Chapter Five
Chapter
Five
Ramona was in full-blown panic mode.
Granted, her panic mode took the form of serene smiles and calmly walking down a sidewalk with a very famous person next to her, all while her heart rammed against her ribs at what felt like two hundred beats per minute.
No, let’s do it.
That’s what’s she’d said when Dylan was giving her a very clear, very kind way out.
Let’s do it.
Why the hell had she said, Let’s do it ?
Of course she knew why—her demon best friend April’s voice in the back of her head, whispering all sorts of nefarious plans.
Seriously though, this is it. Your way in .
And somehow, someway, in the last three hours since April had texted those fateful words, Ramona had truly considered them—Dylan could be her way in.
A connection.
That’s all it was. Not like she’d be using Dylan, but it was just—
Let’s do it.
Ramona wanted to smack herself in the head, a wash of guilt cresting through her stomach.
Okay, breathe, Ramona . She had to breathe.
“I really do love this town,” Dylan said, jolting Ramona out of her guilt spiral.
They’d just turned onto the block where April’s tattoo shop—Wonderlust Ink—was located, and Ramona couldn’t get there fast enough. Unfortunately, the source of a lot of her stress was also the only person she wanted to talk to when she was melting down internally.
“Oh yeah?” Ramona asked, her voice way too high-pitched and obvious. “It’s cute, I guess.”
“Cute?” Dylan waved at the vintage lampposts, the navy and hunter green roofs lining the street, the cobbled sidewalks. “It’s adorable. I actually came here once, years ago.”
Ramona nearly tripped on her own feet.
“Did you?” she managed to squeak.
Dylan nodded, ambling along with her hands in her pockets. “With my aunt. We stayed in this cabin by the lake. It was over the Fourth holiday, and I met this—”
“Oh, wow, look, here we are,” Ramona said quickly, because one thing she knew she could not do right now was hear her own story come out of Dylan’s clueless mouth.
She swung open the glass door of Wonderlust, the sound of a buzzing tattoo gun drifting through the room. The place was small, but in a small town, a tattoo shop didn’t need to be huge, and April did plenty of business. There were only two work areas—one for April and one for Mac, her apprentice turned full-time artist—but April made up for the lack of space with lots of flair. Art covered nearly every inch of the walls, but in a way that felt both sophisticated and cozy. Multicolored frames of all different sizes featured various illustrations, most of them April’s from her time at RISD and beyond, everything from flowers and luna moths and queer identity flags, to Moira in her crow costume from Schitt’s Creek and Dolly Parton’s dimple-cheeked face. The fixtures were all antique bronze with amber lighting, the walls a moody teal. It was strange and beautiful and very, very April Evans. She’d redone a lot of it over the past year, as Elena’s taste had bled into the shop when they were together. Needless to say, Ramona liked April’s style much more.
“Hey,” April said when she spotted Ramona. She was with a client—Molly Engle, a fortysomething mom who had nearly two full sleeves on her arms—and, by the looks of it, April had just finished inking a tendril of ivy around her left wrist. “I didn’t know you were—” But she froze when Dylan came into view, her mouth falling open only a little before she smiled broadly. “Well, hello.”
“Hi,” Dylan said. “I’m—”
“Dylan Monroe, oh my god,” Molly said. She was sitting in the workstation’s chair, her brown eyes wide and her short red hair sleek and lovely.
“Hold it together, Molly,” April said out of the corner of her mouth.
Molly nodded, cleared her throat. “Right, right, sure, yeah.”
Dylan just laughed. “It’s nice to meet you, Molly. And you, April. Very cool place.”
Ramona smiled. Despite the mess back in the diner, Dylan was good with people. Or maybe, she was just better in smaller, more intimate settings, which made sense. A lone tattooed MILF was probably much easier than an entire room of excitable, small-town oglers.
“What brings you here?” April said, her eyes widening in Ramona’s direction.
“Um, just thought Dylan would like to see your shop,” Ramona said.
“It’s beautiful,” Dylan said.
“And, you know,” Ramona said, “now that I think about it, I need to talk to you about that thing.”
April’s perfect brows lifted. “Thing.”
“Yeah.”
“Going to need some more information.”
“That thing, you know. With Olive,” Ramona said.
Liar, liar, pants on fire , but she needed to talk to her best friend and she needed it now.
“Ah,” April said loudly. “That thing, yes, well. I need to wash up anyway and get a fresh wrap for Molly’s new piece.” She stood, snapped off her latex gloves, and nodded her head toward the back.
“You good?” Ramona asked Dylan.
“Oh, sure, I want to hear all about Molly’s tats.” She sat down in the chair April had just vacated, while Molly looked like she was about to internally combust right there.
“Great, be right back,” Ramona said, then grabbed April’s arm and all but dragged her to the office, a tiny space where April worked on designs and kept extra supplies.
