Page 52 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

—JB

Margo found this description of his mother so charming she read it four times. It was not what she’d been expecting. Perhaps because he had so much money and was spending it so recklessly, Margo had envisioned JB as some bored rich kid. And he might still be that, but certainly this portrait of his mom made her like him a whole lot more.

Margo knew that if things were different, she could find a way to make Shyanne likable like this. Every person can be face or heel, flip back and forth, depending on what you showed. Show him putting his sunglasses on a kid, he’s a face. Show him cheating and distracting the ref, he’s a heel. She knew this was because real people were both good and bad, all mixed up together, only the screen made everyone into basic silhouettes. The resulting image could appear either way depending on which way you turned it, which details you showed.

But that happened in real life too. So much so that sometimes it made her dizzy. Even when it came to herself, Margo could see it both ways: hometown girl makes good, defies capitalist patriarchy, or teen whore sells nudes while nursing, too lazy to work.

And what about JB? Who was this guy, and how would she ever be able to tell from the carefully selected fragments he gave her?

Chapter Fourteen

Shyanne called the next day and said she didn’t mean to be so harsh, but that I needed to stop while I still could and delete the account. Somehow, I wound up promising that I would do so. “You’re right,” I said, running my finger along the windowsill in my room. “I think you’re probably right.” When I was saying this to her, I meant it, and it felt good to bend to her wishes. But when we got off the phone, I didn’t take down the account. Instead, I went and ate a bowl of shredded wheat, the big ones that look like little doll beds, since my dad had replaced all the fun cereal in the house.

I figured that if the OnlyFans wasn’t successful after three more months, then I’d take it down. What was the difference between now and three months from now? (Absolutely untouched by this logic was the idea that a successful run as a porn star is much harder to bury than a failed one.)

The week before Christmas was a blur of nonstop filming. As soon as they had the go-ahead from Rose and KC, Margo and Jinx and Suzie went to Fry’s Electronics, even though it was ten p.m. Christmas music was playing, and Jinx and Suzie skipped through the store like kids. Margo waddled behind under the weight of Bodhi in his carrier strapped on her front. They bought two GoPros and a boom mic, some lights, and a Roomba.

They started shooting at KC and Rose’s apartment on Tuesday and didn’t finish until Friday, so much longer did everything take than they imagined. Suzie wound up occasional cameraman and general fixer, bringing them all Chipotle, finding lost shoes or panties. Jinx was a kind of baby-wearing art director who knew a lot more about lighting than any of them had realized. They all needed endless costume changes to make it seem like everything took place over the course of seven days. Even once it was over, there was the editing and organizing, which took Margo another three days.

Still, when she watched it all back, she thought they had something. They had made something. If it was good or not, she didn’t know, but she loved it. She absolutely loved it.

Margo was so busy that she hardly slept, and she certainly hadn’t gotten a chance to go Christmas shopping. At the last minute she ordered an old-fashioned-looking teddy bear for Bodhi from Amazon and bought Jinx an electric razor and a subscription to a tea-of-the-month club. But what to possibly get Shyanne? Margo wound up ordering her a necklace off Etsy: a tiny ace of spades made of fourteen-karat gold on a delicate chain. Taking a deep breath, she booked her trip to Vegas for Shyanne’s wedding on January 6. The ticket was expensive as hell, and she tried not to resent it. She added a lap infant. She would let Shyanne be furious and count on the presence of Kenny to keep Shyanne from outwardly expressing the worst of it.

And yet, during the week before Christmas, where everything was a blur and she hardly had time to shower, she managed to write JB four pages about the best sandwich she’d ever had (a Reuben). She spent an hour googling the mall by his hometown, looking for pictures of how the food court was laid out.

He asked, Have you ever known anyone named Kyle and, if so, what was he like? Do you believe in ghosts? What is the worst you have ever done on a test? Who taught you to drive?

They wrote to each other three, four times a day. It felt like an art project almost, answering each other’s questions, like if they were careful, they could use these messages like Ziploc bags to store reality itself. Who was your first boyfriend? he asked. And she told him an only slightly modified account of Sebastian. Who was your first girlfriend? she asked. And he told her about a girl named Riley who always got the lead in the school play and had an amazing singing voice, and how they never had sex and later it turned out she was a lesbian.

She told him about the TikToks they were working on and how excited she was about the project. Maybe you should go to film school, JB said. Margo started to write back that she couldn’t, but then, what if she could? She asked him about his job, and he explained he did something with machine learning and advertising, like with political ads. This was his first real job after grad school, and all the people he worked with were older, in their thirties, and had kids. He’d moved to D.C. for the job and didn’t have a lot of friends. He was originally from New York, and D.C. felt very different, he didn’t love it.

But it seems like you make a lot of money, she wrote.

I mean, not a ton, he had answered. I think I just don’t have much to spend it on.

That didn’t make sense to Margo. She googled how much machine learning engineers make and their salaries started at $120k, which she considered to be a wild amount for a twenty-five-year-old to be making. Still, she guessed his mother would probably be scandalized if she saw how he was spending it. Margo didn’t know what D.C. was like and pictured an entire city of people who had done student government in high school. She could understand why JB wouldn’t like that.

By the time all the videos were edited, it was nearly Christmas. They didn’t want to post during low traffic and all agreed to wait until the twenty-sixth. Margo thought the suspense might kill her.

The day before Christmas, at about six in the morning, a courier knocked on the door of their apartment, chewing gum and with an improbably large diamond in his ear, and asked Margo to sign for some papers. Then the courier asked if James Millet lived there as well and insisted Margo couldn’t sign for him. She went to wake Jinx, then stood awkwardly with the courier by the doorway, not making eye contact as Bodhi continually yanked the neckline of her T-shirt, trying to expose her breasts so he could nurse. “He’ll be here in a minute,” she reassured him. Finally, Jinx came to sign, and with the courier gone, they opened their respective envelopes.

“What is yours?” she asked, as she frantically tried to understand what her own said, Bodhi grabbing at the pages and squealing.

“Jesus Christ,” Jinx said. “This is unbelievable.”

“PETITION TO DETERMINE PARENTAL RELATIONSHIP,” her form said.

“It’s a restraining order,” Jinx said. “From Mark and Mommy Dearest.”

Margo barely heard him, too busy reading her own form. Was Mark trying to establish paternity? For what godly reason?

On the second page there was a series of check boxes.

IF Petitioner is found to be the parent of children listed in item 2, Petitioner requests:

Legal custody of Children to....... PETITIONER ??

Physical custody of Children to.... PETITIONER ??

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