“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 neon colors, and I was sitting there like Lucille Ball in my polka dots. Which evvvverybody 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.”