Chapter Two
Chapter
Two
Dylan Monroe loved being miserable.
That was the only explanation for the way she was glued to her phone right now, eyes scanning the disaster that was her life. She sat on her turquoise couch in her cavernous house in Silver Lake, pausing her scrolling to stop on a picture of Jocelyn Gareth, her platinum-blond hair a blur next to her new girlfriend’s shiny black waves.
The picture itself wasn’t the problem. Nor was the new girlfriend, Ruby Chopra, an actual nice human Dylan had worked with when they were both in their midtwenties in Hollywood, acting as the BFFs of a main character in the teen sitcom Girlish , which had lasted only one season. The problem wasn’t even Jocelyn, Dylan’s ex, although Dylan’s teeth clenched at the sight of her angelic smile and sparkling blue eyes.
No, the problem, as always, was the copy in this Page Six article, which wasn’t even about Jocelyn and her new leading lady, but rather how Dylan would react to the new pairing. And not a single line of text hypothesized that Dylan would take the news with grace and charm and dignity.
While Dylan Monroe has been silent on the subject and her team declined to comment on Jocelyn’s new love, it comes as no surprise that Dylan was recently spotted at Bacari Silverlake nursing several vodka tonics and cursing out anyone with a camera in their hands.
“I was at dinner with my aunt, you vultures,” Dylan said to absolutely no one, her jaw clenched. “How dare I want to eat some fucking Bacari fries in peace.”
She should put her phone down now. She knew she should, go eat something with protein, maybe take a swim and read through her script in the sun, soak up some vitamin D.
But she was never very good at should .
She kept reading, her temples aching from grinding her teeth.
But that’s what we’ve come to expect from America’s favorite party girl. The only child of nineties rock icons—Jack Monroe of Evenflow and Carrie Page of Halcyon—Dylan Monroe isn’t known for grace. Always the bad girl on-screen, Dylan’s life off-screen matches up pretty perfectly, filled with wild parties, public arguments with her mother, and drama-laced breakups.
The latest of which occurred just this past March at Jocelyn Gareth’s thirtieth birthday party atop the Mondrian Los Angeles hotel. A private event with tight security, yet nothing stopped videos leaking featuring a rabidly angry Dylan Monroe throwing nearly twenty bottles of Veuve Clicquot into the pool, all while screaming about Jocelyn’s alleged cheating. Cheating, mind you, that has never been confirmed. The affair took a dark turn when the police were called, and Dylan’s people removed her from the scene via helicopter.
Yes, you read that right.
Hel-i-cop-ter.
“The elevator was malfunctioning!” Dylan yelled, collapsing back onto the cushions and releasing a grunt at the ceiling. She tossed her phone into the L-curve of the couch. Goddamn gossip columnists. Granted, the Clicquot…yeah, that had happened, as well as the screaming, but it wasn’t about cheating. Jesus Christ, everyone in Hollywood thought every single romantic issue was about infidelity. But Jocelyn hadn’t cheated on Dylan. Instead, she’d done something even worse, something Dylan couldn’t even talk about without sounding petty and bratty and like an all-around bitch.
She huffed, got up, and grabbed her phone from the other side of the couch, this time flopping onto her stomach as she continued to read.
Shockingly, Dylan is headed to a small town in New Hampshire in a few weeks to start filming a rom-com, her first ever, playing a simple darling pining after her first love opposite Oscar nominee Aubrey Daniels. As for us, we’ll buy that sweet little story when we see it.
Good luck, Nowhere, New Hampshire—trouble is on the way.
Dylan swiped out of the article, letting her head fall into her arms. She released a scream, her voice muffled against the couch cushions, making her little tantrum sound much milder than she felt. She stayed like that for a while, until her self-loathing really kicked into gear and she swiped over to Instagram, scrolling through the comments on Jocelyn’s latest post about how she, Killin’ Dylan Monroe, would be out for Ruby’s blood.
