Chapter Seven
Chapter
Seven
Dylan sat on the cream-colored couch in the lake house Laurel had rented for her, going over the first scene they’d be filming today, when a hand jutted her phone into her face.
Jack flashed across the screen.
“Jesus, no,” Dylan said.
“He’s been calling since six a.m.,” Laurel said. “And I’m going back to LA this afternoon, so you’ve got to handle your phone again.”
“Can’t you just get me a flip phone?”
“No. Put on your big-girl panties.”
Dylan stuck out her tongue at her manager, and Laurel—already resplendent in a pair of white shorts and a sleeveless silk blouse—just smiled.
“Love you,” she singsonged, then dropped the still-buzzing phone on top of the script in Dylan’s lap and walked away.
Dylan closed her eyes, counted to three. In that time, the phone stopped ringing, only to start up again a second later.
“Goddammit,” Dylan whispered, then slid her finger across the screen. “Dad, hi.”
“Hey, Dill Pickle, how’s my girl?” her father said.
Dylan opened her mouth to answer, but Jack Monroe barreled onward.
“I’ve got Mom here too,” he said.
“You’re on speaker!” Carrie Page trilled, her voice pleasantly raspy from spending the nineties sucking on a pack a day. “You ready for your first big scene? We sent you some flowers. Did you get them yet?”
Dylan sighed, already exhausted, then made her voice as cheery as possible. “No, not yet.”
“Oh, that’s disappointing,” Carrie said. “I asked for them to get there by nine. You’re starting at ten, yes?”
Dylan didn’t even know how her parents had this information. She certainly hadn’t told them. Though they were Jack Monroe and Carrie Page—they could pretty much find out whatever they wanted about anyone at any time. Jack’s band, Evenflow, was one of the most popular bands of the nineties, grunge rock, as they called it then. Jack and his best friend, Aaron, started the group in Aaron’s parents’ garage in Marietta, Georgia, when they were seventeen, then soared to stardom after moving to Seattle when the rock scene was exploding in 1991. He met Carrie on tour—her angry-girl band, Halcyon, opened for Evenflow—and the rest was history.
A very wild, very fraught history.
By the time Dylan came along four years later, Jack and Carrie were only twenty-three and internationally famous, had no permanent home—just popped in and out of luxury hotels—and were only a few short years from their first joint stint in rehab, though Carrie had managed to stay clean while she was pregnant with Dylan.
Now, Dylan knew neither of her parents had touched a single drop of alcohol or drugs in ten years, and she was proud of them for that, but her childhood was filled with lines of coke on glass coffee tables and hotel suites packed with fans and fellow musicians until two a.m. Her aunt, Hallie, had taken her in a few times—when her parents were in rehab, or when Hallie had heard enough horror stories and took Dylan back to Georgia with her, but she never sued for custody. She’d always hoped her brother would get it together, always believed when he said he had.
By the time Dylan was twenty, her parents had already been through a divorce and another breakup, only to get married again when she was twenty-five. Now, they were living in Laurel Canyon and grew avocados, acted like eternal newlyweds, and seemed to be attempting to make up for their past shitty parenting. They called and texted Dylan all the time, asked about her life way too damn much, and made sure she knew they believed in her and thought she was the most beautiful and talented girl on the planet.
“Yes, ten o’clock,” Dylan said now. “In fact, I should get going.”
“Of course, sweetie,” Carrie said. “Have you seen Blair yet?”
“How did you even know Blair was—” Dylan started but stopped herself. There was no point. “No, I haven’t,” she said instead, leaving out her run-in with her costar at the café.
“Well, it’s going to be fine,” Carrie said. “We believe in you.”
“You’re the most beautiful and talented girl on the planet,” Jack said.
Dylan blew out a long breath. “Thanks. I’ve got to go.”
“Good luck!” her parents chimed together. “We love—”
But Dylan hit the red button before they could finish their saccharine chorus, then flopped back onto the couch, blinking up at the bamboo ceiling fan as she took deep breaths.
In for four…
Hold…
Out for eight.
Just like her therapist, Eli, had told her to do whenever she felt like she wanted to scream and cuss and throw her phone against a wall.
Her parents often had that effect on her, a feeling that also brought a wave of guilt with it. Jack and Carrie loved her. She knew that. And she should be grateful. She just had a hard time reconciling her current parents with the parents of her past. Eli called it repressed anger , called it justified. They also called it something Dylan needed to deal with— repressed rarely meant anything healthy—but she had no idea how the hell to do that, not when every piece of her life had been shaped by Jack and Carrie’s decisions and fame.
Or infamy, as the case may be.
Her phone buzzed in her lap. She groaned, knowing what she would see before she even looked—a text featuring a Bitmoji of both her parents shooting her a thumbs-up with the words You got this arcing over their cartoon heads in rainbow letters.
Two hours later, Dylan’s hair was in a messy fishtail braid, and she was wearing a pink sleeveless blouse tucked into high-waisted denim shorts, a yellow apron with curated grease stains tied around her hips. Her makeup was subtle and her shoes were sensible.