“What is happening?” April said when Ramona closed the door and leaned against it, breathing hard as though she’d just escaped a serial killer.
“I’m a horrible person,” she said, then jabbed a finger in April’s direction. “And it’s your fault. You’ve got me thinking thoughts and feeling feels.”
“Oh, no, not thoughts,” April deadpanned.
Ramona flipped her off, then explained about her walk through the woods and Dylan’s request to hang out and how let’s do it had just come out of her mouth because she was an ogre of a person who just wanted to thrust a screenplay into Dylan’s hands.
“You don’t write screenplays,” April said, her voice maddeningly calm.
“It’s a metaphor,” Ramona whisper-yelled. “And Dylan is gorgeous and smart and kind, and I’m a lying liar who lies.”
“You didn’t lie about anything.”
“I told her I studied apparel design.”
April blinked at her. “You did.”
“But I didn’t tell her why!”
“Why would you?” April said.
Ramona released a grunt of frustration that lasted a whole five seconds.
“Okay, take a breath or ten, I beg you,” April said, closing her hands around Ramona’s arms. “This is not a crisis.”
“It is.”
“No, it’s good .”
Ramona just narrowed her eyes.
“Look,” April said, releasing her and then leaning her butt against the desk. “You said this very bonny morning that you were in. You want to find a way to meet Noelle and shoot your shot. Yeah?”
Ramona swallowed hard. She did. Goddammit, she really did. She nodded.
“Okay, so, you can’t just want , you have to do .”
“I know that,” Ramona said.
“Do you?”
Ramona sighed.
April sighed.
They’d been having this sigh-inducing conversation for Olive’s entire senior year. And it wasn’t that Ramona didn’t understand that dreams needed action to become reality, it was just fucking scary. Plain and simple.
“She doesn’t remember me,” she said softly, sudden tears swelling into her eyes. She swiped them away fast, though April caught them. She always caught them.
April’s eyes went gooey. “Honey.”
“It’s fine,” Ramona said, waving a hand through the air. “It’s better, actually.”
April let that settle between them for a second. “You’re not doing anything wrong or dishonest, Ray. You’re hanging out with her, which is what she asked for. If you happen to get on set in the process, where’s the harm in that? It’s not like you’ll ever see her again after this summer.”
Ramona folded her arms. April was right. Dylan was Dylan Monroe. And Ramona was just…Cherry. A small-town girl whom Dylan once kissed. A forgettable kiss. Forgettable girl.
And Ramona, honestly, was sick and tired of being forgettable.
“Yeah,” she said, forcing resolve into her voice. She rolled her shoulders back, straightened her posture. “You’re right. We’re just hanging out.”
“Exactly. Like gal pals.”
“That sounds gay.”
“It is gay.”
Ramona flapped her hands in the air. “Well, this can’t be gay!”
“Everything is gay, Ray, we’re queers.”
Ramona laughed and dropped her head into her hands before popping back up again. “Acquaintances. Not gal pals. I’m helping her at the diner, and I’m helping her feel normal. Whatever that means.”
April nodded vigorously. “Yes. Right. And in turn, she’ll help you meet Noelle. Hell, I doubt she’ll even mind after a few hangouts and she realizes how awesome you are.”
“Yeah,” Ramona said, a flurry of excitement and lingering guilt warring in her gut. “Yeah.”
April grabbed Ramona’s arm and yanked her into her arms, hugging her tight. “You deserve this,” she whispered in her ear.
Ramona could only nod.
“Okay,” April said, releasing her best friend and taking a deep breath. “The real question is…will Dylan Monroe allow me to tattoo her ass?”
“Oh my god, Apes,” Ramona said, but she laughed. She felt better, as she knew she would. For all of April’s persistence, she was also Ramona’s fiercest champion, ever since the fourth grade when April and her parents moved to Clover Lake. On her first day of school, April had promptly shoved Caden Haskins to the mulched ground during recess for stealing Ramona’s swing.
They’d been best friends ever since, through Olive’s birth and April’s struggles to relate to her stoic parents, through April’s beloved grandmother’s death when she was ten, through Rebecca’s abandonment and Steven’s accident and Olive’s preteen moodiness.
April was Ramona’s person, and she couldn’t imagine ever being away from her.
And LA…well, it was far, far away.
She shook off the thought, shook off Olive leaving, the idea of her father being all alone, shook off anything but right here, right now.
“Seriously, though, I need a plan,” she said. “In writing.”
“You and your plans.”
“I’m a designer .”
April grinned. “You sure as shit are.”
Ramona rolled her eyes, but took her iPad out of her bag and flipped open the folio, slipped her Apple Pencil out of its slot, tapped on her Notes app.
“Okay, Dylan wants to play Putt-Putt,” she said, writing it down as number one.
