Page 58 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

She picked up, but the voice was Suzie’s: “Okay, do you know KikiPilot?”

“Ummm, no?”

“She’s a YouTuber, she got famous streaming Star Wars: Squadrons.”

“Okay,” Margo said, gently swaying from side to side to keep Bodhi asleep.

“Anyway, she picked us up! She did a whole reaction video to the TikTok series from episode one—she watched them all!”

“That’s so cool!” Margo said.

“You are not getting it!” Suzie grunted in displeasure, and there were muffled sounds like fabric was being rubbed over the phone and then it was Jinx: “The video already has a million views, and it was only posted two hours ago.”

“Holy fucking God,” Margo said.

“Come home right now and watch it.”

It turned out that Kiki was insanely beautiful and hot. Margo felt that plastic surgeons should study Kiki, use calipers to measure her face so they could make other people look more like her.

“Honey,” Suzie said, “plastic surgeons are the ones who made Kiki look like that in the first place.”

The YouTube video reacting to Hungry Ghost was eight minutes long. In the intro, Kiki said she saw the Bruno Mars clip on TikTok and then watched the whole series. Kiki played through each clip of the series, making commentary throughout. “You see people do skits on TikTok, and I’ve even seen recurrent themes or characters, but I’ve never seen anything exactly like this. I want to know what these girls are gonna do next.”

By the time they had finished watching it, the video had three million views. As Suzie clicked around to show them more Kiki videos, Margo saw that almost every single one had between twelve and fifteen million views. She’d been nursing Bodhi, and he suddenly detached and used her sweater to pull himself more upright and belched like an old man.

“How much money do YouTubers make?” Margo asked. “Like per view?”

“It depends, but between three thousand and five thousand per million views. So on a video like this one, about sixty grand.”

“She’s making sixty k on an eight-minute video?” Margo could not process this information.

“This is what she used to look like,” Suzie said, and hit play on one of Kiki’s earliest videos.

Margo was fascinated. It was so difficult to pinpoint what was different, and yet Kiki looked like an entirely other person. A pretty but normal person. Her eyes were slightly asymmetric and her lips were thinner. Was her chin different somehow? Her hair was certainly much thinner back then. How had she known what parts of herself to change? Margo imagined the view count moving the plastic surgeon’s hand like a Ouija board, showing him what Kiki’s subscribers wanted.

KC and Rose came in, excited and chattering. Jinx and Suzie had called them right after Margo and told them to come over to celebrate. Jinx put on some music and made red beans and rice and corn bread. They let Bodhi have a tiny pile of the softest corn bread crumbs, and he mashed them around with his little hands and then sucked them off his fingers in ecstasy.

All night, Suzie tracked their TikTok accounts and the girls their OnlyFans. By ten p.m., all of their TikToks had over a million views. Every single one. The real question was whether this would translate to new fans and at what rate. Links to their individual OnlyFans accounts were in a Linktree on the main HungryGhost TikTok account. It was the big unknown, how many people would even click to follow, let alone click to their OnlyFans and subscribe. So far, KC had more than a hundred new fans, Rose had almost eighty, and Margo stopped telling everyone because she felt so embarrassed. But before she went to bed, Jinx grabbed her in the hallway. “Tell me. You don’t have to tell them, just tell me.”

Bodhi was already asleep in his crib. Margo had tried to stay up with everyone else, but she was desperate to be alone.

“How many?” Jinx whispered.

“Um, almost four hundred?”

He squeezed her shoulders with his giant hands and folded her into a hug.

“You’re gonna be so famous,” he said into her hair.

“No, I’m not,” she said, out of reflex.

“Darling, I’m afraid that you are very wrong.”

JB messaged me that night. Not about the KikiPilot stuff; he wasn’t aware of any of that.

JB: Jelly Ghost, I think I’m getting confused. About what’s real and what’s not. I think I need to take a break.

I wrote back immediately: Confused about what?

---