Page 30 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

What I am trying to say is that I was not thinking about the WangMangler promotion. So when I did finally log in to OnlyFans on my laptop, I almost couldn’t interpret what I was seeing. I had 931 new fans. I accidentally shoved my laptop and knocked it off the bed. I’m lucky it didn’t break. Bodhi was in his Bumbo seat on the floor, slouched over like he had pudding instead of bones. I jumped up and down in front of him. He was getting pretty chonky, and he was still super bald. He had a sort of miniature Hitchcock vibe, and he was delighted that I was leaping around.

Overnight I had made $4,645.

“Wow,” Jinx said from the doorway, “you’re feeling better! What happened?”

I froze, crouching in a position of such obvious guilt that there was absolutely no way to explain it. I opened my mouth. Every lie I thought of seemed absolutely insane. And I thought, Jesus, after this night where he has seen you at your worst and been so kind and helped you so much, you’re going to lie? So I told him. I told him everything.

“Oh, Margo,” Jinx said. They were at the dining table now because when she first told him, he’d been so upset he walked out of her room and slammed the door, and after ten minutes she’d followed him, trying to reason with him as he paced tight circles in the living room. She’d then convinced him to drink tea with her at the table and talk about it more reasonably.

“I hate this,” Jinx said. “I hate it.”

“I know,” Margo said.

“You don’t want to get mixed up in that, in those kinds of girls. And it just—it will change the way guys think of you, and not in a good way.”

“What are ‘those kinds of girls’?” Margo asked. At first, she’d been so purely alarmed at how upset Jinx was that she’d kept apologizing. The longer this went on, though, the angrier she became.

“Girls who use sex to get what they want, you know...” Jinx said, trying to find a way of describing sluts without using the word slut.

“Like my mom?”

“Not like your mother,” Jinx said.

“She was working at Hooters. Isn’t that how you met her?”

“I did meet her there. But there is an important difference. At Hooters they don’t take their clothes off.”

“So if Mom had been working at a strip club instead, you wouldn’t have been interested in her?”

“Not seriously. Not romantically.”

“Because other people have seen her naked?”

“Listen, it’s like buying a car. A used car is a better value, but you never really know what has been done to the car, you know, whereas if you buy a new car—”

“I can’t believe you went with the car analogy,” Margo said.

“Obviously women are not cars,” he said, holding up his stupid gigantic hands.

“Well, then tell me: What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to take care of us?”

He didn’t say anything. Margo kept thinking about Murder. How was her father okay with a guy like that, a guy who murdered people for money, who once famously punched a reporter and knocked out two of his teeth, yet he had this huge moral objection to her posting pictures of her boobs on the internet?

“This is what I have,” she said, “this is how I can do it, and if it keeps us safe with a place to live and diapers and clothes for Bodhi, then I don’t care.”

Bodhi started fussing, and Jinx automatically stood and held out his arms for him. The moment Bodhi was in Jinx’s arms, he quieted. “It’s a hard situation,” Jinx admitted, as he bounced Bodhi gently back and forth.

“And I shouldn’t have had him,” Margo said, as though some rip cord had been pulled inside her. “I know that, okay? Everyone told me it would ruin my life and it did. They were right, and I was stupid, and I didn’t get it. Okay? But now I’m here.”

“Yes,” Jinx said. “Now we’re here.”

They were quiet for a moment. Jinx rolled his neck back and forth, and Margo could hear a sound like gravel sliding in a box. That was not a sound a neck was supposed to make.

“What about the guy?” Jinx asked. “What does he think? About you doing the OnlyFans?”

“What guy?”

“Bodhi’s father,” Jinx said.

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