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. “Ipass outat 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. Iam, 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’sHollywood,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 alegendarylife 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 asshe was thrown into role after role playing the troubled child, the troubled teen, the troubled and morally bankrupt vampire named Giselle inSpellbound, 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 onSpellbound. After the show ended, she did a brief run onGirlish, 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 witha solid plan of successfor theiryoung and precocious daughter.Moneyis 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 forPicture 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.
