Page 34 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“Okay,” Jinx said.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

Over the next few days, Jinx helped Margo complete the paperwork to become a corporation so she could write off her health insurance and pay fewer taxes than if she filed as merely self-employed. He told her to move the remaining money from Mark out of her checking and put it in a high-interest savings account, something she didn’t even know her bank offered. Her new income also made Bodhi ineligible for his free health insurance, and Jinx helped her get that sorted too.

Jinx created his own OnlyFans account so he could understand the platform better, and Margo told him everything she had learned so far. Their new plan was to do a copromotion every two weeks. “To build a fanbase who will stay subscribed month after month takes time and a lot of work,” Jinx said. “Men like variety. Their natural inclination will be to subscribe to different girls every month.”

“Okay, yeah,” Margo said, massaging her forehead. Jinx would certainly know about craving variety.

“But how do you override the male preference for sexual variety?” Jinx was clearly in a Socratic mood, high off giving so much advice. “Love,” he said. “You have to make them fall in love with you.”

“I don’t think they’re going to love me,” Margo said. “I mean, half the time they’re telling me to kill myself or that my nipples are crooked.”

“That’s just the internet,” Jinx said, “a disgusting place, really. This is kind of like trying to have a nice dinner party in hell. Certain things you’re just going to have to put up with. So how do you make someone fall in love with you?”

Margo felt it was obvious she did not know.

“What I am trying to say is that you need to think about your persona. You need to be someone worth falling in love with—you teach them how to love you by showing them who you are.”

“Yeah,” Margo said. Because she could see that: Arabella and WangMangler both managed to be unforgettable, whereas most of the other accounts she’d seen tended to blur together into an undulating sea of boobs.

“Are you a heel or a face?” Jinx asked. “The bad guy or good guy?”

“This isn’t wrestling, Dad,” Margo said. It scared her that he’d even asked. She had hoped she was an obvious baby face. She couldn’t imagine being brave or charismatic enough to be a heel. She and Shyanne both had those stupid, innocent faces.

“Everything is wrestling,” Jinx said.

“Honestly, I don’t think I have what it takes to be a heel.” Margo shrugged.

“So you’re a face,” Jinx said, like that was settled.

Margo sighed. None of this was helpful when all you were doing was taking pictures of your tits. Heel and face played off each other, defined each other, like light and dark. Margo was alone in every frame, translated into nothing but pixels, frozen and ready to be jacked off to.

Bodhi, meanwhile, was now three months old and mysteriously getting cuter and cuter. Once, in the very beginning, when Margo was grocery shopping with a three-week-old Bodhi strapped to her chest, greasy hair slicked back in a ponytail, a woman had stopped her to admire the baby and said, “They get even cuter.” Margo had been a little miffed, honestly. Bodhi even at three weeks was the most beautiful and miraculous thing she’d ever beheld. That lady had been right, though. Margo kept wondering what the apex of his cuteness would be and when it would begin its descent, but each day he seemed to be cuter than the last.

One day Margo bought some flowers from a stand on the corner downtown, tangerine-colored roses. She was wearing Bodhi and held the flowers up to his nose. He didn’t react. Then she pantomimed sniffing them herself and held the bouquet to him again. This time he sniffed, and his face lit up. He smelled the beautiful smell! She had told him about it, and he understood her. He had literally never smelled roses before. It was a miracle. They stared at each other, beaming.

It was Jinx who ordered a What to Expect the First Year book. It was at least two inches thick and stared at Margo reproachfully from her nightstand. Every single time she tried to read it, she got creeped out by the weirdly sentimental way it was written. It was like ad copy. One part said, “Not only won’t she get hooked from a day or two of pacifier use, but as long as your little sucker is also getting her full share of feeds, enjoying a little between-meal soothing from a soothie is no problem at all.”

Margo had never even worried pacifiers were bad. She’d bought them in every possible color, even the girl ones. Jinx had seen Bodhi sucking a hot-pink one and said, “Aww, look, the newest member of the Hart Foundation!”

Jinx’s talk about Bodhi becoming a wrestler was nonstop. It was always joking, she knew that. But she would never let Bodhi become a wrestler.

“Why not?!” Jinx had asked, alarmed when she said so.

“Because they all die horrible tragic deaths!”

Jinx tilted his head to the side, half a nod, as if to concede that this was so.

“But you wouldn’t,” he said, tweaking Bodhi’s toe where he sat in his Bumbo on the carpet. “Because you’re too tough.”

The truth was Margo had never loved wrestling. On some level, she’d viewed it as the reason her father was constantly leaving. Murder and Mayhem, even more than Cheri and the kids, were the reason he left them again and again. A teenage Margo couldn’t help watching Monday Night Raw and thinking, For this?

Now that Jinx was living with them, wrestling was on all the time, and she found herself watching it in a new way. For one thing, she was now an Arabella superfan. As an adult, it was much clearer that the stunts they were doing were amazing, especially the high flyers. She was a lot more interested in their biographies too. Jinx personally knew almost everybody, and the anecdotes were simply off the chain. Did she know that the Hart boys had a pet bear growing up? And they’d drip Fudgsicles on their toes in the summer and let the bear lick them clean? Jinx watched a lot of old matches in Japan. He loved Tiger Mask and the Dynamite Kid, who always triggered stories of the truly awful pranks the Dynamite Kid would pull, putting lit cigarettes in Jake’s snake bag so his snake would get pissed and bite him, or injecting his tag team partner Davey with milk instead of steroids. “He had the temperament of a terrier dog,” Jinx would say.

These men were fucked up and frequently deranged. They were also devoted, Margo couldn’t help but feel, to something that could only be called art.

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