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“I promise you, crypto is no more complicated than derivatives or old-fashioned investment banking.”
“Well, I don’t understand derivatives, either. I once went on a date with another guy who was in banking—”
“I’m not your first?” he joked. “Your taste in men is kinda troubling.”
It was. At least until now, she thought. “No, you’re not the first. But he was a lot younger than you,” she teased him.
“Okay, now that hurts.”
“He tried explaining derivatives to me. I didn’t understand any of it—not even something like shorting the market—and I never saw him again.”
“You stopped going out with him because you didn’t understand derivatives?” Frankie asked.
“There was more to it than that. I was just making a point.”
“Futurium’s expanding and Vegas will be a part of it,” he said. “The money will be insane. It will make that guy’s faith in derivatives look like he was planning to retire on the interest from a checking account.”
Betsy picked at her salad, unable to look at him. It was a toxic fusion of embarrassment and shame: she actually knew how much interest she had earned on her checking account the previous month. Nine cents. She imagined that her mother had known every month, too.
* * *
“My God, you and Crissy look alike,” Frankie said. He was scrolling through her sister’s website on an iPad as he sat across from her desk in her office at the counseling service in Vermont. He was slouching like most of her teen clients, sunk into the upright chair as if it were a recliner, his long legs stretched out before him. “Do you look that much like twins in person? How much work has she had done?”
“As in cosmetic surgery?”
He nodded.
“Well, she looks like Diana, right?”
“Exactly like her. It’s uncanny.”
“So, let me ask you: How much do I look like her? The princess?”
“Definite resemblance. Pretty incredible, actually. If you dyed and styled your hair, you could pass for sure—either as Diana or as your sister.”
Over the years, people had observed that she looked like the princess. “Crissy had a nose job. I think that’s it.”
“You wouldn’t need one.”
“I don’t plan to get one,” she chuckled.
He kept burrowing deeper down the rabbit hole that was her sister’s life—at least as she and the casino presented it on the website. He’d read aloud a review quote, then follow the link to the review itself, and then watch ten or fifteen seconds of the tribute show’s trailer before being seduced by something in the video that would lead him in yet another direction.
“Petula Clark?” he asked. “Who remembers Petula Clark?”
“Crissy’s audience does. And we all know the songs, even if we don’t recall who sang them.”
“Not my kids. Not Marisa.”
“Well, my sister’s crowd does,” Betsy said.
“Touché.”
“It’s sweet to watch a sea of Q-tips nodding and swaying.”
“And Dusty Springfield? And Bonnie Tyler? She does them, too?”
“Uh-huh.”
