Page 57 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“We should take her to a hospital, is what we should do,” Rose says.

“You were literally the one against calling 911.”

“Where do you think she came from?”

“You’re asking me if I think she’s an alien?”

“I mean, kind of. What else could she really be?”

Margo’s eyes slide open in a deeply creepy way, and she opens her mouth and a saxophone solo comes out.

Twitter poll:

Should we keep the smoking-hot alien we found on our balcony: yes or no?

4,756 people voted yes.

Suzie was excited about this until Margo pointed out that most of Rose’s and KC’s posts got three or four thousand likes.

“I don’t know, man,” KC said.

She and Rose were over for dinner at Jinx’s behest. He was making everyone oyakodon. He was shocked they’d never had it.

“See, guys, it’s not as easy to go viral on TikTok as you thought. I think it was just too weird,” KC continued. “We should be doing the trends everyone else is doing.”

They had begun posting four days ago, and the vomiting silver paint hadn’t gone viral, but instead had been almost instantly flagged and taken down. None of the videos had gone viral.

“There is no such thing as too weird,” Jinx said. “People just don’t get it yet, what it is. It’s worth making another week. I don’t think you can make a thing too weird for people to fall in love with.”

They all felt a little sorry for him. It was part of his old-man-ness, the way he was out of touch and couldn’t see that what they’d made was childish and stupid and no one would fall in love with it. But he was at least right about the oyakodon being delicious; Margo would have eaten that every day for the rest of her life, no problem. KC and Rose wound up drinking too much wine and spent the night on the couch, and so the next morning had the festive air of a debauched slumber party. Jinx put on an Asuka match and made everyone oatmeal with nuts and golden raisins stirred into it.

So they didn’t find out for several hours that they had gone viral. It was right when KC and Rose were about to leave that Suzie opened TikTok and saw it. It was a clip none of them had really liked where Margo, in Amelia Bedelia–like fashion, plants a light bulb in a pot and covers it with dirt, and KC and Rose keep telling her it’s not going to work. Margo just keeps looking intently at the dirt, and suddenly a tiny dancing man appears and the camera zooms in on him and it’s Bruno Mars. It had taken Margo forever to figure out how to paste in that GIF of Bruno Mars.

“Okay, okay,” Suzie was saying, “this is what I would call baby viral, but you have two hundred fifty thousand views.”

“Why did that one get so many views, though?” Margo asked.

“No, because it’s like,” Suzie began, “TikTok shows it to three hundred people, and then if engagement is high enough, they show it to a thousand people, and so on. So people didn’t ever see the other clips, they only saw this one because that first group of three hundred people really liked it.”

“Okay,” Rose said, “that makes sense.”

KC was looking at her phone. “I have ten new fans!”

“Ooh, let me log in and check mine,” Rose said. Rose had five new fans. They checked Margo’s and she had three. It was not by any means a rousing success. But it was enough to convince them to keep going.

KC’s voice: “She’s claiming the vacuum is sentient.”

“Rigoberto,” Margo says, nodding and pointing at the Roomba.

“That’s a Roomba,” Rose says gently.

“No,” Margo says. “Friend.”

“He’s your friend?” Rose asks.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” KC says.

On New Year’s Day, Margo was shopping at Target, which had become in the months since Bodhi’s birth a sort of spiritual home, when Jinx’s number flashed on her phone.

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