Page 36 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

After pie they all lounged about the living room. Jinx’s body was exactly the length of the pink velvet couch as he dangled Bodhi above him in the air, then brought him down for raspberries and ticklish kisses before hoisting him back into the air again. All of this was accompanied by much gibbering and squealing. Bodhi had begun to babble, and all he said was “Dada, Dada.” Jinx would smile and say, “Yes, I’m Dada!”

“Isn’t it weird for you to be teaching him to call you ‘dada’?” Margo asked. Really, she was just miffed that Bodhi wasn’t saying “mama.” She worried it was because she wasn’t spending enough time hoisting him in the air and making him squeal like that. She worried it was because so often when she was holding him, she was looking at her phone.

“‘Dada’ is usually the one they say first,” Jinx said. “He won’t call me dada eventually.”

“They say ‘dada’ first?” Margo was sitting at the coffee table. A Curt Hennig match was on TV. Her dad had some subscription service that gave him access to every WWE match ever.

“At least all my kids did,” he said. “You did. Just about killed Shyanne.”

This made Margo grin. “What do they say next?”

“Either ‘mama’ or ‘baba.’”

“I hope it’s ‘mama,’” she said. Her phone buzzed. It was a message from JB:

Dear Hungry Ghost,

$100 per question (length is up to you) for answers to any of the following questions:

Who are some friends you remember from middle school?

What are your favorite foods, and what foods do you irrationally dislike?

Did you know your grandparents at all?

What has become of your brother, Timmy? Are you guys close?

Do you go to college? Are you thinking about going to college? It really, really seems like you should go to college, and you look so young. I guess I don’t know how old you are, though. Maybe you have already graduated college and just have great skin. I don’t know, I don’t know what I am even saying, but what are your goals for yourself? What do you want?

—JB

He had attached a picture of Jelly Bean in an ill-fitting turkey costume looking absolutely miserable. Margo smiled. She hadn’t told Jinx or Suzie about JB and these strange writing prompts. She’d convinced herself she didn’t need to tell anyone because they weren’t important. She wasn’t going to let JB know anything real about her. She knew how to keep it under control.

She wrote back: I want a selfie of you and Jelly Bean!

She didn’t know why, exactly; she just wanted to see if he would do it, if she could command him.

He’s not in the costume anymore, JB wrote. He didn’t like wearing it.

HungryGhost: I don’t care about the costume.

There was a pause, then a picture came through, and her breath caught in her throat. She did not know what she was expecting from a man who was sending a girl he met online weird writing prompts on Thanksgiving Day, but it wasn’t this. JB was tall and broad shouldered, or at least he looked that way with a pug cradled under his chin, and he had long, thick, shiny black hair that hung around his shoulders. He looked Asian or Pacific Islander and was wearing a black T-shirt and what she was 80 percent sure was a pearl choker necklace. He seemed to be in his late twenties at most and was absolutely, confusingly smoking hot.

She set down her phone. Jinx had been talking for some time, and Margo had no idea what about. Thankfully, it turned out to only be an anecdote about Curt Hennig slipping Yokozuna laxatives so that he shat himself on a plane. “He was always putting drugs in people’s drinks,” Jinx said. “Which by today’s moral standards is reprehensible, but at the time it was fairly humorous.”

Jinx hoisted Bodhi in the air again and then said, “Oh God, Margo. Take the baby. Take him right now.”

Margo scrambled up and took Bodhi. Jinx kept his arms in the air in the same position, clearly afraid to move.

“I did something,” he said.

“To your back?”

“Oh God,” he said.

She could see that his face was white, and he was sweating. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “I think it’s only a spasm. I need Somas, but I don’t— I mean, because of rehab I don’t have any. I just need the muscles to unclench. I don’t think a disc slipped or anything.”

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