“I don’t like blood,” she said loudly. “I pass out at the sight of blood.”
“I always thought that was an interesting quality for a former vampire,” Laurel’s voice called from the entryway.
“I’m full of surprises,” Dylan said, still scrolling as Laurel, her manager for the last four years, strolled into the room dressed in a hot-pink blazer, fitted lace blouse, and wide-legged black pants. “Plus, it’s hard to get squeamish when you know it’s just corn syrup and dish soap.”
“Fair,” Laurel said, setting a cocoa-brown box with a simple white-and-gold label on the quartz counters in the mammoth, mostly unused kitchen.
Dylan tilted her head at the box. “What the hell is that?”
Laurel only pursed her mouth. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Dylan crawled up to her knees, pointed an accusing finger at the box. “That’s from Lark Cake Shop. You only ever bring me Lark Cake Shop—a chocolate tart, to be exact—when you have to deliver some awful news, and I swear to god, Laurel, I’m not in the mood.”
Laurel was not swayed in the least, not that Dylan expected her to be. Her manager was one of the best in the business—as a Black trans woman who had started transitioning when she was only sixteen and living with her supportive widower father in south Georgia, she’d seen and dealt with more than her fair share of other people’s bullshit. She knew exactly how to handle Dylan’s drama, which was exactly why Dylan would never, ever fire her, even if she wanted to, which she certainly didn’t.
Her manager’s dark eyes flicked down to the phone in Dylan’s hand, then she sighed. “Please tell me you’re not—”
“I am. I am , Laurel, because they’re lying their asses off. I don’t give two shits about Jocelyn and Ruby, and I—”
“Of course they’re lying their asses off, Dylan, it’s Hollywood , or did you forget what you do for a living?” Laurel plucked Dylan’s phone from her hand. “Who your parents are?”
Dylan’s throat went thick, that decades-old feeling of helplessness cresting over her. As if she could ever forget who her parents were, the king and queen of nineties alternative rock, still adored and revered in all corners of the music world, despite their incredibly messy past—one divorce and another breakup from each other with a final reconciliation five years ago, the fug of drugs and sex and booze in which they attempted over and over to raise Dylan, and the still-constant mention of their names in the tabloids, usually alongside Dylan’s as their fucked-up, wildling daughter, the collateral damage to a legendary life of rock and roll.
Since the day she threw her first toddler temper tantrum in Carrie’s too-skinny arms on a busy Brooklyn street, the press had spun every single emotion she displayed even semi-publicly as a meltdown, so, yes, she knew full well who her parents were.
She just didn’t like it.
And, granted, she had a lot of emotions. She never tried to pretend she didn’t. She had a therapist, kept a list of breathing exercises in her head, and had an app on her phone that blasted green noise into her skull anytime she felt like she was going to lose her shit.
Which, lately, was often.
Ever since her breakup with Jocelyn, she’d felt even more trapped than normal. Sure, she’d had her fair share of breakups, some of them very public and very intense, but she’d been in her twenties then, still under her old agent Vance’s thumb, still clueless about what the hell she was doing with her life, with her fame, with her parents.
She was only eleven when she’d been launched into acting, a cherubic face all her father’s and her mother’s ice-green eyes. She hadn’t slowed down since, hadn’t made a single choice of her own as she was thrown into role after role playing the troubled child, the troubled teen, the troubled and morally bankrupt vampire named Giselle in Spellbound , a supernatural show that ran for six seasons and that catapulted her into a fandom that felt all her own for the first time in her life.
Still, even with the Spellbinders, as they called themselves, she was the villain, the one they loved to hate, loved to lust after, a role that Vance pushed her into as a nineteen-year-old and spent six years trying to make fit. Sure, she had some good times on the show. A lot of them, but she also struggled to understand her character and fought constantly with other cast members.
Lonely .