She was Eloise Tucker, small-town waitress who grew up in a tiny apartment on the outside of town with an unreliable mother and dreamed of opening her own flower shop. She was quiet and cerebral, knew the meanings of every single flower in creation, and was a terrible driver.
So, pretty much the complete opposite of Dylan. All except the unreliable mother part, an experience Dylan had zero clue how to tap into for theatrical fodder. Now, she stood in the grassy town square with its adorable white gazebo as Noelle Yang and her assistant debated whether or not her apron needed a smear of mustard.
“I think the more, the better,” the assistant, Vee, said. They had pale skin, and their pixie-cut hair was such a light strawberry blond it was nearly pink. “It says she’s exhausted.”
Noelle, a designer famous for her attention to detail, tapped her red mouth. Her straight salt-and-pepper hair hit her shoulders, cut so bluntly Dylan thought the ends might slice a finger open if touched. She wore all black—simple jeans and a tee—and her entire air was elegance and style and just fucking cool . Dylan would be intimidated if Noelle weren’t also extremely gentle and calm and snorted when she laughed.
“I think you’re right,” Noelle said. “You good with that, Dylan?”
“Oh, sure,” Dylan said.
“Great,” Noelle said, then tapped away on her iPad as Vee finger-painted a blob of yellow mustard near Dylan’s hip. “Then we’re a go. Yes, that means I’m finished.”
It took Dylan a second to realize Noelle was speaking into her headset, which also meant it was time. Butterflies swelled into her stomach, an entire swarm. She smoothed her apron, but then came away with a bit of mustard on her fingers.
“Oh, that’s okay, that’s okay,” Vee said, fluttering around her with a napkin. “Gives it a good smeared look.”
Dylan nodded, smiled. She would not be the high-maintenance actress on this set, she would not , but god she hated mustard. The smell alone triggered her gag reflex.
“You good?” Laurel said, sidling up next to her, phone out. She eyed the mustard Vee was currently wiping away.
Dylan could only nod, the scent lingering on her fingers making her regret not having any breakfast.
“Just channel your inner small town,” Laurel said. “You’ll be fine.”
Dylan said nothing, as Laurel knew full well Dylan had no inner small town. She’d been to this particular small town once in her life and barely remembered it because she couldn’t stop worrying about her parents, who had been just about a month away from entering rehab. At the time, she only knew that something was very wrong with them, and she’d gone far too many days without an actual meal when Aunt Hallie came and picked her up. All she really had to pull from was an inner fucked-up kid of rock icons. Where was the rom-com for that character?
She sighed, pressed her hands to her stomach. She was an actor. She could be anything, anyone. That was her job.
All around her people buzzed and barked orders. She hadn’t seen Gia Santos, the director, yet. Nor had she seen Blair, but they were filming a conversation between their characters that took place several scenes into the movie. At this point in the story, Mallory, Blair’s character, had just arrived in town for the summer at her family’s lake house and run into Eloise—the girl she’d loved for many summers as a teen, then lost touch with after she went to college—at the diner, and she’d already begged Eloise to pretend to be her girlfriend to satisfy Mallory’s wealthy parents, who hesitated to trust her with the family’s publishing business unless Mallory settled down and got serious.
Dylan would much prefer to start filming with the meet-cute—at least then she could build up the feelings and emotions alongside Eloise—but Gia wanted this scene first, where the two women meet at the town gazebo to go over plans for a boat party Mallory’s family was throwing, their maiden voyage as a fake couple.
We want to establish chemistry straightaway is what Gia had written in the film itinerary.
So not only did Dylan have to figure out how to smile at Blair after so many years of, let’s be real, enmity , she also had to flirt with her. Be shy and uncertain. Laugh with her eyes sparkling. Lower her lashes in that way that Ramona did when Dylan had made her laugh yesterday…
Dylan smiled, remembering those lashes. They were so long. And dark. She wondered if Ramona used mascara, or if—
“Dylan?”
She jolted from her thoughts as Laurel shook her arm. “They’re ready for you. And I’ve got to go.”
Dylan all but whined. “Do you have to?”
“I’ve got a partners’ meeting I can’t miss. I’ll be back later this week.”
“That’s two days away.”
“Big-girl panties.”
Dylan sighed, then patted her hips. “Fine. I’ve got them on. Pulled all the way up.”
“Careful, it’s not a thong,” Laurel said, and hugged Dylan tight before shoving her toward the gazebo, then took off through the grass in her three-inch heels, calling out, “Think small town!” as she went.
Dylan forced herself to keep moving, spotting Blair standing by the gazebo’s stairs and laughing with Gia Santos, a tall woman with short black hair and thick, turquoise-rimmed glasses. Gia was a seasoned director and writer of rom-coms—she’d developed this script with the book’s author—and was a lesbian married to cinematographer Zara Hollister, and was also famously demanding. She wanted what she wanted out of her actors, and exactly when she wanted it.
“Hi, there,” Dylan said from a few feet away, and both women immediately stopped talking, aiming too-bright smiles in her direction.
