I was sitting in one of the most expensive restaurants on Melrose Avenue, celebrating my rise to the Top Thirty Entrepreneurs under Thirty, when I got the call that I was broke. The restaurant declined my credit card.
Halfway up a mountain at the north end of Old HomesteadRoad, a big, shuddersome house gazes down at me like a beady-eyed crow, tracking my progress to the opposite side of town. Even though that house and its occupants don’t know I’ve been hiding out in Teller City for the last several months, I feel it watching me all the time. It’s why I do all my shopping in nearby Springhedge. Needing to keep a low profile means I can’t risk trying to make any friends here, so I sit alone on the couch night after night, dreaming of the good old days.
I scurry like a beetle back into my rotting log, a small dwelling on the wooded outskirts of town with no cable, where the electricity and Wi-Fi are unwittingly being powered by one of the neighbors. (I run an extension cord from their outdoor outlet.) I stopped paying the water bill, so I’ve been waiting on that to dry up: my future holds either getting a job or showering at the YMCA in Springhedge and doing my toilet business unspeakably. I subsist on frozen pizza and peanut butter sandwiches. And Evian bottled water, of course. I’m not a pleb.
Once inside, I collapse onto the couch to feel sorry for myself. “Why couldn’t you have lived somewhere else?” I moan to Eileen. “Or had a bigger television?” This one is twenty-four inches.
Eileen doesn’t respond, as she is very busy being dead in Florida. She was only supposed to be in Florida for a three-week vacation last February, but the ninety-year-old lady snuffed it at Disney World during week two. I had needed money and a place to stay, and found her advertisement asking for someone to water her plants at a time when the situation was dire (I had been staying with a woman I’d just met, who said I could take her sofa if I acted as lookout whenever she was doing illegal tattooing). My three-week stay has grown into nearly a year. Every single day, I amterrified a cop is going to show up and arrest me for squatting, or a long-lost relative will come to claim Eileen’s house and belongings. I can’t believe no one’s kicked me out yet.
It’s a drafty little place, musty-smelling, like it knows Eileen is dead and has decided to die right along with her even though someone’s still trying to live in it. The walls are dark wood paneling, the carpet gray shag that’s crunchy in areas. Crayons and dead mice have melted under the radiators to form the world’s most grotesque rainbow. There isn’t a single decent wall to pose in front of for pictures. I had to nail a tie-dye tapestry up on the wall with the best lighting, which as far as my followers and family know, is the “bohemian room” in my private Hawaiian villa. Don’t ask to visit me because I am simply too busy to accommodate guests—I am making a fortune as an influencer for a nonexistent company called verdIgRIS Tea, a multilevel marketing venture I made up. Allegedly, if you drink the tea it can make your eyes greener. I’ll send details to you in the mail, which will then be lost by our inefficient postal system.
Even though verdIgRIS isn’t real, other brands will surely see my sponsorships, so the goal is to make them think I’m in demand. If you build it (the lie), they will come (with enough cash to get me out of Teller City before my grandmother discovers I’m here and heckles me for being a failure).
I swallow, staring at the ceiling. Three days.
Only three days left until I have to see everyone and put on a convincing show that I’m Doing Great, Actually. No, I certainly did not make a huge deal out of how rich I was, then blow my money on big, elaborate parties for fair-weather friends I haven’t heard a peep from since my brands went kaput. The media didn’t overexpose me to the point where everyone hates me. My facewasn’t all over tabloids, first for my success, and then for my lavish parties, and finally as a target of ridicule. Constant accusations of cheating on partners or being cheated on. Plastic surgery. Debt. (They got that one right, at least.) I didn’t lose job opportunities, left with nothing except for credit too bad to get a loan.
It’s what my parents have been warning me about since I was four years old and crying that I wanted to be a Disney star. My frugal, responsible, ordinary parents, who shunned the limelight my grandmother casts, who’ve been scrupulously saving for their retirement since they were in their twenties. I certainly couldn’t approach them for help, not when my dad tried so hard to keep his kids from chasing fame but we all did, anyway, because bad people in nice suits offer fame-adjacent children the world the second they turn eighteen, exploiting their connections, sweet-talking them right into ruin, and then moving promptly along. Dad hoped we’d choose normal lives, too. He was worried we’d end up spoiled or broken. Joke’s on him: I’m both!
