Extracurricular

Prologue

On nights like this, she loses herself in feeling adored.

As usual, the lights are too bright for her to see past the first few rows.

The audience is a blur of pale yellow to match her latest album cover, the one with her sprawled in the wreckage of a giant cake.

There are fishnets and tulle, plaid miniskirts and corset tops.

An almost irresponsible amount of glitter.

Her fans always dress up for her, and she loves their confident expressions of girlhood even more than she hated scraping buttercream out of her lashes.

Tomorrow, though—tomorrow she’s going to break their hearts.

“Milwaukee!” she yells into the mic, and they cheer like it’s the title of their favorite song. She arranges her doe eyes and cherry-stained lips into an expression of dramatic concern. “Milwaukee, I need your help.”

At this, she waits a beat while the crowd quiets down. Scattered whoops. Hundreds of phones pointed at her face.

“I’m a little nervous,” she continues, her voice grave, “because it’s been a while since this next song came out, and I’m not sure I remember how it goes. I think it’s something like—” She hums the chorus, brow furrowing. “Sort of like that, right?”

Laughter rolls through the arena, even though most of them have seen her do this bit online. A girl in the third row who can’t be older than seven perches on the shoulders of a mother or sister. She’s been singing at the top of her lungs all night. Ramona makes eye contact. Gives her a wave.

She’s still humming, purposefully off-key as she searches for the tune. “God, this is embarrassing for me.” Her bottom lip snagged between her teeth, and then: “Does anyone here know the words?”

Their screams are a hit of dopamine straight to her veins, such pure joy that she can almost ignore the itch in her throat and the fear that her voice will crack. Thank god for the backup singers.

Her guitarist hits that familiar crunchy chord, and then Ramona launches into the song that made her famous.

It’s the last stop on her Wasted Potential World Tour that kicked off in Los Angeles five months ago, winding its way across the country and up into Canada before a string of dates in the UK and Europe, then back to the Midwest for a few final shows that no one knows yet are her final shows.

Not her parents or her producers or Len at the record label.

And certainly not Thaniel, the lead singer of her opening act, who she’s been hooking up with for much longer than she planned, and who insists on going by that name despite how awkward it is to pronounce and the sheer number of better nickname options there are for Nathaniel.

She wanted tonight to be a true grand finale. The best show of her life, the one that will define her career even as she ends it.

Instead, she tweaks her ankle during the first chorus and spends the rest of the song focused on keeping the pain off her face.

It’s more of a whimper than a crescendo, but none of the fans seem to care.

Heart-shaped confetti rains down from the ceiling while she blows kisses to the audience, hugs her dancers and her band, thanks everyone for being there.

For supporting her on this tour. For being the reason she’s able to do this.

She wishes it were enough, their adoration, and a ribbon of guilt wraps tight around the parts of her midsection that aren’t squeezed by her high-waisted leather shorts. Maybe it would be, if this were only about the music.

But that’s the thing—it’s never been only about the music.

Then she’s backstage and someone is pushing a bottle of sparkling water into her hands, someone has an ice pack for her ankle, someone is helping her unbuckle these godforsaken shoes. She pushes hair and confetti out of her face and breathes.

It should feel like a bigger relief.

“You were incredible, baby,” Thaniel says as he swoops in for a kiss, though she’s too exhausted to give him anything but her forehead. “So fucking hot.”

She reaches up to pat his cheek. “Thanks, Thaniel.” Just because she hates that pretentious nickname, she makes a point to use it as much as possible. “I think I’m ten seconds away from passing out.”

“You gotta let me take you out to celebrate.” The suggestion comes with a hand on her ass, because what he really means by celebrate is her blowing him in his hotel room before faking an orgasm that’s more of a performance than anything she’s ever done onstage. And as appealing as that is—

“I really just want to sleep. For two weeks straight.” She coughs into her elbow, but it does nothing to ease the pressure in her chest. “And I might be getting sick.”

“We could sleep afterward,” he offers with a flutter of one eyebrow, and she wonders how she ever fell for this.

Soon, she reminds herself. It’ll all be over soon.

Her parents descend, her mother giving Thaniel a tight smile and a dismissive wave.

