And Ramona loves that about her—that Betty has never bent over backward just because her friend is Ramona Wilder.
WasRamona Wilder.
The verb tense is still a little confusing. She’s not sure where the persona ends and the person begins.
“Is the music okay?” the driver calls as he merges onto the 101, and it jars her so much that she has to ask him to repeat it.
It shouldn’t, of course—it’s a simple question. But any mention of music turns Ramona sensitive, makes her feel like she’s under a microscope. When the silence in her home gets to her, she turns on jazz or a podcast, something with zero chance of yanking her back in time.
“Sure,” she says, because although the electronicuntz untz untzpulsing at the base of her skull is about as pleasant as the hard-core dental work she had done between seasons two and three ofGreta Life!, she hasn’t been able to eliminate that people-pleasing part of her entirely. “It’s fine.”
Another few moments of silence, and then: “Do you like it?”
Her automatic five-star rating drops to a four. “Uh…yeah?” She phrases it as a question, unwilling to insult his taste.
The driver’s eyes meet hers in the rearview mirror. “It’s my new single.”
And then he proceeds to spike the volume while Ramona plasters a grin on her face, inwardly cringing.
Jesus, what if she’d said she didn’t like it? Her life is literally in his hands, and though she’s taken hundreds, maybe thousands of cars, it really is an absurd amount of trust to give a stranger. Next time she’ll opt for a rental.
At the very least, the driver doesn’t seem to know who she is. Maybe her sunglasses and hat are keeping her anonymous, or he never follows pop music.
One thing has become clear in the months since that show in Milwaukee: Ramona is too paranoid. But not without good reason.
Her parents seemed convinced the earth would careen off its axis if Ramona Wilder stopped making music, but it has in fact continued spinning. Was it an absolute clusterfuck in those first few days after her announcement? In the fewminutesafter her announcement, even? Oh, absolutely. Order had collapsed; fans had grabbed at her clothes, her hair; and she’d even indulged a briefis this really how I die?before security swooped in. She still wound up with a couple bruises. A scrape down one leg from ametal gate. The news exploded on social media before she’d even reached her hotel—articles and speculation and conspiracy theories andsadness. She’d anticipated some of that, sure, but the videos of preteen girls filming themselves crying were almost too much for her to bear.
She flew home after posting her planned statement and spent the next forty-eight hours in bed with her cat, Janet, alternating cold medicines until she could breathe through her nose again.
Once she was healthy enough to see her parents, DeeAnn begged her to see reason. Beck thought they could spin it as a publicity stunt, that she could announce a comeback the following year and emerge bigger than ever.
“I can’t believe you could be this selfish,” DeeAnn said. “We raised you better than this. This is our livelihood. Ourfamily business.”
If it really was a family business, then why was Ramona’s face the one on every album cover?
Ramona explained herself until she was hoarse. “My mental health is in a fucking dumpster,” she said, because it was impossible to divorce her self-worth from the charts, the number of streams, the number of likes. “I had a panic attack before nearly every show on the tour.”
So we’ll find you a better therapist.
“I’ve never had the chance to think about what I might actually want in life.”
You have money, fame, and thousands of fans who worship you. Whowouldn’twant that?
Around and around they went, until DeeAnn started crying that her daughter was leaving them to rot out on the streets and Beck suggested they take a breather and Ramona opened adelivery app without worrying about how many calories were in the KFC Family Feast.
The simple truth was this: if she kept going, she didn’t know how much longer she’d last until she completely fell apart.
After that, she confined herself to her house like she was going into hibernation. It would all blow over soon enough, and then she could stride confidently into her new reality, even if she wasn’t quite sure yet what it would hold for her.
“She’s taking time off to rest,” her parents told the tabloids, so Ramona hired her own publicists to reiterate her statement. Her own lawyers, who bought her out of her contracts.
Quitting her job, it turns out, is the most expensive thing she’s ever done.
“Look me up on Spotify,” her Uber driver says, jabbing a finger at the QR code taped to the back of the passenger seat.
“Yeah, of course,” she says, and honestly, maybe she will. Maybe she never really knew anything about music at all.
—
