Chapter 8
Night Three
Betty
Betty wasn’t lying. Mallory was a nightmare.
She ate Betty’s yogurts. She had an absurd collection of cacti.
She played weird bohemian music with an annoying bass that gave Betty a headache.
She had very loud sex with her boyfriend at least twice a night, which was part of the reason Betty tried to accrue as many work shifts as the trust-fund diner owner would allow.
Arguing with Mallory about any of the above meant drawing attention to herself, and Betty preferred to go unnoticed, to be as unintrusive as possible.
As a child, she had this down to an art.
It really wasn’t all that hard to go through life nearly invisible.
She had an unmemorable face, average brown hair, average brown eyes, average though skinny in a malnourished way build, average height.
When she’d bleached her hair blonde, she’d emerged from the bathroom to find Mallory’s boyfriend on the couch with one hand on the remote and one tucked under the waistband of his sweatpants, and he said, “Holy shit, Betty, you’re actually fucking hot,” and Betty wanted to spin on her toes and undo it.
She wasn’t interested in being hot. She was simply interested in getting by.
“I think this is a great idea,” Sybil was saying. “Betty, I know that we don’t know each other well, but I have a daughter—”
Betty knew she had a daughter. All Sybil talked about was her kids.
Betty could already tell you more about them than she could her own siblings as of late.
Betty had four of them. Three brothers. A sister.
She’d ghosted them all but Levi when she left Georgia, and now she and Levi swapped an email every few months, a phone call even less so, mostly for emergencies or when Betty really missed him so palpably that she had to hear his voice to ground herself.
Betty knew that Sybil had twins, that this was the first time they’d been away from each other, choosing different colleges.
She wanted to dislike Sybil. The upper-middle-class highlighted blonde, Pilates-toned, Range Rover–driving woman was so not her type.
But Sybil had a warm heart and also, Betty thought, a stone-cold disposition when she needed to.
Which maybe meant the two of them weren’t all that different.
Tonight, Betty decided to be agreeable. She thought it might be useful to stay with Zeke, and certainly, it would be more peaceful than her current arrangement.
Also, importantly, he seemed harmless, the exact right level of clueless about the world around him and narcissistic about his own needs that it took to be successful in his sport.
“Sure, Zeke, thank you for the offer,” Betty said. “I guess, well, sure, I’d love to move in with you. On a trial basis.”
“Of course,” Zeke said. “No pressure. I have another surgery coming up next month, so it would be nice to have someone around.”
He struck Betty as someone who, surprisingly, did not have many friends. If he did, he wouldn’t be here in this shitty diner with strangers he had met online. Something they had in common.
“I can help!” Sybil offered. “Betty, you’re young, you should be out exploring the city. Meeting young men. Or women. My Eloise likes both, which I totally support, by the way. But you should be out having fun! Doing what young people do.”
Betty didn’t reply because she wasn’t interested in sharing anything personal, so Sybil clapped her hands together. “I feel like this is the thing, the thing that we all need. We need each other to help solve each other’s problems.”
“Who said I have problems?” Julian asked.
“Well, you don’t sleep, my man,” Zeke said. “So there’s gotta be something.”
Julian emitted a cough at that exact moment that sounded like a train engine. When he caught his breath, he said: “Sorry, I do feel like my body is falling apart from not sleeping.”
“Ditto,” Zeke said.
“Tritto,” Sybil said, then her cheeks flushed and she added, “Sorry, Eloise says that sometimes…it sounded cuter in my brain.”
“It’s the perfect amount of cute,” Zeke said, and Julian raised an eyebrow toward Betty, like they shared a secret. Betty kind of liked that too. She was used to secrets, but only her own, and it was a balm, a relief, to be in on someone else’s.
“Maybe this was preordained.” Sybil’s cheeks were bright pink now, like she was really amping up to something big. “What are the odds that the three of us met on an internet forum—”
“That sounds like the start of a horror movie,” Betty said.
“Or porn,” Zeke replied, then his eyes went wide like he’d forgotten that they didn’t actually know one another all that well.
Betty watched his face blanch and marveled that someone so famous, with so much clout and power, could still be a bit of an idiot.
Didn’t he have a filter? Betty’s filter was so rigid that she never said anything without thinking three beats down the line.
This is why she was still on her feet. She thought about Levi again.
Wondered if he were still on his feet. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d connected.
Where had he been last? Seattle. Maybe he was still in Seattle.
“Sorry,” Zeke said, mostly for Sybil’s benefit, Betty thought. “I’m still on pain meds. They make me loopy. That was a joke…about the porn.” His eyelid spasmed like it, too, was crying out in apology.
Zeke turned to Betty as if he still had to plead his case. “I swear, I’m a feminist. I’m best friends with my sister.”
Betty didn’t care about his politics. She honestly was just thinking about living in an apartment the size of the White House.
“I would never, ever put you in a position where you were uncomfortable,” he continued, rambling now. “It would just be nice to have the company. And if it helps you out, um, financially, then I’d feel less selfish in offering.”
“So we agree!” Sybil said, tapping her palms on the table, like that was that. “We will lean on each other until our problems are solved.”
“I’m in,” Zeke said.
Julian wheezed again, which the table took as a concurrence.
Later, Betty realized that she had never really agreed to anything.
So as far as she was concerned, if she ever needed to break the terms of the deal, she could, no questions asked.
She’d learned that from her father too. Her terms, her choices, her freedom.
No matter what the others thought she agreed to, she well understood that she would abide only by her rules, by what served her needs, by what kept her safe.
After that, it was every man for himself.