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 ofGreta. When a boyfriend broke her heart right before she went onstage in São 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 bedsounds 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 wantingmore.
The pressure in her chest returns with a vengeance. Before the show, she did the wholefive things you can see, four things you can touch…method her therapist taught her, but it was no match for the anxiety that’s been steadily growing since she left the UK, when the end of the tour suddenly felt like a tangible thing. She swipes at the zipper at the back of her shorts. Tugs it down a little, in case that’s what’s preventing her from getting a proper breath, but her clothes have only ever been a symptom of the real problem. The disease is the whole fucking industry.
She wasn’t going to do this tonight. But between her parents and the cold and the way she can still feel the press of Thaniel’s palm on her ass, she can’t help it.
She cracks.
“There isn’t going to be a next album.”
DeeAnn doesn’t even glance up from her phone.
“You don’t want to write with Milo again?” Beck asks. “Fine. We could always get Greg and Liza back. I’m sure they could help us find a more mature sound—”
“No,” Ramona says, straightening her posture. “I’m done. With all of this. I want…to retire.”
The word is so ridiculous she almost laughs.Retire. At age twenty-six. And yet maybe it’s the only way to get them to understand what she means.
Becausegod, she really doesn’t want to be onstage singing a song called “Never Be Prom Queen” in her thirties.
Finally, DeeAnn must realize her daughter is serious, because she puts down her phone and scoots to the edge of the couch. Her natural blond hair is dyed dark to match Ramona’s—she loves it when the two of them pose together and everyone remarks on the resemblance that’s really only there if you squint.
“Ramona Jane. Are we really doing this again? The whole woe-is-me shtick?” DeeAnn dramatically pinches the bridge of her nose. She was the one who wanted to be on TV, whose auditions never led to anything beyond a role as a dead body in not one but two episodes ofCSI, who foisted all her ambitions on her daughter. “You’ve just had the most successful tour of your career. Now’s not the time to slow down. You know how many people would kill to be in your shoes?”
Obviously. It’s what’s made Ramona so wary of complaining. But the sleeplessness and the early flights and the protein shakes and the sound checks and the plain chicken for dinner for the fifth time this week, the fact that sometimes she just wants a plate of lasagna bigger than her face butnot while we’re touring, you know that.
She does know that. As well as she knows that after the tour, there will be another photo shoot, another music video, another reason to deny her body the joy it so desperately craves.
“How about some time off?” Beck suggests, trying to play peacekeeper between mother and daughter. Ramona and DeeAnn aren’t just oil and water; they’re oil and whatever hazardouschemicals were in that lip gloss. Oil and fucking uranium. “We could do that. A couple weeks in Hawaii, or we could book that resort in Big Sur again if you want to stay closer to home?”
“Hawaii soundsperfect.” DeeAnn holds out her arms, frowns down at her pale skin. “I could use some sun.”