Dylan caught a whiff of mustard, swallowed a gag.
“Dylan, hey, great, you’re here,” Gia said brusquely, shaking Dylan’s hand with one soul-squeezing pump. “Let’s get you both in the gazebo.”
“Dylan,” Blair said.
“Blair,” Dylan said, hating the already-stilted tone to both of their voices. She rolled her shoulders back, tried to think small town and breathe normally as she settled on the white bench inside the gazebo next to Blair, but her stomach refused to unclench.
Crew members swarmed, setting up the mics, getting the cameras adjusted to their positions. Vee came and blotted her face, then Blair’s, then yanked some strands of hair out of Dylan’s braid so they feathered around her face.
“Okay, thanks, Vee,” Gia said.
Vee started to leave, but Dylan latched on to the assistant’s wrist. “Stay,” she whispered desperately. Vee’s eyes widened and they fiddled with the strands of hair around Dylan’s face a bit theatrically, but Dylan would take any delay she could get right now. So much for her big-girl panties.
“Vee, get out of there,” Noelle said from where she was tapping on her iPad in the grass.
“Sorry,” Vee whispered, then vanished.
Dylan’s throat thickened, her heart galloping throughout her entire body.
“All right, I trust you’re familiar with this scene,” Gia said.
“Yes,” Blair said.
Dylan could only nod.
“We need unsure and shy from you, Dylan,” Gia said, adjusting her headset. “Blair, I know you missed the read-through, but I think you can handle it. Mallory is brash and full steam ahead. But with nuance. Be a person , not a character. Let’s make our fellow queers proud, shall we?”
“Hell yes,” Blair said, smiling and fist-bumping Gia.
Dylan just nodded again, like that fucking bobblehead version of herself she knew went for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
“Okay, let’s do this,” Gia said, then yelled, “Places!” as she jogged down the gazebo’s steps, turning to face Dylan and Blair. Gia asked a few more questions of the camera crew, the sound, then Dylan heard the word “Action,” and she completely forgot what she was doing.
What her name even was.
Blair said something—her line, Dylan presumed, but Dylan couldn’t remember what it was or what she was supposed to say next.
“Cut,” Gia said calmly, then simply stared at Dylan with her arms folded.
Dylan blinked, glanced at Blair, who also wore an annoyed expression.
“Sorry,” Dylan said. “Just…warming up.”
“ I don’t know how this will work ,” Blair said.
“What?” Dylan asked.
“That’s your first line,” Blair said. She was dressed in white shorts that showed off her lovely brown legs, red Keds, and a silky blue-and-white polka-dotted tank top. Her hair was natural and curly and fanning out around her face. She was a perfectly posh Mallory.
Because of course she was.
“Right,” Dylan said. “Yeah. Good. Thanks.”
Blair sighed.
Dylan felt like an idiot.
She shook her head, trying not to flash back to all the scenes she’d filmed with Blair on Spellbound that always seemed to include Blair sighing and Dylan feeling like an idiot.
“Again,” Gia said. “Action.”
“ I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this ,” Blair said as Mallory, crossing her legs and tilting them toward Dylan.
“ I…yeah, I…um…I don’t know. ”
“Cut,” Gia said on a sigh. “Stick to the script, Dylan. You’ve got to earn the right to improvise.” She looked down, scrolled through her iPad. “Jesus, I can’t believe I let them…”
But the sound of her voice trailed off as she shook her head, then continued to mutter under her breath.
Dylan swallowed, her mouth completely dry, confidence shrinking like a prune under a summer sun. “Sorry.”
“Take a second to review your lines,” Gia said, scratching her forehead.
Dylan’s whole body washed hot, then cold. It was clear that Gia wasn’t her biggest fan, which did not bode well on the first damn day.
“Haven’t you known about this role for months?” Blair asked.
Dylan didn’t answer, just did as Gia told her and closed her eyes, running through her lines.
“I’ve known for two weeks,” Blair said. “I wasn’t even their first choice.”
“And you know all your lines and mine,” Dylan said. “Am I right?”
“You’re right,” Blair said, flicking a tiny bug off her arm.
“I know my lines,” Dylan said. “I’m just nervous.”
Blair pursed her mouth, didn’t look at Dylan. “You get handed the role on a silver platter and still can’t even appreciate it. Typical Dylan Monroe.”
“What do you mean I got handed —”
“Let’s go again,” Gia said. “Action.”
Dylan’s spine snapped straight, like her teacher just slapped a ruler on her desk, the back-and-forth and sudden shifts making her dizzy.
“ I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this ,” Blair said again, a wry smile on her mouth, Mallory in complete control.
“ I don’t know how this will work ,” Dylan said, then wanted to pump her fists in the air in triumph.
She did it.
She said the damn line.
“Cut,” Gia said.
“Fuck,” Dylan said under her breath.
“Can we get a little less robot, more person?” Gia asked. “You know, acting ?”
Blair blew out a breath through puffed cheeks.
Dylan slumped back against the bench, her prune-like confidence nothing but a dried-out seed at this point. It was going to be a very, very long day.