That was the predominant emotion she took from her time on Spellbound . After the show ended, she did a brief run on Girlish , which some critics say tanked because she was thoroughly unconvincing as a science-nerd seventeen-year-old.
After that, she fought Vance for more roles she truly wanted to play—romance leads, heroes who caught the bad guy, introspective millennials in indie films—all of which Vance scoffed at and refused to even try for.
You’re not that kind of actor, Dilly , Vance had said. You’re femme fatale. You’re…
She’d lifted her eyebrow at him, waiting for him to say something truly creepy, considering he’d been directing her life since she was a preteen.
He’d shut his mouth though. He never crossed those lines, which was the one decent thing Dylan could say about him. Still, he was a balding cishet white man who called her Dilly and treated her like she was forever one glass of wine away from a stint in rehab. But he was a famous LA agent—a true legend in the business—who’d approached a perpetually high Jack and Carrie after an Evenflow concert one sultry summer night with a solid plan of success for their young and precocious daughter. Money is what her parents heard, so they trusted him, gave their daughter to him, essentially, and Dylan spent the next fourteen years contorting herself into Vance’s image of her, into Hollywood’s image, her parents’.
Even her own image of herself, which was cloudy and unformed in her mind, never clear, never something she created herself.
So at twenty-five, she went behind Vance’s back.
Cold auditioned for Picture This , a swoony romance where she would play a powerful advertising executive who falls for the down-on-his-luck owner of a bakery she’s trying to rebrand. Dylan loved the idea of playing a badass woman, getting into her vulnerable side, tapping into emotions other than vengeance and anger and teen angst. Actually being one half of a love story.
The audition did not go well.
She barely made it to the end of the scene, as the casting director and director himself—Cale Richter, a popular creator of Hollywood rom-coms—pretty much laughed her out of the room. Oh, they let her read, but did so with amused expressions, lifted eyebrows, and chuckles when she got to an especially emotional part in the script.
Needless to say, she didn’t get the role, and by the time she dragged herself home, Vance was already blowing up her phone with messages about how unprofessional and immature and embarrassing she was.
After that…well…Dylan had a tiny little quarter-life crisis. She fired Vance, fired her assistant, and spent the next six months locked up in her house eating delivery food and reading multiple novels a week, consuming anyone and everyone’s story except her own, and feeling ridiculously sorry for herself.
“Come on,” Laurel said now, bringing the cake box over to the couch and sitting down next to Dylan. “Eat it.”
“What, this bribe disguised as a goddess-tier chocolate delicacy?”
“Yes, exactly,” Laurel said, setting the box in her lap and Dylan’s phone in her own pocket.
Dylan sighed, but opened the box, sugary heaven drifting into the air. She could never say no to Laurel—well, except for the times she did , but it was never about anything really important—because unlike Vance, she trusted Laurel with her life, with her career, with pretty much everything. She was infinitely grateful for Laurel and that her aunt, Hallie—her father’s very normal sister who taught gender studies at the University of Georgia where Laurel had gone to undergrad, and who helped take care of Dylan through the years when Jack and Carrie fell off the planet—had sent her favorite former student Dylan’s way four years ago.
Without Hallie and Laurel—along with Dylan’s agent, Adriana, who was a badass in and of herself and worked closely with Laurel to keep Dylan’s career on track—Dylan would most likely still be buried under a pile of paperback books and Cherry Garcia.
“Okay, so,” Laurel said, propping one ankle on her knee and brushing a dark curl from her face. “You want the good news first, or the bad news?”
“Bad,” Dylan said through a mouthful of chocolate. “Always bad.”
Laurel nodded. She knew Dylan was a “rip off the Band-Aid” kind of person, which Laurel always did with a tough-love yank that often left Dylan gasping for breath. She braced herself.
“Aubrey is out,” Laurel said.
Despite her preparedness, Dylan nearly inhaled a chunk of tart into her lungs. “Out?” She coughed, banged on her chest. “Out of what?”
