Page 51 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“Okay,” I said.

“Mamamamammama!” Bodhi cried, delighted with himself. He shook his little fist with my hair clenched in it.

Shyanne stalked off, up the escalator and toward Macy’s. I hugged Bodhi tight to me.

“Mama,” I said.

“Ma Ma Ma Ma,” he said.

“Yes, I’m Mama,” I said. He yanked my hair. “Are you hungry?” I asked, wiping the tears off my cheeks. “Let’s find a place to nurse.”

I found a bench and pulled out a boob, didn’t even cover up with a blanket. Just nursed for all the rich people to see.

Suzie had convinced Margo that her target demographic was nerds, and she ought to familiarize herself with their major franchises. “I’ll put you through nerd school,” Suzie said, “it will be great!” Nerd school was mainly, it turned out, playing video games and watching anime together, and Margo secretly thought perhaps Suzie had only wanted a friend. She didn’t object. She liked Suzie more and more, she found.

That night after playing Minecraft with Suzie for a couple of hours and dying repeatedly by falling in lava, Margo tried to write JB. She looked over the questions he had sent. The sadness of the day with Shyanne had left in her a deep well. She thought she could use it. Maybe she could pull the dagger out of her gut and put it into his. That was what writing was, wasn’t it? She decided to answer his question about childhood pets. More and more she’d begun simply telling the truth when she answered his questions, then changing things around to match the lies she’d already told. It made her think of the old classroom arguments between Mark and Derek, about how characters weren’t real people.

Mark was always insisting that characters weren’t real, that they had no psychology at all, having no actual body or mind. They were always a pawn of the author. Our job, he insisted, was to try to understand the author, not the character. The character was merely the paint—we needed to try to see the picture the paint was making.

Margo didn’t know if she believed that or not—surely characters sometimes took on a life of their own—but it made her feel better about lying to JB somehow. Like even if she was lying, it was okay because she was using the lies like paint to try to tell him something real.

JB,

My mom was pretty anti-pet growing up, but we did wind up adopting a cat when I was eight or nine. We don’t know where she came from, and she only had three legs. She was beautiful, a Siamese mixed with something else. She had those bluebell-colored eyes, and she was white with tiger stripes. We didn’t know how she lost her leg. It was one of her back ones, cut off at the knee. We figured it must have been done surgically or else how would she have survived, so someone at one point had been willing to shell out however many thousands of dollars for this cat. But she wasn’t wearing a collar and there were no lost cat signs. She kept hanging out on our doorstep and meowing to come in, so eventually my mom just held the door open and Lost-y (we eventually named her Lost-y) sauntered in like she already knew the layout.

And she was the most superior cat. She would use one paw to hold down my head while she aggressively licked my hairline, and if I moved at all she would bop me with her paw to keep me in line. She would eat any and all human food. I once saw her eat a whole piece of lettuce, just wolf it right down.

Then one day when I was thirteen, she didn’t come home. I hung signs everywhere. I went out on my bike calling for her. I couldn’t stand not knowing what had happened to her. Had she been hit by a car? Was she living with another family? Had a coyote gotten her?

I just hope she knew how much we loved her. I hope whatever happened that she was able to face it because she knew these two weird monkeys that lived in a creepy old apartment building from the ’70s loved her.

Love,

??????

She read it over and added some stuff about her imaginary dad and imaginary brother, Timmy, and then took out the last sentence entirely. Presumably her fake family lived in a real house, and the line just didn’t work as well if she changed it to “four weird monkeys who lived in a respectable, middle-class home.” The email didn’t seem as deep or special as the others, and she worried JB wouldn’t like it. She had not managed it, the transfer of the dagger from her gut to his.

She hovered over the last paragraph and then started typing.

I just hope she knew how much we loved her. It bothers me that we never got her a collar, that we never made the effort to claim her, to say, “This cat is ours, beloved by us, call us if you find her, contact us if she dies in your yard!” In Lady and the Tramp there is this moment where Tramp finally gets a collar, and it’s a symbol of being loved. If you get taken to the pound, someone is gonna come get you. The dog catcher is different with a dog wearing a collar. A dog without a collar is just an animal. If the world doesn’t know you are loved, then you’re trash. I think that’s even true of people. Maybe. Sometimes. Or I fear it is. That being loved is the only way to be safe.

Sincerely,

Jelly Bean

She was not entirely satisfied, though she knew it was closer, and she was tired. She thought for a moment, trying to decide how she should spend her next question of him. She added: PS: Please write me a portrait of your mom. Then she pressed send and went to bed.

Here is the portrait JB wrote of his mother and sent to her the next morning:

Jelly Ghost,

Both my parents were born in Korea, but they didn’t meet there, they met here. My mom is super loud, very pretty, and she’s always talking to strangers. She builds—I’m not sure how to say this—inappropriately close relationships with clerks? It would embarrass me so much as a kid, I don’t know why. She was wild about movies, wanted to see every single thing that came out. She was a real regular at Blockbuster. The guys that worked at Blockbuster, they were mainly like nineteen-year-old white boys with spiked hair, I don’t know, not a natural pairing for a middle-aged Korean woman, but boy, did they love her. She would bring cupcakes when it was one of their birthdays. They talked movies endlessly. I got so mad because she invited one of them, Philip, to my thirteenth birthday party, and I kept trying to explain to her that it was weird, but she just couldn’t understand. I remember he got me a magic eight ball. I still can’t believe he brought a gift.

She’s obsessive about cleaning the house, like no molecule of dust has ever settled in that house, I’m surprised she hasn’t plastic-wrapped my dad. They love each other. I mean, I think it might be more accurate to say he worships her, even though a lot of the time he plays at being aggravated. My mom has a lot of Lucille Ball energy and she’s constantly getting into weird situations, like she accidentally knocked over this Hell’s Angel’s bike and it became a whole thing and my dad had to pay hundreds of dollars.

I have a younger brother and my mom dotes on both of us, spoiled us rotten, but not in a normal way. She was always playing video games with us and could beat all my friends. She’s never worked a job because my dad made good money, but randomly in her fifties started working as an aide at our local high school because she “wanted something to do.” These kids love her, like they tell her all their crushes, and she helps them resolve fights they have with their parents, and she’s always coming home talking their slang.

I’m definitely closer to my mom than my dad. It’s just a more intimate thing, my relationship with her. My mom demands to have an intimate relationship with everyone, you can’t get away from her fast enough, three minutes in and she’s trying to advise you on your bowel movements. I love her. She was a great mom.

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