Page 59 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

JB: All this started out as a kind of game, like an experiment, but now it’s getting confusing. I may need to take a step back. I just wanted to let you know so you would understand you didn’t do anything wrong.

I knew on some level that he was saying he was developing real feelings for me, and I knew that should have worried me. Instead, it felt more like an exciting upping of the ante. Maybe it was the leftover excitement from the KikiPilot video, but I didn’t want him to take a step back. I wanted to keep going, not because I knew what we were doing or where it was going. It was like I had become addicted to it. There was a purity to our messaging that I found intoxicating. We’d been working our way through grade school, trying to remember everything we could about each year, our teachers and classmates, our lunch boxes and backpacks, the books we read, what we did at recess, our favorite toys. It felt like I could touch the sublime by memorizing all of JB’s memories. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful human achievement? To learn everything about a person you would never meet?

I wrote: The thing is, writing these messages with you has become the most interesting thing I get to do.

JB: Yes, that’s the same problem I’m having.

HungryGhost: So why is that a problem again?

JB: Aside from the staggering financial impact, I just feel weird. I don’t even know your name.

“Staggering financial impact” was worrying. He had always acted like the money was nothing. I wrote: I mean, I have one. Does it really matter what it is?

JB: It doesn’t matter what it is, only that I don’t know it? Maybe?

I lay in bed, listening to Bodhi’s sleeping breath in the dark. Did I really believe JB would use my name to hunt me down and kill me? It was hard to imagine, given everything I knew about him now, and yet he could be lying to me the same way I’d been lying to him, or twisting things so they didn’t sound as bad. Don’t be an idiot, I thought. Don’t be stupid.

My name is Suzie, I wrote, and the moment I pressed send I knew I had made a huge mistake. I had lied to JB plenty, and honestly, I had never felt that bad about it. But this time I felt like I’d played the wrong chord on a piano, the shame was that immediate and ringing. He’d been asking for something real from me, and I hadn’t even lied well. If I thought a first name was enough for him to hunt and kill someone, which I obviously did not, I had just given him my roommate’s name.

Suzie is a beautiful name, he wrote.

I was going to throw up. Don’t pay me anymore, I wrote on impulse.

JB: What?

HungryGhost: It’s too much money.

It really was an absurd amount of money. He’d paid me almost four grand in the last month. It also felt like he was saying he felt stupid for valuing what we were doing together, and I didn’t want him to feel stupid. I valued it too. And I could have shown him that by telling him my real name, and I hadn’t. This was another way I could show him.

He didn’t write back right away, and I didn’t know what was happening.

HungryGhost: JB?

JB: I’m embarrassed. Not paying, or at least not paying so much, would be a huge relief. I was kind of digging myself into a hole. But I also loved sending you the money! Like sending you a tip and watching it go through was this thrill, and I liked feeling like a rich guy, but I knew it was totally out of control.

You idiot, I wrote, though I was grinning.

JB: See, before you didn’t know I was an idiot!

HungryGhost: I like it better that you’re an idiot.

JB: Thank you, Suzie.

And I tried not to feel sick hearing him call me that. Because I knew there was no way I could ever tell JB the whole truth. If I told him I was a college dropout with a baby and no real career prospects, all this would evaporate. This was the kind of spell that worked only at a distance. All I could do was try to enjoy it while it lasted.

Chapter Sixteen

Margo had assumed Becca was coming home from NYU for the holidays, so when she didn’t hear from her at Christmas or New Year’s, she inwardly felt snubbed, though she tried not to dwell on it. But three days after KikiPilot, and two days before Margo was supposed to leave for Vegas, Becca randomly knocked on their door. The timing was so weird; Margo thought maybe Becca had come because of the KikiPilot video, but that turned out not to be the case.

After the flurry of hugs and the admiring of Bodhi, whom Jinx then graciously, wordlessly took from Margo, Becca and Margo found themselves alone at the dining table drinking tea Jinx had made that smelled strongly of hay. Becca looked exactly the same. She was wearing knee-high black leather boots that looked ridiculous in a California January and a kind of artsy black velvet blazer. Her face (that of a chubby Reba McEntire) was the same too; even the zits on her chin were in a familiar constellation. She smelled the same, though Margo could never have named the smell. It evoked cloves and the interior of cars, the sweetish acrylic odor of Halloween costumes.

One look and Margo loved her again, and she could see that Becca loved her too. They were helpless to stop themselves, even if they both would have liked to hold on to their hurt a little longer. “Dude, you’re a mom!” Becca said. “I don’t think it was real to me until I met him. Like real-real. And your dad is here! I did not see that one coming.”

“I know, right? It’s all very weird.” Margo realized as she took a sip of her tea that she would have to make a conscious choice to either tell Becca or not tell Becca about her OnlyFans. On the one hand, Margo felt honor bound to start telling the truth. And if Becca didn’t know about the KikiPilot video, part of Margo was proud and wanted to tell her. But Margo also dreaded having to navigate whatever bullshit reaction Becca might have.

“But is it okay? Being a mom? You seem okay.” Becca reached out and grabbed Margo’s forearm, squeezed the meat around the bone.

Margo tried to figure out how to answer this question. “I think I’m okay? In some ways, I’m totally overwhelmed, but in others I think I may be doing better than I ever have?”

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