Page 3 of Dream On, Ramona Riley

The play ranfor only an hour, and Ramona had a shift at the café starting at four. After helping the kids store their costumes on hangers instead of the dressing room’s poured-cement floor, she and April walked toward downtown.

“Okay, hear me out,” April said, turning around on the sidewalk to walk backward. The watery May sunshine sprinkled gold through the flowering trees, the clear blue sky making Clover Lake glitter like a sapphire in the distance. The lake was huge—not quite Winnipesaukee huge, but close—and the entire town wrapped around it like a crescent moon. Summer people were already starting to move in, lake houses shut up for the long winter airing out, shiny cars in once-empty driveways. Ramona loved summer in Clover Lake—she loved all the seasons, really, but summer held a certain magic to it, a freedom and possibility.

“Don’t you have someone’s body part to draw on?” Ramona asked, but she was smiling.

April grinned, the Nirvana tee she’d cut the neck out of dropping down her tree-inked shoulder. “Not until six, so you’re stuck with me until then.”

“Neverstuck,” Ramona said, looping her arm with April’s. “Just…attached.”

“Nice spin, but that’s half the problem.”

“What?”

“You’re too fucking nice!”

Ramona sighed. “Ilikedoing costumes.”

“Yeah, I know. Costume design was your endgame. LA, New York, stages or films full of actors who’ve actually been through puberty. You know, dreams?”

“Hmm,” Ramona said, tapping her chin. “Think I had one lastnight where my hands had turned into crab claws. Wonder what that means…”

“We’ll google it,” April said, stepping around a turquoise bike leaning against a lamppost. “In the meantime, you need to do something that doesn’t involve safety pins, prepubescents, or pouring bad chardonnay for tourists who don’t realize all chardonnay is disgusting and tastes like butter. I’m thinking some dates.”

Ramona nearly choked on the air. “Dates?”

“Yeah. Romance. Hot people. Sex?”

Ramona opened her mouth.

“AndnotLogan Adler,” April said.

Ramona snapped her mouth shut. Logan was Ramona’s on-again, off-again boyfriend of the last five years or so, a lifelong Cloverian just like Ramona. He was a nice guy—a hot guy—who ran his family’s furniture shop in town, and with whom Ramona had very good sex and very little else, which was why they kept breaking up and then falling back into bed with each other.

Over and over again.

Needless to say, April did not approve, said that Ramona needed someone more emotionally stimulating than a celery stick in human form.

“Logan is a good guy,” Ramona said.

April groaned and Ramona laughed. It wasn’t like she hadn’t dated anyone else in the last few years, she just hadn’t dated much. As for sex, there had been hookups, which April knew, but yeah, the last one had been…last fall? No, last summer, that tourist named Andrea who came into the café twice a day because she thought Ramona was cute.

Okay, so it had been a year—with a little Logan sprinkled in here and there, maybe, probably—and Ramona was in a bit of a dry spell, but Olive’s senior year had been busy. Landing a full softballscholarship to a top-tier private university was no small feat. But they’d done it. And now…

And now what?

Ramona felt a wave of nerves crest in her stomach.

“Dating people not named Logan is a baby step,” April said. “Something to get you out of your comfort zone so you can get serious about getting out of the café and into an actual design job. It’s easy.”

Ramona laughed. “Oh, easy as pie, huh? I think you know better than that, April Evans.” April hadn’t dated anyone seriously in over a year, when her fiancée, Elena Watson, dumped her a month before their planned and paid for spring wedding. Not only that, but she did so for another woman, a twenty-two-year-old painting student named Daphne Love, and April had not reacted well. She’d met Elena three years before at a bar in Boston, then spent a magical night together—they walked the cobblestone streets hand-in-hand, took a ghost tour, shared their life stories, then went back to Elena’s posh apartment and had, in April’s words,DNA-altering sex. Even April’s stoic parents—the Drs. Preston and Jacqueline Evans, who rarely understood anything April said or did—had adored Elena. The whole town had. Elena was beautiful and elegant, a curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and she had loved April’s wilder, darker personality. She’d celebrated it, even, which was all April had really ever wanted.

Since the breakup, April had reverted to her pre-Elena ways, sticking to hook-ups and casual dates, rarely seeing anyone more than once. That was all well and good, but Elena was the only person April had ever truly fallen in love with, and Ramona worried April was simply too scared to try again.

“If I date, thenyoudate,” Ramona said softly. “Andnotfuckbois like Leigh Reynolds.”

April narrowed her eyes—Leigh was an old high school friend of April and Ramona’s, and April’s favorite hookup whenever Leigh swaggered back into town to see their mom.

“Don’t knock it till you try it,” April said, then shoved a single finger into the air. “Oh wait, you already have.”