Ramona Flowers

It had been a few months since Ramona Flowers finally broke up with Scott Pilgrim—not with a flaming katana duel or a neon-lit boss battle, not even a dramatic FWOOOM panel sliding across reality. Just... quietly. The kind of quiet that doesn’t get theme music or motion blur. She wished she could pretend it had gone down in some epic, definitive, canon-worthy way, but the truth was stupidly mundane: she woke up one morning, stretched, blinked twice, and realized Scott Pilgrim wasn’t a tragic underdog hero. He wasn’t an inspiring cautionary tale. He was just Scott. Endearingly chaotic when he wanted to be, aggressively lazy when he didn’t, and always more in love with the idea of Ramona Flowers than the actual person standing right in front of him.

For the first week after she left, her old answering machine blinked at her like some tiny, smug emotional time bomb. The voicemails came in phases—Level 1, Level 2, mini-boss, repeat. First were the sad ones: Scott mumbling apologies between sniffles, the unmistakable sound of Sex Bob-Omb “rehearsing” (aka accidentally generating noise) in the background. Then came the indignant ones, where he’d shout her name like he was trying to unlock a hidden dialogue tree by sheer volume. Eventually they all blended into one chaotic, guilt-soaked monologue about how he’d “changed,” as if personal growth were a cheat code he’d suddenly discovered.

After voicemail number twenty-something, she changed her number. It felt good—like slicing the final flickering wire of a bomb she’d been carrying around in her head. The silence afterward came as a shock, but a welcome one. The kind of quiet that reminded her of late nights in her tiny apartment, when the world was still and no Ex, no drummer, no hero, no problem child was dragging her into their side-quests.

So when Julie Powers announced another one of her infamous “not-a-party-but-it’s-definitely-a-party” parties, Ramona showed up. Maybe to prove she wasn’t hiding. Maybe to test whether she could be around the orbit of people who still spoke about Scott like he was some messy Toronto legend. Maybe just to see if she could exist in a room without feeling like she was about to run into one of his emotional boss forms.

The air inside Julie’s place was dense—cheap perfume, cheap beer, a questionable Smashing Pumpkins loop someone insisted was “a vibe.” Ramona slipped through the crowd like a glitch flickering in and out of the panel borders. Her hair—pink with electric-blue tips now, sharp and bright like someone had highlighted her with neon markers—caught the dim light and bounced it in strange, glossy streaks. Her eyes, huge and dark as inked circles, scanned the room with that half-lidded calm she’d weaponized long ago.

She wore a slate jacket over a black hoodie, messenger bag slung across her chest, boots scuffed from too many dimension-shifts and Toronto winters. There was a light choker at her neck, a detail she barely remembered putting on, but it made her feel... anchored.

She poured herself something unidentifiable into a red Solo cup—something borderline alcoholic, probably—and leaned against a scuffed patch of wall that had clearly survived many Julie-hosted catastrophes. The bodies around her blurred together: the too-loud laughers, the awkward make-out couples, the strobing background characters that only existed to fill space in moments like this.

Part of her—some lonely, soft, occasionally stupid part—still wanted to believe in cinematic sparks, in fate with a pixelated edge, in the possibility of someone new stepping out of the crowd with a splash page introduction. The other part—the one shaped by seven Evil Exes, twenty-six bad hair phases, and one Scott Pilgrim—knew better.

And yet... as she scanned the room, she couldn’t help noticing certain faces she didn’t recognize. People she’d never seen around Julie’s circle. A few of them watched her a little too closely, like they were waiting for something. Like they’d read ahead in the script.

There was a guy near the kitchen doorway with a look in his eye she’d seen before—competitive, charged, almost glowing at the edges. Another leaned against the banister with the blasé confidence of someone who believed he had an epic backstory ready to monologue at the slightest prompt. And a girl by the window, arms crossed, sizing Ramona up like she was checking stats.

None of them approached her.

But something in the room shifted anyway. A familiar hum. The faint promise of trouble.

Because Ramona knew better than anyone: Exes didn’t stay in the past. Not really. Some just waited for the right scene to make their entrance.

She took a slow drink from her cup.