Page 56 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“Merry Christmas,” she whispered to Bodhi’s small sleeping body when she finally made it down. Beside his crib lay a narrow twin air mattress covered by a gaping too-large fitted sheet, and as Margo eased her weight down onto it, the plastic made an elephantine farting noise. She stared at the ceiling of Kenny’s rec room, thinking about Mark of all people. Had he and his wife pretended to be Santa, eaten the cookies, drunk all the milk, filled up the stockings? That made Margo wonder: What did Mark’s wife think about him filing for full custody? Was there any chance he was seeking custody in earnest? She tried to imagine it: Mark watching his real children open their gifts in the morning, Bodhi hovering like a ghost in the corners of his vision. But if he did long for Bodhi, did genuinely want to know him, why not just call her on the phone?

It simply had to be an attempt to hurt her. To make her waste money, to scare her.

And it did scare her. Ever since she had uttered the words, they haunted her, floating through her mind in odd moments: an unfit mother. Margo did not actually worry she was a bad mother; like, if Bodhi could magically be consulted, she believed he would give her a good report, except for maybe the night she was on mushrooms.

It was the word unfit that scared her, a mother who didn’t fit. A mother who wasn’t the right kind of mother like all the other mothers. A mother without a ring, who was too young, who let men look at her body for money. She could almost hear Pastor Jim: “That’s right, she would be stoned! Put to death! Or, at the very least, cast out!” Even her own mother had called her a whore. And the only reason she was allowed beneath Kenny’s roof was because she was lying to them.

She didn’t think she was a bad person, but did bad people ever know that they were bad? Mark didn’t seem to, even though he gave lip service to the idea. She thought of Becca saying, “Since when do you care about being a good person? I mean, you were fucking somebody’s husband.” What if, inside, Margo was secretly rotten? What if the reason doing the OnlyFans didn’t feel wrong to her wasn’t because it wasn’t actually wrong, but because she was so vile she could no longer detect all that was wrong with it?

They began posting the TikToks on December 26.

“I shit you not,” KC’s voice can be heard, “there is a girl on our balcony.”

The camera blurs as it attempts to focus through the glass. On the balcony is a sopping wet Margo in a futuristic-looking silver bikini. The light is behind her. She is mostly a silhouette.

“What do we do?” Rose says.

“How did she get out there? Like, from— Did she climb up?”

“We should let her in.”

“Are you crazy?”

Right then Margo slams both her palms on the glass, startling them. Biotch barks at her through the glass psychotically.

“Call 911,” KC says.

“She’s just a girl,” Rose says. “It’s not like she’s armed, she’s practically naked. This is ridiculous.”

Rose goes over and yanks open the sliding glass door. Margo does not move. She looks curiously at Rose.

“Hey,” Rose says gently, “are you okay? How did you get out here?”

KC comes closer with the camera, and you can finally see Margo’s face as the expressions ripple across it: confusion, delight, fear. Finally, she says, “You have big, big tatas,” laughs, and then barfs silver paint all over Rose.

Margo, still in her bikini, is in a bubble bath, and Rose is trying to wash the silver paint off her face in the bathroom sink. (That had been a real problem they’d not anticipated. The silver acrylic paint that Margo barfed through a tube they taped to the side of her face away from the camera was not as easy to wash out as the acrylic paint they remembered from childhood, perhaps because it was house paint, and they were all idiots.) KC is interviewing Margo.

“Where did you come from?”

Margo shrugs and continues playing with the bubbles in the tub, giving herself a pointy, conical bubble beard. Rose is cursing as she tries to wash the silver out of her hair. “What even is this? Is this puke? What did she eat?”

“Look,” Margo says, and she pulls out the plug from the bathtub, laughing, delighted by the sound the drain makes as it begins to suck out the water.

“No, you want to leave that in,” KC is saying when Margo puts the entire plastic bath plug into her mouth and starts to chew.

Wrapped in a towel, Margo is sitting at the breakfast bar.

“Ghost hungry,” she says.

“I know,” KC says. “I’m making you eggs.”

“Ghost hungry,” Margo repeats, picks up a pen, and puts it in her mouth.

“No!” KC says.

But Margo is already chewing the pen into pieces. (Margo had put about five uncooked rigatoni in her mouth and that is what she is crunching, but the noise was compellingly plastic-like.) Finally, she swallows. Then she says hopefully, “Tinfoil?”

Margo is passed out on the couch, piles of crumpled tinfoil around her. KC and Rose are out of frame, talking to the camera. “This is not normal. I don’t know what the fuck is going on with this girl. We can’t get her to leave.”

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