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 will absolutely say 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 especially for 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 with Andromeda 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 like It’s so sad to see what’s happened to her, and I don’t know who they’re referencing, but just the fact that it might be 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 the New 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.