“She is,” Ramona said. “Summer.”
“You with this crazy movie?” Logan asked.
“Sort of,” Dylan said. “Crew.”
He nodded, not even a single flicker of recognition in his eyes.
“I know Dolly from a trip she took to Clover Lake years ago,” Ramona said. “When we were teenagers.”
The truth slipped out like an oil spill, but she didn’t regret it. She waited for Dylan to realize the truth. Recognize her. Figure it the hell out. Anything that didn’t make Ramona feel so invisible.
But Dylan just smiled. Nodded. “Right.” She clasped her hands behind her and grinned, no curiosity in her expression, no wondering, not even a glint of confusion. As though she and Ramona were in on this secret identity plot. “Summer before tenth grade.”
“Ninth.”
Ramona stared at her, almost like a dare. Dylan stared back, expressionless but blinking rapidly, holding her gaze for about five seconds before she jutted her thumb toward the lane. “Do you think Olive would mind if I bowled her turn?”
It took Ramona a moment to get out “Not at all,” but she managed it. She even put together some version of a smile—mouth upturned in what probably looked more like a grimace than a grin, but she wasn’t the actress here.
Not by a long shot.
“She looks familiar,” Logan said.
“One of those faces I guess,” Ramona said flatly.
Logan narrowed his eyes at Dylan, but shrugged, then pressed his shoulder to hers. “So, about getting out of here.”
Yeswas on the tip of her tongue, because why the hell not. She watched Dylan fling a ball down the lane without a care—or memory—in the world.
Why the absolute hell not?
Chapter
Eleven
Ninth grade.
Ramona had said it so matter-of-factly, so firmly. In the next five seconds, a million thoughts had flooded into Dylan’s mind.
First—Of course, yes, right, ninth grade, how could I forget, wink-wink.
Second—The summer before ninth grade.
Third—The summer. Before. Ninth grade.
Her schooling had always been a little all over the place. She changed schools constantly and spent either seventh or eighth grade with tutors—she could honestly never remember which one.
But ninth grade, she remembered.
Dylan sent the ball down the lane with as much force as she could.
Ninth grade was when her father bought that giant house in Hollywood Hills in order to appease the social worker assigned to the Monroe family, and her aunt Hallie had lived with them from August to December, forsaking her own job in Athens, Georgia, for a semester, all to ensure Dylan went to school and ate more than canned pork and beans for dinner. Ninth grade was when she shot her first commercial, some teen-centric deodorant that smelled likestrawberries and caused a rash to erupt in her armpits. Ninth grade was when she got cast in her second movie,Glass House, where she played a troubled child of two parents who couldn’t keep it in their pants. And ninth grade was when she was knew, without a doubt, that she liked girls.
And the summer before ninth grade…that summer was how she knew.
Because of Cherry.
The name popped into her mind. She’d thought of it before, of course, the fake name of the first girl she’d ever kissed, that cherry-print shirt and fireworks on Clover Lake’s shore, and—
