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“What kind of car did you buy?” Betsy asked. She was expecting a used Hyundai. Maybe, if the wheels were new, a Chevy Spark.
He pointed at a red Audi sedan parked against the small lot’s metal fence. “The S3. I didn’t get the carbon atlas inlays in the seats or the nineteen-inch wheels, so we brought it in for under fifty Gs.”
“New…”
“Oh, yeah.”
She had been driving the same Subaru for six years. It had nearly 127,000 miles. He started telling her about the Bang & Olufsen 3D sound system in his car and the vehicle’s virtual cockpit, but it was all a blur. His sister rolled her eyes at the alpha swag name-dropping and put her elbow around her brother’s neck, collaring him good-naturedly.
Betsy had never expected to get rich as a social worker, but among the ways she changed during the pandemic was the realization that when she had been a mess in high school, she had been on to something: life is short, and there is no one steering the big blue gumball on which she lived. Since college, she had been trying to make the world a better place, and for some families and a few kids, she had. But now, post-pandemic, she was in her midthirties and living in the sort of apartment that parents rented for their kids when they were in college: part of the second floor of a Victorian at the edge of the University of Vermont campus.
There had to be more. She’d spent her adult life trying to save others. Maybe it was time to try and save herself.
When she started falling for Frankie, she tried to understand this new currency. While she found the machinations of crypto byzantine, she thought the nomenclature was precisely the sort of techno teen-speak she had mastered from years around adolescents: apes and bags and DAOs and FUDs and moons and normies and rug pulls and (her favorite) WAGMI, as in “We’re all gonna make it.” How could you not like that optimism? Oh, there were some terms that caused her eyes to glaze, such as “proof of stake,” but all of them were signposts to a different future.
A life that wasn’t hers and that sure as hell wasn’t Crissy’s, because Betsy most assuredly did not envy the specifics of her sister’s Nevada biosphere. There was something dark and sad about living in a second-rate casino, a mutable world that wobbled between the faux ostentatious and the very, very bleak. And unlike the vast majority of Vegas performers, Crissy was living large. She wasn’t living the life of Barry Manilow or Celine Dion, but her existence was one of spectacular privilege compared to most Vegas entertainers. The secret to her success, in Betsy’s opinion, was the confluence of three things: She was unique, the only Diana there was in Las Vegas. She was channeling a celebrity who, though long dead, was perpetually in the zeitgeist: the world’s obsession with the royals never waned. There would always be another movie, another musical, another streaming TV series. Another novel of her life or another biography. And then Crissy or her agent, Terrance, had the brilliant idea to add songs to the show that appealed to a certain demographic—songs that reminded them that, once upon a time, they weren’t old. All cover bands and tribute performers mined the emotional gold that was nostalgia, but her sister had found the mother lode in Diana.
And so while Betsy didn’t covet Crissy’s life—she wasn’t even sure she approved of it—she did believe one thing with certainty: her own life in Vermont was much more pathetic than even that of an off-the-strip princess.
* * *
Though Betsy may have been the difficult sister as an adolescent—the one with a seemingly allergic aversion to reasonable behavior—she turned it around in college. Less weed, less alcohol, fewer decisions based on the pleasures derived from immediate gratification. She understood that actions had consequences, and life was a cause-and-effect equation.
And now, while much of her sister’s world appalled her, Betsy did like the idea that Crissy lived in a place where it almost always was sunny. She appreciated the fact that her sister was far from the home where their father and stepfather had died, and the ground zero where their mother had passed away. She was jealous that Crissy was three time zones away from their childhood. Betsy craved that, too. She saw the possibilities inherent in putting that much geographic distance between herself and her adolescent muddles and missteps.
One afternoon, long after Frankie had left the investment bank that had made him rich to join Futurium—the very crypto she had heard about in the counseling center’s parking lot—he fell back against the couch pillows in her apartment, naked, and told her that he was leaving for Las Vegas to work at Futurium’s office there. He added that the word office was a misnomer. It was more of a warehouse.
“My sister loves it there,” she told him, trying to retain her equanimity in the wake of this bombshell.
“And she’s at a second-rate casino. Can you imagine how much she’d love it if her show was at a nicer place? One of the titans on the strip?” he asked. “The BP makes me cringe. I should take your sister under my wing and set her up at the kind of resort a Dowling girl deserves.”
“It’s not that bad,” she replied, instinctively defending the casino where Crissy worked. “You make it sound like a hot-sheets motel.”
“No. Of course not. But it’s still run by cretins. Two brothers who don’t belong in the business.”
“How much do you know about Las Vegas?”
“I know lots. We know lots. Investment banking is all about research and knowledge. I may be in crypto now, but we still do our due diligence. I know who the casino players are, and I know where the politicians stand on every issue that matters to Futurium. It’s what I do. And there’s a lot to love about Vegas that has nothing to do with the business model we’ve put together. Futurium’s Florida partners and investors saw that when they were deciding where to set up shop. Vegas is warm, just like home, and just like in West Palm, the wealthy can wear their money on their sleeves. So, I totally get what your sister sees in the city. Totally.” Then he told her about the Nevada facility where the crypto company had installed its crypto mining rigs—its massive computers—and how it was only a matter of time before crypto and Vegas were synonymous. More casinos were accepting Bitcoin. He described the houses he was looking at online outside the city, and how serene it would be to live near Red Rocks. On Zillow, he showed her the house he was likely to buy. And then he got to the point of his revelation, and it was precisely what she realized she’d been hoping he’d say.
“I want you to come with me, Betsy. There’s a place for you, too, with Futurium.”
She said yes without hesitation. This was the stars with all their plenary power telling her that a life buoy was being tossed into the water, and it was time to grab it with both hands, and allow herself to be pulled to safety.
Everyone said I was “so verbal.” It was like I was a dog that could talk.
But it’s always been numbers that interest me. That after-school coding class for “gifted young mathematicians” I got to go to was the coolest thing I ever did in Vermont.
CHAPTER THREE
Crissy
Diana Spencer was an eidolon in both senses of the word: she was idealized and she was spectral. I doubt anyone other than Peter Morgan, the mind behind the TV series The Crown, has watched as much video of the woman as I have, but still she never grows stale. Google her. Watch her. Listen to her voice. I always feel her power and her pain, and yet there’s also a part of her that remains just out of reach. There’s a reason she was beloved that transcended the fact that she married a prince who loved someone else.
Or, let’s face it, the fact that she married a man whose idea of phone sex was to fantasize being Camilla Parker Bowles’s tampon.
* * *
Once Nigel had finished his avocado toast and left me alone, I took my phone from the cabana side table and stared at the word Betsy in my contacts. I had finished my Bloody Mary and eaten the celery stalk, and so I swigged the last of the melted ice. Even in a cabana, ice melts fast in Las Vegas in August.
