“What are those?” Dylan asked, squatting too. “I’ve never seen them before.”

“Elf cups,” Ramona said. “Aren’t they gorgeous? If you’ve ever been walking along in the woods and see some bark that looks stained blue, it’s probably because of these little beauties.”

Dylan looked at Ramona, whose face was full of wonder. “You like mushrooms, huh?”

Ramona laughed and stood up, Dylan following. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“Explains the bag,” Dylan said, nodding toward the bag crisscrossing Ramona’s body, tiny red-and-white mushrooms dotting the dark gray canvas.

“Oh, yeah,” Ramona said, hand swiping down the material as they started walking again. “My sister gave this to me. We got really into mushrooms when she was around four. We’d spend hours in the woods behind our house, foraging and searching, then we’d come home and look up everything we found, learn about them.”

“I never really thought about it,” Dylan said.

“They’re just so amazing,” Ramona said, talking fast and then tapping her foot on the ground. “Underneath us, there’s a whole other world going on. Mushrooms talk to each other, help the trees talk to each other. They care for each other. It’s incredible.”

“What do they talk about, I wonder,” Dylan asked.

Ramona laughed. “Olive—that’s my sister—and I once wrote a really bad poem about that.”

Dylan smiled. “I’d like to read it.”

“Oh, no, you would not, trust me.”

“Come on, don’t be modest.”

Ramona just smiled and shook her head.

The trail curved and the lake came into view, sparkling and blue under the late morning sun. The main beach area was visible, a plethora of people dotting the dark sand. Dylan hoped they weren’t heading in that direction.

Because she loved this.

A simple walk.