Page 26 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“Huh” was all he said before scurrying away to the bathroom. That was the other thing: the amount of time Jinx spent in the bathroom. She could not fathom what he was doing in there. He seemed to poop three times a day, and each session was an hour-long ordeal. Was he constipated? Was it diarrhea? Was it a prostate thing? Should she make him go to the doctor? He kept talking about a therapist and seemed to talk to him by phone, though she doubted the therapist had the real lowdown on these concerning toilet behaviors.

Taking care of Bodhi, monitoring her father’s closed door, endlessly refreshing her OnlyFans page to see that nothing new had happened, then making herself scan through job postings on Craigslist was like trying to make origami out of wet paper. The harder she tried, the more it all kept disintegrating in her hands. It was unclear how so many things simply not happening could be so stressful. She created HungryGhost Instagram and Twitter accounts that led to her OnlyFans through Linktrees like she had seen other people do and tried to follow other girls on those accounts, but still nothing happened. Sometimes she opened Arabella’s account just so she could gaze upon her hostile, smirking face for strength.

And then she got her first fan.

U1134967. Right away he sent her a twenty-dollar tip and a dick pic to be rated. Margo opened it on her phone and studied the penis for a long time as she was nursing Bodhi. She wanted to get it exactly right.

After she set Bodhi down in his Rock ’n Play, she pulled out her laptop and wrote the following:

Congratulations! Your penis is a Tentacruel! With bulging pink glans and glittering dark blue veins, your penis is filled with quiet menace. When that mushroom tip glows red, you know he’s about to attack! As both a water and poison type, your penis is passionate but prone to jealousy, easily seeing slights where no harm was intended. He needs lots of coddling and gentle licks. His primary weaknesses are psychic and electric types, so stay away from redheaded witches with stars in their eyes! Your Tentacruel’s special moves are Ooze Attack (extremely potent pre-cum, watch out for accidental pregnancies), Clear Body (in which your penis completely disappears, which can happen when it’s cold out or if you hear your mother’s voice), and Poison Prison (in which you ask a girl for so many reassurances that she loves you that she stops loving you, completely understandable and luckily avoidable!). Tentacruel is your penis’s fully evolved form, and he has an HP of 120. I rate it a 10/10, tantalizing Tentacruel.

She pressed send, as nervous as the first time she text messaged a boy in middle school. She was still staring at her computer screen when the notification dinged. Another twenty dollars and a message: That was awesome, way better than I was expecting! Not sure how you knew about Poison Prison, but you were sadly right on there, hehehe. You’ve got a fan! More people should know about this account!

Encouraged by this, Margo diligently posted several times a day for her single fan, U1134967. Since it was only him, her posts grew sillier and less self-conscious. One day, she wrote on her boobs in eyeliner boobs and just posted that. He commented with a laughing emoji and sent a ten-dollar tip, suggested she make a video of her boobs bouncing. That was an entire genre she hadn’t even thought of. She made a video clip of her boobs bouncing as she pulled off a shirt, one where she jiggled them with her hands. She even made a clip of herself jump roping naked (during which she definitely damaged the popcorn ceiling of her bedroom).

Then one day (incidentally the same day Jinx left the house for three hours and came back with a small ficus tree, which he asked her to help lug up the stairs so it could live in his room—still no bed, still no bookcases, just a sleeping bag and a tree and maybe two hundred books), Margo got two fans at once: U277493 and RocketRaccoon69. Most guys left their handles completely anonymized, and Margo was grateful when they didn’t because it made it much easier to keep them straight. Neither of her new fans asked for their dicks to be rated, which was a little disappointing, but she kept posting and the fans kept trickling in.

At the end of three weeks, she had twenty fans paying $12.99 a month each. After OnlyFans took its 20 percent, it was less than she could have made in one night at her old restaurant, and she certainly was no Arabella. But she had time to figure it out, another month or two at least. Mark’s mommy had made sure of it.

“So do you think you’re clinically depressed?” Margo asked Jinx one day as he was folding laundry in the living room. He loved doing laundry, he said it was soothing, and he had taken over the chore for them all. Margo felt weird about this. He folded her panties into tiny little packet-balls. But she would do almost anything to avoid lugging Bodhi along with their dirty clothes down to the basement. There was simply no good place to put him while she loaded the washer.

Jinx was pairing sets of Bodhi’s tiny colorful socks. “Probably,” he said.

“Maybe you should think about getting on an antidepressant,” Margo said.

“I’m not sure an antidepressant would help,” Jinx said. “I think my problem is more of a fundamental failure to attach to other people. I’m not sure that, without love, Zoloft could really do much for me.”

Margo thought about this. She knew that she’d always felt her father was a kind of distant planet, but she hadn’t known he felt himself to be a distant planet. She’d assumed he was closer to other people who were not her.

“I just feel like you need, I don’t know, a world. You need people. What about going to some twelve-step meetings?” she said. He had mentioned NA before, hadn’t he?

Jinx frowned and sighed. “This is going to sound conceited and ridiculous, I realize, but in some circles, I am sort of famous, and it can make those meetings very awkward. People record your shares with their phones and post it online. Terrible.”

“Oh, right,” she said.

“What about you?” he asked.

“What about me?”

“Well, are you going to get a job, or go back to school, or what’s the plan?” He paused from folding a tiny pair of footed pajamas and stared at her.

“Touché,” she said.

Jinx laughed. “Two aimless sailboats lost in the harbor.”

“I don’t know what job to get,” Margo said. “Like, all I’ve ever done is wait tables.”

“So, wait tables.” Jinx shrugged. “I have named my tree.”

“You named your tree?”

“Yes,” Jinx said, “I have named my tree Earnest.”

“That seems like a good tree name,” Margo said. In that moment she almost wanted to tell him about the OnlyFans. Jinx hadn’t been judgmental about Arabella; he’d even said, “Good for her.” Her instinct to hide it was almost entirely because she didn’t really know Jinx that well and it seemed like her private life, not his business. Then again, here she was suggesting he was clinically depressed, so evidently she didn’t mind sticking her nose in his business.

She still wasn’t sure if starting the account had been a stupid idea or if she should keep going. But when she thought about applying for server jobs, she felt like she couldn’t breathe. And as badly as her OnlyFans was doing, she at least felt a glimmer of hope about it. After almost a month, she was beginning to understand the problem. OnlyFans had no discovery algorithm. It didn’t show you accounts unless you already followed them, and there was no general feed you could explore to find new ones. This had to be why it seemed to work only for people who were already famous or had a larger platform. And yet a lot of big accounts seemed to be run by girls who weren’t famous at all. How were they finding new fans, or rather getting found by them?

“How do you build celebrity?” she asked.

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