“Putt-Putt?”
“Yes, Putt-Putt. But I think the new course will be too crowded, especially in the summer.”
She met April’s eye and they both grinned.
“Dickie’s,” they both said at the same time.
Dickie’s was Clover Lake’s first Putt-Putt course, just on the outside of town. It was run-down and featured creepy clowns on a lot of the holes, along with all manner of plastic animatronics covered in moss. Dickie, the owner, refused to close when the new course opened near downtown, and the result was a cult classic attraction that was mostly frequented by high teenagers.
“Dickie’s is perfect,” Ramona said, when a knock sounded on the door.
“Ramona?” Dylan called from the other side.
Ramona turned and flung open the door, her stomach swooping to her feet when she saw Dylan’s face. Not only because she was a very famous person just, right there , but because god, she was pretty.
“Hey,” Ramona said.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Dylan said, then jutted her thumb toward the shop. “Molly needs to go.”
“Oh, shitballs,” April said, scrambling up from where she was leaning again on the desk and opening the small closet, grabbing a couple of packages of wrapping. “Thanks, Dyl.” Then she was out the door, waxing apologetically to her customer.
Dylan’s eyes followed her out, a smile on her face. “Already have a nickname. I like her.”
Ramona laughed. “She loves her nicknames.”
“What’s yours?”
“What isn’t my nickname?” Ramona said. “Ray is her go-to. Mona when she really wants to annoy me. Ona.”
“Using all syllables, I see.”
“She very resourceful. Nothing wasted.”
Dylan’s eyes sparkled. “What else?”
“Ra, Ram, Llama Face, Am—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Dylan said, holding up her hand. “Llama Face?”
Ramona fought a smile. “Pretend I didn’t say that?”
“Oh, absolutely not.”
Ramona dropped her chin to her chest, cursing how easy it was to talk to Dylan. “Then can I at least defer any questions until a later time?” she asked. She tapped her iPad screen. “I’m making us a plan.”
Dylan narrowed her eyes. “I won’t forget Llama Face.”
“I would never expect you to.”
Dylan folded her arms. “Fine, then. What’s the plan?”
Ramona breathed a sigh of relief—no need to bring Llama Face into all this quite yet. She waved Dylan over to the bright green pleather love seat in the corner, and they both sat, the iPad balanced between them. “I’ve got a Putt-Putt option.”
“Dickie’s?” Dylan read from the screen. “That’s bound to be incredible.”
“It is,” Ramona said. “Just wait.”
“I trust you.” Dylan nudged her shoulder, and Ramona fought against a flutter in her stomach.
“What else?” Dylan said.
Ramona wrote Moon Lovers hike on number two of her bulleted list.
“Moon Lovers?” Dylan asked.
“It’s a great trail. Lesser traveled during the day because it doesn’t go around the lake, so we shouldn’t run into a ton of people.”
No need to mention that Moon Lovers Trail was also a local legend, that any couple who walked its path under a full moon—which draped the trail in a silvery glow at its height—would fall in love and live happily ever after. His junior year of high school, Owen took the girl he had a crush on for a moonlit walk, and they’ve been married for twenty-six years.
“Sounds perfect,” Dylan said.
“You mentioned bowling, but I wonder if that would be too complicated,” Ramona said.
She explained that there was only one bowling alley in town, and it was constantly busy with professional leagues and families sending gutter balls down the lanes, especially during the summer.
“Hmm,” Dylan said, tapping her chin. “I’ve never bowled before.”
Ramona dropped her pencil against the screen. “We should make a list of things you have done.”
Dylan laughed. “That’s a long list too, only filled with scandalous shenanigans I would shield you from. Though you’ve probably read about them.”
Ramona said nothing, because honestly, she probably had. She wrote Bowling with a question mark on number three. Her cursor blinked on number four, mind whirring for ideas, things Dylan had said she wanted to do.
Swim at a quiet spot in the lake. I bet you know all the secret places, don’t you?
And just like that, all she could think about was Mirror Cove, where she and Dylan had first met. First laughed. First kissed. Well, their only kiss, she supposed. Their only anything.
“I think three is enough for now,” she said, closing the folio over her iPad. “We can think of more later.”
“I like that plan,” Dylan said.
Ramona nodded, but she couldn’t get rid of the knot in her throat. She needed a second, a few actually, and probably had to get back to the diner anyway. She was technically still on shift.
“Hey, Dyl,” April said, appearing in the doorway. “Allow me to show you a cornucopia of options for a tattoo on your ass.”
Dylan laughed, but immediately popped up and headed into the workspace. April winked at Ramona on her way out, and Ramona had never felt so thankful for her best friend in all her life. She collapsed back against the couch and let her mind wander through memories of a night she hardly ever let herself think about anymore.