Page 24 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“Oh, I didn’t know Arabella went to Ring of Honor,” he said.

“Who?” Margo asked, curling up on her end of the couch. Bodhi was asleep on Jinx’s chest. It was weird not to be holding him all the time.

“The one with the bright pink hair. She was with WWE, then her contract got terminated because she’d... Well, have you heard of OnlyFans?”

“No, what’s that? Is that like Cameo?” Margo knew Jinx made a sizable fraction of his living now from a site where people paid him to record videos wishing their husband happy birthday or whatever.

“Oh, no, not quite. OnlyFans is more... it’s pornography, essentially. Celebrities or people with large internet followings have unfiltered, X-rated social media accounts, and you can pay whatever amount per month to follow Arabella and see whatever saucy pics she posts. This is nothing new, pro wrestlers have been making pornography for ages—good for her and all, I hear she makes quite a bit of money—but WWE didn’t want to be associated with it. I’m glad Ring of Honor picked her up. She’s nice. She loves video games.”

Margo sat, digesting all this. She and her father had never remotely discussed pornography before. Jinx could be weirdly prudish in conversation. “Like how much money?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know, but when Triple H first told her she had to quit OnlyFans or leave WWE, she said she made more in a month on there than in a whole year wrestling. I mean, I don’t know the details of her contract, but if that’s the case, it seems like a simple decision. You’re not gonna blow your knee out taking nudes, or accidentally break your neck and wind up paralyzed.” She knew he was talking about Droz, who had wound up in a wheelchair after D’Lo Brown broke his neck on SmackDown. Jinx made a point to visit him once a year or so.

“How famous do you have to be to do it?” Margo asked.

“Oh, I think anybody can do it. It’s just a matter of whether people will follow you. Look at that, she’s about to do her finisher, watch.”

Margo watched as Arabella choked the other girl with her thighs while doing a one-handed push-up. It looked awesome.

“How does she make something so stupid look so good?” Jinx marveled.

That night in her room, Margo nursed Bodhi and was waiting for him to fall all the way asleep so she could move him. Her top was off, and she could see herself in the mirror, one of those cheap college dorm ones you hang on the door. Her boobs were huge. She’d never had boobs this big before. On impulse, she gave a squeeze and sprayed the mirror with milk.

And that is when she thought: Any man would pay to see this.

Margo was highly aware that she was not as pretty as she was hot. Shyanne had said it all the time. “You’re not pretty enough to have dirty hair, get your ass in the shower!” “You’re not pretty enough to have that kind of attitude, Miss Noodle!” Her face was not as angular as her mother’s, and she had Jinx’s mushy nose. Shyanne was always trying to contour it and turn it into something better.

Margo knew her mother was trying to pass down wisdom and skill, the dark art of turning an ordinary person into a minor goddess by means of paint and fabric, but what she also heard was: Your face needs to be covered. To be loved, you should put this face over your face. It was even okay if it hurt, if it burned, if it accidentally tore out your eyelashes. “Beauty is like free money,” Shyanne used to say as she did Margo’s face.

Margo transferred Bodhi to his crib and pulled out her laptop. She didn’t know why she was so curious about it. She had the money from Mark’s mother. She wasn’t desperate, though it was alarming how quickly that money was already disappearing. She went to the OnlyFans website and clicked around. It was hard to see what it entailed without signing up, but signing up was free, so why not?

She needed a username. Think of something sexy, she thought. Though suddenly it seemed entirely mysterious what made something sexy. Since having Bodhi, sex felt impossibly foreign, like something in another world or half remembered from a dream. Sex adjacent, she thought, but her brain kept generating ideas like BoobsMcGee and TwatLord. Finally, she typed: HungryGhost.

And then she was in.

The first thing she did was search for Arabella, but nothing came up. She checked the spelling, mystified. Did Arabella not actually have an account, or was there something intentionally weird about the OnlyFans search algorithm? In frustration, she went to Arabella’s Instagram account, clicked through her bio to a Linktree. Buried at the bottom was a link that said Cum follow me 18+. Margo clicked and was finally taken to Arabella’s OnlyFans page, though she couldn’t see any of her posts without subscribing and paying money. Arabella’s account cost an astonishing twenty-five dollars a month to follow. Margo felt like Scrooge McDuck, unwilling to part with her cartoon golden coins. But in the end, she was simply too curious. Once she had full access, she scrolled through Arabella’s feed, trying to understand it. She’d been expecting nudes, maybe something in between the kind of selfies you would send a boy and something more professional like Playboy or Penthouse. Most of what Arabella posted were pictures of her playing video games in her bra and panties. There were some videos that were grayed out; you had to pay extra to see. One of those was titled “Rubbing One Out After Insane Vic Roy.” Margo wasn’t sure she wanted to see that; she didn’t know what a “vic roy” was. But she clicked open a free one, astounded to see it was eight minutes long.