“Out of the movie.”
“ My movie?”
Laurel nodded. “Skiing accident. Broke her leg. Surgery, rehab, the whole nine yards.”
“Fuck,” Dylan said. “Is she okay?”
“Will be,” Laurel said, nodding. “After those whole nine yards I mentioned.”
“Right.” Dylan blinked, her mind whirring. She liked Aubrey Daniels. They’d never acted together, but had met at several events over the last few years, and they’d done well together during the film’s read-through last month. Moreover, she was queer and kind and treated Dylan like she belonged exactly where she was. Never even mentioned Evenflow or Halcyon or what it was like to see pictures of herself as a two-year-old asleep on top of a half-eaten pepperoni pizza in a trashed hotel room.
She’d been looking forward to playing opposite Aubrey in As If You Didn’t Know , her first rom-com—a queer rom-com at that, and with a plethora of studio money behind it. Dylan still couldn’t believe Adriana had secured her the co-lead.
Finally.
The kind of role she wanted, dreamed about, with a costar she admired and respected and who seemed to respect her too.
“What the hell is the good news?” she asked Laurel.
“We’re not quite done with the bad.”
“Shit.” Dread coiled into Dylan’s belly. “Who’s taking Aubrey’s place?”
“Blair Emmanuel.”
The name flitted through the space between them, a ghost.
Or, rather, a witch.
“Blair,” Dylan deadpanned.
“Blair,” Laurel deadpanned back.
Dylan felt half of the chocolate tart she’d already consumed threaten rebellion in her stomach. Blair Emmanuel was gorgeous and talented and bisexual just like Dylan, and she had played Cressida, a much-beloved witch hell-bent on Dylan’s own vampiric character’s destruction for six straight seasons of Spellbound . They hated each other on-screen because that was their job, but the vitriol bled into real life too. They were constantly bickering on set about everything from Dylan eating the last vegan doughnut when she wasn’t even a vegan to a screaming match mid-scene over either Dylan’s or Blair’s tone, an eyebrow raised too dramatically or some such shit.
Dylan knew their enmity was petty and childish and didn’t matter five years later, but she hadn’t worked with Blair since, never wanted to, and now they were suddenly romantic costars.
As in romance .
Swooning and smiles and vulnerability and fear and kissing, all the things Dylan was excited to explore as an actor and now dreaded digging into with Blair, whose own reputation in Hollywood was that of an absolute class act.
She swallowed hard, glanced down at her half-eaten torte. “Is that it?”
“That’s it,” Laurel said, waving her hand through the air. “Can totally move on to the good news now.”
“And what’s that? My father’s working on the movie’s soundtrack?”
Laurel simply cleared her throat, ignoring Dylan’s comment altogether. “The good news is Spellbound fans are going to go rabid over this pairing.”
Oh, Dylan just bet they would. Spellbinders were drama thirsty, and they loved it when the gossip sites inevitably posted some article about how Dylan had dared to raise her voice in public while Blair was spotted demurely sipping cava by the sea.
“Great publicity for the movie,” Laurel said. “And for you.”
“For me?”
“You’re not exactly America’s sweetheart right now, Dylan.”
Dylan huffed and set the dessert box on the tufted ottoman, her appetite for comfort chocolate completely sapped. “Thanks for putting it mildly.”
“That’s not what you pay me to do. And America loves Blair. They love Spellbound , and the producers think this could go a long way to smoothing over your image.”
“My image.”
Laurel sighed. “You’re about to play a major role in a major queer film, and the studio needs it to do well. Really well. You’re playing a hometown lesbian who serves coffee for a living, and this morning, there are pictures of you in TMZ making a very rude gesture while hanging out of a helicopter.”
“God, those are surfacing again?”
“So, yes, Dylan, your image,” Laurel said without missing a beat.
Dylan rested her elbows on her knees, dropped her head into her hands. “Why did they even cast me?”
