Now Wilhelmina
Now WILHELMINA
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#WilChaseArrest
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Wilhelmina Chase
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#MarnieMaybe
#childhoodruined
Kira Winston @kdub3473 2h
Who had Wilhelmina Chase getting arrested on their 2025 bingo card??
Brenda Morales @morales95 1h
Marnie wtfffff #childhoodruined
Benjy Zhang @benjybyrihanna93 1h
Okay but marnie’s mugshot is a lowkey slay
Kat Brown @xxkittykat7878 2h
MARNIE MAYBE U SHOULD RE-EVALUATE LMAO
T he gavel slams and, just like that, one hundred hours of community service is staring me down.
Among “serve the community you’ve harmed” and “irresponsible disregard for private property,” the words “first-time offender” and “upstanding public figure” were thrown around.
“What about me is upstanding?” I ask my lawyer, Paula.
She slaps me with a look that says shut up, please as we exit the courthouse doors and descend the steps into a sea of cameras and flashbulbs. Reflexively, I push my sunglasses higher on my nose, like they’re my shield against a dragon. Or thirty dragons pushing into each other and breathing fire as they try to get the perfect shot of me cannonballing into a quarter-life crisis.
“Wil! Was it a fair sentence?”
“Wilhelmina! Over here! Comment?”
“Do you think you got off easy?”
I’m not sure what’s worse: grown men yelling hungrily in my face, or the social media hashtag childhood ruined that I catch as I scroll briefly through my phone. There are hundreds of posts. People laughing at me, people pulling me from the trash pile in the back of their minds to lament my loss of innocence. Marnie was a constant for so many of these fans growing up. And I’m sorry they have to see her spiraling.
I’m sorry I have to see it.
I pick a spot at the hem of Paula’s tasteful skirt-suit to zero in on, as she carves a path for us through the chaos, and try to tune them all out. Try to turn their shouts into ordinary city sounds. A bus rumbling by. A plane roaring overhead. A car honking in the distance.
But each of their questions, each of the ways my name comes shooting from their mouths, pierces me in the chest. I push down the urge to look around for a tourniquet.
In the car, I trace the outline of my phone, willing it to ring or sing out with an incoming text. From Margot or Cassie, but mostly from Dad. Except, hey, it turns out that when you attempt to burglarize your father’s ex-fiancée, he doesn’t pop bottles of champagne. He closes himself off to you. When he looks at you, as you tell him what you’ve done, it’s with quiet disbelief. With a touch of shame.
We were just starting to heal, too.
I chew my thumbnail until it’s short on one side, the skin raw pink. My knee bounces against the black leather seats of the SUV. And as we merge onto the freeway, I see a group of people in orange vests spearing stray pieces of garbage along the side of the road and shoving them into sacks.
Oh, holy fuck. This is my future.
Awesome.
My heart kicks into overdrive, pounding inside my chest as I realize that this may never go away for me. The social media posts are one thing, but I’d forgotten about tabloids and magazines. FORMER CHILD STAR ‘STICKS’ IT TO HOLLYWOOD. It’ll run next to a terrible picture of me squinting in the sun, or sneezing, or, I don’t know, sobbing, probably, on the side of the 101 with a trash-stabbing pole in hand.
I need a distraction. And pulling up his contact is too easy, too natural.
Are you busy tonight? Dinner?
Hitting send takes about four seconds. It’s the waiting for Dax to reply part that starts eating at me. Like those tiny green dinosaurs in Jurassic Park—slow and tame at first, then merciless.
But, in my hand, my phone vibrates, and a little bell eases the tension in my chest at the reply sitting right there on my screen.
Love to. Mexican?
And that’s how I dip back into the sweet, sun-drenched sea of all the good things we used to be—over margaritas and chips and guac.
There’s a booth in the back, black rounded leather beneath a neon sombrero. Through the nearest window, I watch dusk slip its fingers between the distant skyscrapers, brushing calm, beautiful, encroaching dark across Los Angeles.
Somewhere between me shoveling guacamole in my mouth and raising my hand in the air for a refill on my margarita, Dax and I ease our way into a normal conversation.
“So, you graduated.”
“Barely,” he says.
“And you loved Yale?” I ask. The word loved sends wings fluttering up through my ribs. He used to love me.