There was Arabella, her hot-pink hair hanging a little stringy around her face, wearing a black leather bra with little chains connecting the nipples, split screen with a video game Margo had never seen before and was instantly captivated by. Arabella’s character in the game was a sexy girl in a magenta-pink teddy bear suit. Margo watched as the pink bear parachuted down from a blimp onto a cartoonishly beautiful Technicolor island covered with buildings and lakes, little roads and trees, an entire world to explore. Arabella was chewing gum. She said, “Let’s go to Tilted, always like to go to Tilted.” She landed gracefully on top of some sort of multistory concrete apartment building and began digging a hole through its roof with a pickax. The game play moved so fast Margo had a hard time even visually processing what was happening as the pink bear collected glowing weapons and moved through rooms, eventually coming upon what appeared to be a moving angel made of stone, which she immediately killed, saying, “Hello there!” As Arabella sped down the stairs of the apartment building, she came upon other players in quick succession: a buff blond guy, a gigantic nutcracker, a hot girl in a red triceratops costume. Arabella killed them almost as quickly as Margo could register them on the screen. After killing triceratops girl, Arabella broke her silent, gum-chewing concentration and gave a little battle cry—“Come at me, biiiiiiitch!”—as her teddy bear character on-screen started breakdancing.

Margo could not stop watching. In the game there were grocery store shopping carts you could push and ride around in, there was an ever-encroaching purple storm, there were canteens of mystical blue fluid you could chug to become shielded, all of it visually spectacular. Margo had never gotten into video games. She’d really only seen Nintendo, which felt a little babyish, or else like Call of Duty, where everything was gritty and chaotic, and there were definitely no hot girls in bear costumes. This was the first game she’d seen that made her want to actually play it. After that video she watched three more. This was not what she was expecting Arabella’s account to be like at all.

Margo clicked around and subscribed to three other random accounts she found on Instagram, girls who had mentioned OnlyFans in a post or comment, each of them fifteen dollars, and none was like Arabella’s. They were much more in line with what she’d expected: a bunch of nudes and sexy talk and purple devil emojis. You could buy a photo set or video based on a thumbnail and a single sentence of description, “Wednesdays make me horny: self-play, vibrator, feet.” It seemed improbable that men really wanted sex this badly, and yet they did, there was an entire economy based on how badly they wanted it, and for a moment Margo understood the sexual desire she felt was mild in comparison. She would never pay fifteen dollars to look at a guy naked. You could buy two, possibly three sandwiches for fifteen dollars. You couldn’t actually see how many fans someone had on their OnlyFans, but judging by their Instagram followers and general engagement, none of the other accounts she followed had as many fans as Arabella did.

Margo still didn’t think she would start an account and begin posting, though she was intrigued. She’d pictured OnlyFans as a sad garden of desperate, fake-horny girls trying to be what men wanted, all of them crying, “Pick me, pick me!” She hadn’t imagined Arabella in a fantasy world dressed as a hot-pink teddy bear merking people left and right. Margo knew she couldn’t be that—she wasn’t that badass, and she was hopeless at video games—but what if she could find her own thing?

“Maybe a bunch of people will want to fuck Mommy,” she whispered, looking over at Bodhi in his crib, softly snoring like a baby pig.

And that is how she became HungryGhost. Alone, in the dark, lit up by a laptop screen, with her baby, steadfastly refusing to think about her father injecting heroin and fucking some woman named Viper.

Or that is how I became HungryGhost. It is hard to tell which one of us it was.

Chapter Seven

One of the first things Jinx did was clean the bathroom, and I mean with a toothbrush and a gallon of bleach. It was like he was getting ready to perform surgery in there. He culled the half-empty shampoo bottles and made me choose only two out of the vast array of scented lotions I’d accumulated over the past year.

His uniform was now a white T-shirt and gray sweatpants, a bold departure from his all-black lifestyle. I couldn’t get over how much smaller and more normal he looked. The white shirt had teal lettering on it! Teal!

“I’m sorry, I can’t get over seeing you in clothes that aren’t black. You’re like a whole different person!”

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