I get up and pour the remaining quarter of a bottle from the fridge into a glass. California zinfandel has never let me down.
Three days. The ticking clock is a roar.
“This sucks,” I tell my wine. “And so do you, but at least you’re trying.”
I have nothing to give to anyone.
All of my possessions have already been featured in social media posts. Athena will know if I’m giving out my own stuff as Christmas presents, she willabsolutelysay something, and then what? At any rate, I couldn’t possibly part with the few belongings I own from my old life. Gold-infused essential oils recommended by my aromatherapist, a prosperity-boosting body scrub that only works if you’re a Scorpio. Musk-scented CBD oil made especiallyfor depressed blue tang fish. Most of these are GOOP products, obtained through my persistent extortion of Gwyneth Paltrow. She’s in the wind now and hasn’t sent me anything in months.
I pop open a fresh bottle. “It’s not fair!” The closer Christmas gets, the sicker I feel.
I rev up social media to do the number one no-no: look up my own name.
What I find is bad.
Tweets with the highest engagement accompany the hashtag #BettieHughesIsCanceled, followed closely by #LucasDodgedA Bullet.
This was the fallout after I tried to tell people that my ex-boyfriend, Lucas Dormer, was emotionally abusive, via an interview withAndromeda Magazine. Lucas’s fans swiftly crushed me. We’ve been broken up for years now, but they still won’t let their hatred go, dogging me all over the internet, posting GIFs of people throwing Raisin Creme Pies at each other’s faces (I’ll explain that reference later).
I pour another drink, digging into TikTok. The only time I’m mentioned by the merciless teens of today’s society is in mean hashtags on videos they post of themselves dancing to Lucas Dormer’s songs. One of them green-screened my years-old mug shot into the background.
I’m making a bad day much worse. I need to put my phone away, but I can’t. I have to know what people—people who think I’m too rich and busy to look it up—are saying about me.
Some of the girls I used to be friendly with before their modeling or acting careers took off have posted cryptic tweets likeIt’s so sad to see what’s happened to her, and I don’t know who they’rereferencing, but just the fact that itmightbe me pumps my body full of furious adrenaline. How dare they!
I’m drying up my second bottle. Every boyfriend I’ve ever had has, at one point, used a #BettieHughesIsOverParty comment to link to their melodramatic “What’s It Like to Date a Watson-Hughes” exposés on Medium.com from two, three, four years ago.
I “like” a few of them, just so they’ll know I see what kind of shitfuckery they’re up to. A reporter at theNew York Times, Kelly Frederick, who used to dig around in my finances and tell everyone my companies were drowning, declared she was praying for me. She tagged @BettieHughes, the wrong handle, as mine is @RealBettieHughes. Her thirty most recent tweets are gushing over Lucas Dormer’s guest appearance on some teen drama, tagging him in every one. I know she’s hoping he’ll show interest, maybe gratitude. I know he’ll probably flirt with her a little from afar but never date her, because he’s a celebrity whose public persona doesn’t match up with reality behind the scenes, and she’s a reporter.
The worst part?
Almost all of these tweets are from last year. Hardly anyone’s been talking about me since, except to make jabs. A theory that I’m in rehab is floating around. Some people think I’m dead.
Even my unpopularity isn’t popular anymore.
I can’t let this be my legacy. I had no idea how pathetic my public image has gotten. I’m going to have to deplete my vault of Photoshopped pictures. Each one takes hours to perfect, which is fine because I don’t have anything else to do. I have no real skills, so I can’t find lasting employment anywhere. The few places that would take me, I can’t work at without being recognized. I can see the trending topic now:Is Bettie Hughes working at Speedway?
I unleash the whole collection: myself Photoshopped in front of private jets. Hotel rooms with Versace shopping bags on the bed, lobster dinners in restaurants that require a reservation made months in advance. I’m not an amateur; I know I have to alter enough details in these pictures that no one can trace back to the originals. There’s a forty-year-old Swiss woman with two followers who has the best life I’ve ever seen, and she’s usually my go-to. I change the shape of clouds in her backgrounds, tint the coloring of her clothes. Apply filters liberally. Now her life is mine.
