“My grandmother,” I tell him, “destroyed my future by giving me her genes. She’s had a long, successful career, a long, successful marriage. There are documentaries about her. Foundations in her name. A scholarship program. The future will remember Bettie Watson. Me, on the other hand? It’s a compare-and-contrast Venn diagram that I’ll never look good in. When you’re unfavorably compared to someone who’s the best at everything, when you fall short of expectations, you fall very, very far.”
*
Hall’s teleportation has a few bugs. We arrive up on the mountain without the red pickup or any of the presents inside it. Our shoes were also left behind, and my hair’s in a ponytail now for some reason.
Teleporting, thankfully, isn’t as violent as time traveling. One second, we’re right outside the town house, the next we’re regaining our balance in a copse of trees. The property is situated on the edge of a steep hill, and if the copse weren’t there acting as aguardrail we could easily roll off and die. Or I would die, at least. Notable side effects of teleportation are: (1) Your sinuses temporarily fill with ice-cold eggnog that drains down the back of your throat within seconds of landing. (2) The song “Video Killed the Radio Star” becomes stuck in your head.
“It’s breathtaking,” Hall declares in quiet rapture, staring at a Coca-Cola bottling plant that’s been abandoned since the 1980s. “Precisely where I would imagine the great Bettie Watson to reside.”
I grab his shoulders and wheel him around in the opposite direction, toward Grandma and Grandpa’s small gothic castle. It’s like 1313 Mockingbird Lane up here, thanks to Grandma’s deep flair for the dramatic and free license to design whatever kind of house she wanted, in her and Grandpa’s negotiations to retire here, in his hometown. “Thatis where the great Bettie Watson resides.”
He lets out a startled “Egad.”
“Don’t worry, it’s more normal on the inside. Grandpa makes her keep the worst stuff on the outside of the house so that he won’t have to look at it.”
I yank him behind a tree as a young woman zooms up the jagged driveway on a motorcycle and unclips her helmet, finger-combing her brown-blond pixie cut. She must have ridden here from her vacation home in Aspen, which she’s turned into a recording studio. She’s wearing a long navy tunic over a black lace skirt, over striped leggings and old-timey boots with a zillion decorative buttons up the sides. It’s a bohemian-Victorian style that she callsbotorian. “That’s my sister Kaia,” I hiss. The L.A. Dodgers ball cap she removes from her backpack to pull over her head shouldn’t go with that outfit, but it does. One more detail to be envious of.
I narrow my eyes at curtains ruffling in an upper window. Judgment Time has begun. My heart leapfrogs around like it’s looking for an exit, but I remind myself that this time I have backup.
“The thing that really sticks in my grandmother’s craw is that I’m the spitting image of her, and she doesn’t approve of what I’m doing with that image. Also, I’m named after her. As far as she’s concerned, I’ve blighted the name, too.”
Hall nods in agreement. “You do look like you could’ve been twins.”
My brother and sisters (beneath Athena’s peroxide) have medium brownish hair and blue eyes, like our dad. I inherited Grandma Bettie Watson’s jet-black hair, her thick, expressive eyebrows, and eyes so dark you can’t distinguish iris from pupil. As a child, all Ieverheard was that I looked exactly like my glamorous Hollywood grandmother. No matter what I do, I can’t weaken the resemblance. Whether I’m au naturel or wearing heavy eyeliner and glittering smoky eyes, denim halter tops or a little black dress, she’s already perfected it, and I look like I’m trying to copy one of her countless phases. I refuse to wear the retro swing dresses I used to be famous for anymore, which ticks her off because she’s adamant that those suit me the best. My wardrobe of late consists mainly of black tights, black sweatshirts three sizes too large, and a black rain slicker. I’ve been dressing like a burglar so that no one will notice me picking flowers and pumpkins from the neighbor’s yard, to garnish my Instagram selfies.