Laurel was silent for long enough that Dylan looked up. “Laurel.”
Laurel blinked, shook her head. “They cast you because you’re right for the role. That, and Adriana is very good at her job.”
Dylan exhaled heavily. “She really is.”
“Now you just need to ensure they continue to see how perfect you are to play Eloise Tucker, small-town sweetheart.”
Dylan nodded. Took a deep breath. A few deep breaths. She could do this. She had to do this. She wanted these kinds of roles, wanted to prove she was more than the villain, more than pools full of Clicquot and waggling her tongue through her fingers from a helicopter.
More than her parents.
More than that toddler asleep on a pizza, tomato sauce streaked over her little arms and legs.
She pressed her eyes closed—the memory she was too young to remember felt so real, full color in her brain, her blood. The longing, the mess, the fame, it was all there, pulsing just under her ribs.
And she wanted more than that.
“Okay,” she said, straightening her shoulders, smoothing her hair. “This is fine.”
“It is. It will be,” Laurel said.
“Blair and I are more mature now,” Dylan said. “Perfectly capable of being civil to each other. Professional.”
“And if not, you fake it,” Laurel said, a favorite tagline of hers. Fake it, fake it, fake it. That’s all Hollywood is anyway.
“I’m shocked Rayna hasn’t concocted some fake dating romance between Blair and me,” Dylan said, laughing, but Laurel’s expression sort of…froze. Dylan’s eyes went wide. “What. Tell me you’re kidding.”
Laurel winced. “Rayna suggested it. Blair’s people shut it down.”
Dylan blinked, this news settling in slowly. Rayna was her publicist, brought in by Laurel, and was a heady mix of sweet tea and arsenic, a viper disguised as a debutante. Fake dating between two starlets was probably her wet dream.
“So, Blair didn’t want to fake date me,” Dylan said.
“She did not.”
It shouldn’t bother her—she didn’t want to fake date Blair either, Jesus. But at the same time, why didn’t Blair want to fake date her?
She shook her head, stood up. “Okay, whatever. This is fine.”
“You said that already.”
“Well, it is,” she said, impressed by how calm she felt, how smooth her tone was. She was going to focus on what she could control, just like her therapist, Eli, reminded her to do every week.
Simple.
Easy.
“Did you make sure the diner is still ready to train me?” she asked, picking up the thick script for As If You Didn’t Know from the ottoman and tucking it under her arm.
“All set. Three weeks and you’ll be a bona fide waitress in Clover Lake, New Hampshire.”
The town’s name wrapped around her like a hug, a soft smile settling on her mouth as sweet memories warmed and loosened her tight chest. “You ever been there?”
“Clover Lake?” Laurel asked, standing up too. “No.”
“It’s lovely.”
“You’ve been?”
Dylan nodded. “Hallie took me for a week during the summer I was thirteen. My parents were…well.” She cleared her throat. “It was a good few days.” Her memory drifted to a dark-eyed girl, a long fishtail braid, and a cherry-print T-shirt. The girl’s face was blurry now, but the feeling was still there—comfort and hope and excitement, first kisses and laughter.
Just two girls being kids. Something Dylan never really got to be, not like other children. Not like that girl on Clover Lake’s shore.
“Anyway,” Dylan said, shaking off the dreamy memories. She returned to them too often, whenever she was stressed or overwhelmed, that singularly happy moment in her life. But she had work to do now. She had to focus, not dwell in a fairy tale that she sometimes had a hard time believing was even real. “It’ll be a great location. Good to get out of LA, that’s for sure.”
Laurel dug Dylan’s phone out of her pocket and held it out. “Can I trust you with this?”
Dylan flicked her eyes to the device, then picked up her cake box and turned away. “Probably not.”
She headed out onto her back patio and into the perpetual LA sunshine to try her damnedest to become the best small-town queer gal the world had ever seen.