Page 77 of Off the Rails

A scream of terror made me jolt from my spot on the couch, and I nearly tossed my phone across the room. The cry reverberated off the walls, even from this distance.

Glancing at the time on my phone, I tried to comfort myself.

It’ll be over soon.

I just needed to distract myself for a few more hours. And what better time to work on my escape plan?

Winning Fright Night had been a great start, but starting out with just a duffel bag of clothes, the costs of finding my own place were going to add up quickly. Frankly, considering the advance rent any landlord would require to overlook my credit score, the $20k would be a nice apartment starter kit and little more.

I needed a way to grow the pot. Picking up my phone, I tried searching how to invest in the stock market. But I was quickly met with an overwhelming wave of information: brokerages, index funds, tax-advantaged accounts, IRAs.

By the time I scrolled through one whole page of a discussion board, I’d ended up with fifteen open tabs of extra reading and no clue what to do. Everyone seemed to have different opinions about the best place for a beginner to start investing.

But there was one thing they all seemed to agree on: there would be no quick return. Wherever I chose to put my money, I needed to let it sit and “mature”. Some people recommended leaving it in the market for decades if possible.

I don’t have that kind of time.

My plan was crushed before I could even start it. Closing out the search, I shot Nico a text to let me know if there were any slow nights at the club I could pick up. Then, I moved over to TikTok to scroll away my despair.

I was hardly paying attention to the videos as I swiped them off my screen: dog videos, thirst traps, local-coded jokes about Valemont’s local roads. None of it was a match for my gloom.

Then, just before I could close out the app and drown my sorrows with the TV, something finally caught my attention: a girl about my age with “MONEY HACK” written across the center of her screen. She looked polished and confident as she explained the new betting app that let her make $700 overnight.

“Bullshit…” I muttered, but then the screenshots flashed across the screen: huge payouts every day for betting on everything from popular TV shows to the weather.

I’m lucky if I make a grand on a busy weekend at Velvet Paradise before club fees and tip outs.

And even that required an entire weekend of dancing.

I clicked into the suggested video tab and flipped through a few more videos of people talking about the app, complete with screenshots of their own earnings. It sounded too good to be true. But if this many people were swearing by it, it couldn’t hurt to try…

Clicking one of their affiliate links, I downloaded the app and was gifted $10 of betting credit to start with. Scrolling through the options, I was totally overwhelmed. You really could bet on anything. But what did I feel like an expert in?

I started off placing a few bets that the Lionshare had labelled as favorable, focusing on ones that would close soon: oil prices, stock values, and sports outcomes in the next fifteen minutes. I hardly had a clue what I was betting on, but I rounded out my $10 of credit with $40 of my own dollars and committed to the popular vote.

Competing bets flashed in the lower left corner of my screen while the live graph charted out the real life trajectory of the bet. I wasn’t even sure where to look — the live chat on the left, or the countdown timer on the right.

It didn’t matter — in a matter of fifteen minutes, I’d grown my $50 investment to $120.

This really is easy.

Adding another $100 of my money to the app, I looked for more favorable wagers, as well as a few questions in the pop culture category that I could bet against the popular vote on to increase my earnings potential.

I bet on everything from how many streams Taylor Swift would get on Spotify this week to who would get sent home on Sweetheart Shores tonight.

There was even a section for sports betting, but I knew better than to poke around in there. I could hardly name three professional sports leagues, let alone their players.

And with each successful wager, my confidence grew — so did my deposits into the app. Before I’d even realized it, my dozens of tiny wagers had added up to thousands of dollars in the app, waiting for a final verdict to pay out.

I contemplated placing one last bet on the color of Sabrina Carpenter’s costume at tomorrow’s concert, but a squeal from outside startled me out of my contemplation — much higher pitched than the others.

Jealousy twisted the pit of my stomach as I listened to the shrieks and moans that followed. Had they brought other women back here?

I knew that they’d been doing Fright Night long before I came around. I just figured that while I was staying here, it would be more of an exclusive deal. But we’d never set that out in the terms explicitly.

Images of Blade taking another girl over the bumper cars or on the ferris wheel made me sick. Or Nash taking another girl back to be her muse? Bile burned at the back of my throat.

I shouldn’t have cared. But that didn’t stop me.