DeeAnn Wilder, who handles her promotion and merchandising, and Beck Wilder, who handles her music, have been jointly managing her since her children’s television days, her role on Greta Life!

that made her a tween idol before her debut album broke all those records.

“They could see your underboob for the last three songs,” DeeAnn says, passing Ramona a towel so she can dab the sweat on her face.

In an instant, the relief is replaced by a too-familiar emotion: shame.

“I knew that leather bra was a disaster waiting to happen. One more spin, and you would have been flashing your nipples.”

“A hell of a way to end the tour,” Ramona deadpans, but DeeAnn is unamused. She glances down at the bra and the apparently offensive part of her body that’s on display. Adjusts it, though it doesn’t matter now.

This is the line Ramona has never been able to walk without stumbling, the careful balance between sexy and slutty.

Men should want to fuck you, an exec told her once, but they shouldn’t feel dirty about it.

She should have bolted from that meeting and never looked back.

There are so many times she’s pleaded with the universe to tank her career. When she had her first panic attack at age fourteen during a live taping of Greta. When a boyfriend broke her heart right before she went onstage in S?o Paulo. When she reads any of the comments sections.

Maybe it’s taken her a decade to summon the courage, but now she has it all planned out. A carefully written statement waiting on her laptop that she’ll post directly to her Instagram without running it by a single publicist.

Her resignation.

Because that’s what it is, in simplest terms—she’s quitting her job, the one she’s had since she signed that first contract as a starry-eyed kid, when she didn’t know where any of it would lead.

Her parents follow her into her dressing room, where she collapses onto the gray suede couch that witnessed her preshow panic attack. She can still hear the tender chaos out in the arena. “Do we have any more DayQuil? Or I guess it would be NyQuil? Bonus points if it knocks me out.”

“Suzette might,” her father says, but makes no move to call the assistant into the room. “I promise we won’t keep you too long. Can’t believe this one’s really over, huh? What a ride.”

Ramona chugs the rest of her seltzer, her preferred method of hydration.

Her throat is aching, her brain fuzzy. She can’t decide if she’s too cold or too warm, so she grabs a fleece blanket, scattering sequins on the floor as she wraps it around herself.

Her bed sounds heavenly right now, not the one in a Milwaukee hotel suite but the one in her LA home that she hasn’t seen in months.

Her bed and her white-noise machine and her cat curled up next to her.

“You’ve been looking through those songs Milo sent you, right?

” Beck rolls over a chair while DeeAnn takes a seat next to her on the couch.

She should probably text Suzette about that NyQuil, only she can’t remember where her phone is.

“And I think we’re all dying to know what you’ve been working on yourself.

Ideally we can get you back in the studio next month, but we should really start talking themes for the next album.

Some people think you’re still trying too hard to be edgy, and the last thing we want is to keep doing the same thing over and over. ”

“Maybe even a full rebrand,” her mother puts in. “The Real Ramona. Ramona Deconstructed. Et cetera.”

She’d rather eat glass, even if Pitchfork’s review of her last album still haunts her. Wannabe feminist drivel, they called it. “Do we really have to do this now?” she asks.

DeeAnn scrolls through one of the three phones she has on her at all times.

“It’ll only take a second. L’Oréal wants you for their new sustainable beauty campaign, but we can do better.

I still think we ought to reconsider you starting your own line.

I know there was that little kerfuffle with that set of lip glosses—”

“The ones that had lead in them? That kerfuffle?” She’d been fifteen, high off a series renewal and her first six-figure paycheck, when the sickly-sweet lip gloss set with her face on the box was pulled from shelves, and she’d had to issue a public apology.

She’d even made a donation to a nonprofit focused on reducing lead exposure.

DeeAnn waves this off. “It was a long time ago. No one remembers that.”

Then her parents launch into their favorite activity: discussing Ramona’s career like she’s their employee instead of their daughter.

Because it isn’t enough that she just wrapped a tour that earned them both millions of dollars.

She learned early on—back when she still had some of her baby teeth, grinning into the camera for a Children’s Claritin commercial—that no matter how good she was, there would always be someone wanting more.