Page 65 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“The point here,” Mark said, “is that it is possible to form sentences that make sense syntactically but still don’t make meaning. Words can be made hollow, and once they are hollow, anything can be done with them.”

“I still don’t understand,” Derek said. “How is this related to point of view?”

“That’s because you didn’t read to the end,” I said, not even aware I was speaking out loud.

Mark barked out a laugh, then covered his mouth with his fist, his happy eyes watching, excited to see what would come next.

“I read to the end,” Derek said uncertainly.

“Then you are aware that the story is actually in first person?”

“Wait, what?”

“At the end, the narrator begins addressing the reader in first person, about how he doesn’t even understand the story he’s been telling, which you know can’t be true or else why would he be telling it?”

“I’m not sure that negates my point, though,” Derek said. “I mean, it was in third person for most of the story.”

Really, he was remarkable. Mark looked at me and grinned, hopeful perhaps that I would tear Derek apart. Personally, I wasn’t sure it was worth my time.

“Well,” I said, “you have to think outside the box when you’re confronted with this kind of perfect storm of a can of worms.”

Mark laughed so hard and loud it made Derek jump a little.

“But you have to keep in mind,” I said, “what comes around goes around and you can take it or leave it, but every rose has its thorn.”

“Uh... okay?” Derek said.

Mark was still losing it, giggling in a girlish way, his face covered with both hands.

“Really,” the boy next to me said, catching on to the joke, “I think this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.”

“What is going on?!” Derek whined, aware we were making fun of him even if he still didn’t get the joke. His instincts were so bizarre. I could only guess he was the youngest of a group of siblings.

It went on that way for a bit longer, with people telling Derek to buck up, that he could cross that bridge when he came to it. Later, when Mark and I started sleeping together, we would speak nonsense to each other as a weird kind of love language. “The ace up my sleeve keeps adding insult to injury,” he would say. “You air your dirty laundry against all odds,” I would reply.

It felt like that, the custody battle. Like all the words had stopped being attached to anything. We were reduced to “Petitioner” and “Respondent.” And maybe Mark would be able to stack up his meaningless words higher than mine, even though I was the only one who loved Bodhi. But there were no words on any of these forms for love. Nowhere did it ask you how the baby’s head smelled or whether you would be willing to die for the baby.

When we retained Ward, we decided to move forward with mediation. I was hoping the courts would be so backed up we wouldn’t get an appointment for months, but our appointment was only two weeks away. And so each day was converted from normal life into a countdown to unthinkable loss.

Meanwhile, there was still more work than I could possibly do, and for hours and hours each day I was looking at pictures of dicks and writing things like, Whoa! That is a Bulbasaur that would leave any lady sore! Each penis was so isolated, the only thing in the frame, and they seemed like a series of blind, hairless, oddly defiant little critters. Would it be so different if these men were sending me pictures of their noses? Close-ups of oily pores, isolated little snouts. It felt that strange and dislocated.

I saw my mother’s wedding as a series of Facebook posts. Her account was totally public, so I could view them from my HungryGhost account even though I’d deleted my personal one. She wore the Diane von Furstenberg. I had written her right after the doxxing saying I was sorry, sorry for lying to her and sorry for making trouble with Kenny. When she didn’t respond, I was a little relieved.

For comfort I wrote JB a three-page email about when I’d thrown up shrimp at the eighth-grade dance because I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to eat the tails. Once it was sent, I reread it two times to luxuriate in imagining him reading it, lingering on the places I hoped he would laugh.

Then I watched videos of people jumping out of planes in wing suits, their tiny forms gliding over fantastic landscapes. There was something about the wrongness of it I found soothing, the fact that they’d snuck out of the world and gotten into a place they were never supposed to be: the sky. It was like if a period had climbed off its sentence and begun flying over the page.

This is definitely one of those sections I will have to tell in third person:

Margo was eating Crunch Berries in the dark when her phone rang. Jinx had relented about the healthy cereal only out of pity for her and guilt over threatening Mark. It was midnight.

“Hello?” she said, though she knew who it was. She had given JB her number as soon as she got his message. He had written:

So you’re from California and you don’t have a brother named Timmy and your mom is named Shyanne and you have a baby? On Instagram, someone said, ‘@MargoMillet, this you?’ and I clicked, and sure enough, it was you! Margo. Such a mango of a name! Why would you call yourself Suzie of all things? It doesn’t suit you. Jesus. Margo, why am I so gut punched? I’m not even mad, I just feel like an idiot. Like, of course you were lying. I was stupid to think that you weren’t. I was paying a girl to pretend to fall in love with me, and I got confused and fell in love instead. I’m an idiot.

She had written back without thinking: You are not an idiot.

Then she had given him her number and told him to call her right then. “Hey, it’s JB.” His voice was lower, more raspy than she would have guessed.

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