You would be so much prettier if you did something with your hairis Grandma’s favorite parting remark (I haven’t changed my hair up in ages; it hangs limply to my shoulders and doesn’t hold a curl. It bores her), especially while sobbing:You could have been the face ofChanel. Chanel made the offer when I was an excited, Who Cares What’s In The Contract, I Want To Do It fourteen-year-old, but Dad said no. He didn’t like that I accompanied my grandmother on red carpets, or that my picture was so public when I was a child purely because I looked so uncannily like Bettie Watson.
All of the big fights my parents had when I was growing up were about parenting differences. Mom’s a deeply compassionate, people-pleasing softie who couldn’t tell any of us no when we wanted something (we were always wanting lots and lots of things), and Dad was the wary, serious sandbar against the wave of all his children’s requests. I can never ask them for financial help because she’ll want to say yes; he won’t, and I’m not driving a wedge. Their relationship is so much better now as empty-nesters.
“Grandma was born in 1946 and grew up on television, which I’m sure you know,” I tell Hall, diving into my messed-up-family history lesson. “When I came along and turned out to be her clone, she and Mom thought it’d be adorable to style me after Grandma’s child self, dressing me in fifties clothes. Took me along to red carpets in her most famous vintage outfits, with my Care Bears purse. Everybody’d be screeching how adorable I looked. There was Real Bettie and then there was Little Bettie! How delightful.”
Hall’s watching me closely. “It sounds like you didn’t enjoy that.”
“I did at first. But the people who shout the loudest about how much they love you are finicky. The moment you step out of the box they put you in, they just want to watch you burn. Real Bettie got to try out styles from the sixties, seventies, and beyond as she aged, but I was trapped in the fifties. All my friends were wearing crop tops and bandage dresses, getting their hair dip-dyed neoncolors, and I was sitting there like Lucille Ball in my polka dots. Whichevvvverybody loved. Those goddamn polka dots are my villain origin story.”
Hall chews on his lip, stifling the tiniest of smiles.
“Fast-forward, I was arrested three days after I turned twenty-one and after that, the media wasn’t so nice.” I scrub my hands over my face. “And I hadn’t even done anything wrong! It was just loitering on private property, which I still think was a setup.”
While I was building my sandcastle empire, the media took turns lauding my success with one hand and writing scathingly about me with the other, depending on the current temperature of public opinion. In my periods of unpopularity, fewer and fewer legitimate industries wanted to do business with me. People I’d thought were friends turned on me, only wanting me when I was popular, when they could use my name and image to boost the power of their own. When my companies folded, I became a joke. I’ve been pretending that I bounced back from it, fooling just about everyone. But I can’t fool myself. I know I’m a joke.
“Little Bettie” reminded someone very clever on the internet of “Little Debbie,” which has morphed into a meme, strangers spamming me with dented boxes of Nutty Bars and pictures of Swiss Rolls smashed on grocery store floors. There was a TikTok Challenge a while back that involved microwaving Little Debbie Raisin Creme Pies until they exploded, and I was tagged in thousands of them.
“I wanted to be a celebrity without appreciating what all that entailed,” I admit. “My every move has been judged: relationships, sexuality, reproductive health. There are only so many times a person can insist they’re not pregnant, that they’ve just gained a bit of weight, before they blow up on an interviewer.Which becomes an unflattering sound bite, a hashtag, another nasty story about Bettie Hughes being an ungrateful brat.”
I reach the end of my rant and realize I’m shouting. There are tears in my eyes.
“You’re not an ungrateful brat,” Hall tells me gently, pulling me into a hug.
I sniffle into his shoulder. “I am what I am. Don’t pity me.”
He strokes my hair, and I burrow into the feeling, the attention. “Why not?”
“I don’t want your pity.” I back away, wiping my nose on my sleeve. “I want your revenge. On everyone. I want you to help me get back at them.” The statement is supposed to sound scary, but the sniffling ruins it.
Hall’s mouth twists. “I’m not made for revenge.”
“I know. You’re so nice to everybody, so upbeat all the time. It’s unhealthy. What’s up with that?” I try to lighten the mood, already embarrassed that he saw me cry over my undeniably privileged childhood. I’d meant to tell him about Bettie Watson and instead I told him everything about Bettie Hughes.You do love to make it all about you, I hear former friends sigh. I shake my head.
