Bettie

Bettie’s photographs were changing hands under the counter long before she ever stepped off the train: prints baked yellow in backroom drawers, pinned up in trucker cabs, slipped between the pages of respectable magazines. Nobody knew her name; everybody knew the rounded fringe and the blood-red mouth. By the time she finally reached town, she didn’t need an introduction. She just asked who was selling, and for how much.

Where another woman might have screamed theft, Bettie pulled out a ledger. She catalogued the counterfeits, priced out the margins, noted every address. Her own face had been earning for other people for years; she’d come to collect the till herself. The bootleg printers tip their hats low to her now. It’s the safer move, and the deserved one.

She works the hours when clubs dim the lights and raise the prices. A pose measured to the millimeter, the lacquered cigarette holder she never actually lights, a smoky look held exactly one second too long: wallets open by themselves, wider than planned. Bettie never asks for a thing — she lets the client talk himself into believing that generosity toward her means stepping into the photograph. Plenty pay dearly for that spot in the archive.

Ambition, for Bettie, has the patience of a negative: everything’s already there, it just needs developing. She’s aiming for the top and treats every bootleg copy as a down payment on her own legend. In her downtime, she sorts through her own images, deciding what survives and what burns. And she has an eye for other faces too: in the club lines, she can spot at a glance which girl’s photograph will someday be changing hands under the counter.