“Yale was cool,” says Dax vaguely. He sips his margarita.
My eyebrows jump up. “Yale was cool?”
“What?” He frowns. I snort. “It was. They brought in guest directors and professors all the time. It’s constant improv and Shakespeare and moving through the space like a goose and—” He peeks at my expression and I see pink creeping across his cheeks, drifting to the tips of his ears. “All of that is cool, by the way.”
I stir my cup of leftover ice with my straw and make bug eyes at the tabletop. He’s so incredibly, spectacularly dorky. “Did you say ‘like a goose’?” I squint at him.
Dax’s fingers plunge into his warm brown hair, leaving it spiked and chaotic by the time he’s dragging his hands down his face in exasperation. Damn it, the last seven years have been kind to him. “See, this is why I didn’t tell you about it.”
“I thought it was because I was pissed at you.” I’ll always have the instinct in me to quip, to slap a button on the last thing someone said. I say it with a smile, but the weight of it, heavy enough to snap our table in half, is absolutely and completely unfunny.
When I let myself look at him, Dax is scratching at his chin. “Uh, well, sure. Yeah. Could be.”
“I’m over it,” I say quickly. And I shake my head for good measure, smiling right through that lie. It’s a lie, isn’t it? That the way we ended is something I’m over. For so many years now, I’ve pinned that notion to the back of my brain.
It was the right choice for him.
Maybe I wish it hadn’t been so easy for him to make.
“Okay,” he says, nibbling his bottom lip. Dax’s eyes dip towards his lap for a beat, then they’re on me and the frozen-over look is gone. His expression is bright, friendly, interested, a little funny like he always is without trying. I can feel the twitch of muscles around my lips, making my fake-ass, totally-over-it smile turn real. “So, Wilhelmina.”
“So, Daxonius.”
His laugh is spluttering and goofy and full-bodied. He thumps his fist against his chest, grinning wide, and says to the ceiling, “Oh my god.” Then his eyes are on me again, his head shaking side to side. “How ya been?”
It’s the silly Midwestern accent he’s using that rips my first sip of a third margarita up and out through my nasal passage. I splutter and cough and laugh, flipping him off as I wipe down my face with my red cloth napkin. “Oh, you know,” I play along. My fingers fold the napkin into a tiny, neat square. “Keeping busy. Little of this, little of that.”
“Ya don’t say,” he Midwesterns again. Then he makes eye contact with our waiter and orders a Coke. When we’re alone, I watch his smile get smaller. “I booked something big.” He’s chewing his lip again. “A movie. To the Stars . Based on the book. I’m the lead.”
“Shit.” That sobers me up. “That’s huge.” A bestseller. An in-your-face bestseller. Reese’s Book Club. The buzz around this book is like pressing your ear to a hive. For a moment, I let myself imagine that buzz around Daxon, and I want to shield him from thirsty women, from scrutiny, from the kind of fame you can’t shake yourself free from.
Another part of me wants to tell him how proud I am. He really did it. Which is good, it’s so good, that these years away have given him fame and reach and the kind of notoriety I was sure would be mine instead. I know it’s good. But I can’t shake the gnawing jealousy.
He nods. “Filming in South Carolina.”
“When?”
“Four weeks.”
“Who’s starring?” I ask. Dax scratches at his chest and rattles off what they have of the cast so far. A few bigger names, a few I don’t recognize. “Who’s the other lead?”
“That’s the thing,” he says. “Can’t find one.”
My eyebrows collapse into a thick, doubtful line. “Can’t find one? You need a romantic lead and you can’t find one? Throw a rock, Dax.” I gesture towards the window, incredulous.
“We’ve auditioned, like, eight trillion women,” he says. Irealize how tired he looks. “Nobody... fits.”
“Oh, come on,” I scoff at him.
“It’s true. Swear to god. I’ve been reading audition sides since eight this morning. Nothing’s clicking.”
“You’ll find someone,” I say, because it’s true.
He sits forward, leaning his forearms on the table. Then his eyes zero in on me. I want to look away, but I can’t. He’s got his long-sleeved shirt rolled to his elbows, a vein from the top of his hand snaking around his forearm. The fucking audacity. Finally, he opens his mouth.
“How about... you?”