Page 66 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“Hey,” she said. “Are you okay?”

He gave a brittle laugh. “Not really.”

She wasn’t sure if he sounded drunk or like he’d been crying.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Fantasy production is your whole job. Like, it’s what you are paid to do. You didn’t do anything wrong. I was the one who got lost in it.”

“I think I got lost in it too, though.”

“Don’t say that,” he said, his tone suddenly sharp. “I can’t— Like, don’t try to make me feel better. It makes it worse. Because I can’t tell what’s real. I need to wake up from it, you know?”

Margo hesitated. She didn’t want to throw it all away simply because it wasn’t true. That would be a waste. “JB, the big parts were a lie, but you should know the little parts were true. Like I really did throw up shrimp at the eighth-grade dance. And I loved writing those messages, none of that was fake. I need you to know that.”

He sighed and his breath was ragged. She could tell he was moving, pacing around his house.

“You have a fucking kid, Margo! Like sure, the little things were true, I can see that, but having a kid is a pretty big thing to lie about!”

“I know,” she said, and slumped back in the hard wooden dining chair. Because it was the biggest thing, a thing so magnificent and huge and altering she wasn’t even sure how it could be truly communicated to someone who had never experienced it. And he was a young guy. Kids weren’t even on his radar yet.

“Look, Margo, I don’t have any idea who you are now. You know every single little thing about me, and I don’t know anything about you.”

“Listen, JB, obviously this is not how I wanted you to find out. But you have to look at it from my side. When you first wrote to me, like, if you could even see my inbox you would understand. Right next to your message is, like, guys telling me they are going to use a cheese grater on my vagina. Lying was a self-protective thing, like, it would have been reckless for me to spill my guts to you.”

“I get that,” he said. “But there have been so many points since the beginning! You could have said, ‘Hey, I lied to you, and I want to tell you the truth now.’”

“I know, and I wanted to!”

“Even when I asked you for your name, you lied,” he said. “So you can’t go and say now, oh but really it was real. That’s bullshit. Right? You can’t have it both ways.”

“Listen,” she said, struggling to regain control, “you’re a client. You are the coolest, funniest, most interesting client I have. But you’re a client—and—”

“Exactly,” JB said. “Thank you for finally being honest.”

“JB,” Margo said, closing her eyes again, like she could find him there in the dark. Everything was getting all twisted around. “I mean, I have to prioritize my safety, I have to—JB?”

But there was only silence, not even the hum of connection: flat, dead silence. He was gone.

It was almost shocking, how difficult it was to keep going after that phone call. Margo had been unaware that JB had been so central to her happiness. After all, sometimes she’d look at their situation and think they were strangers playing a game, a kind of online poker of the heart, her lies no more morally problematic than a bluff in cards. Other times, she’d look at their relationship and think it was too real, that what they were doing was bigger and deeper and stranger than real.

“All things that are genuinely interesting aren’t quite real,” Mark had said. It was almost frustrating, really, how right that stupid little man had been about so many things. And now whatever was between her and JB, real or unreal, was over. It felt like a portent. Like this was the beginning of things going horribly wrong.

I left Bodhi at home with Jinx for that week’s shoot at KC and Rose’s place. Bodhi had a Gymboree class, and Jinx agreed to take him. Gymboree was a brightly lit space padded with blue tumbling mats where women were paid to sing songs to babies and blow bubbles on them to... encourage them to crawl? I wasn’t certain, but it made me feel like an extremely good mother whenever I took him there. Suzie called in sick to work so she could come with me as camerawoman. That was one thing I had not appreciated or understood about Suzie before all of this. The girl was always aggressively down.

On the way to Huntington Beach we stopped for beef jerky and blue Slurpees. Suzie had her bare feet up on the dash as we listened to J Dilla beats, stuttering and doubled as our hearts. We were wearing sunglasses. I had been doxxed and lost both my mother and the client who made up a staggering proportion of my income, but I was also twenty years old, going seventy miles an hour on the freeway, hopped up on sugar and preserved meat, about to shoot TikToks that would hopefully make me thousands and thousands of dollars.

“Thanks for calling in sick again,” I said.

“About that,” Suzie said, “I’ve been fired.”

“Oh shit, Suzie! I’m so sorry!”

“I was just wondering, like”—Suzie hesitated, clearly nervous—“if I could be paid for the hours I work on the TikToks? Or the hours I take care of Bodhi?”

“Of course,” I rushed to say. It suddenly seemed obscene that I hadn’t already been paying her. How had I not noticed that Suzie was working almost as many hours as me and making nothing for it while I made thousands of dollars? “We’ll figure it out, like I don’t know what’s fair, an hourly or some kind of percentage, but we’ll talk to Jinx when we get back.”

Suzie was visibly elated and that felt good. She rolled down her window, and I turned up the music, glad I wouldn’t have to talk, because while I felt it was the right thing to do, I was getting awfully comfortable making financial commitments I was in no way sure I could honor. The four hundred new fans I’d gotten from the KikiPilot video were a huge boon, but that was still only five grand, and it hadn’t even cleared my bank account yet. I’d paid Ward’s $10k retainer, and who knew how much more I’d have to pay if it went to court. I had more money than I’d ever had in my life, yet somehow it never seemed to be enough. Still, I would make sure I had a way to pay Suzie. I would figure it out. We would shoot new TikToks and take advantage of the momentum we’d already built.

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