Page 73 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“It’s what?!” Jinx crowed with laughter. “Oh, Margo. Margo!”

“What?”

“You delight me.”

“So in what way does the Roomba take over your body exactly?” Suzie asked.

Margo didn’t answer. She could not stop refreshing her earnings page to see the total again and again. She’d made over $12,000 in an hour. Well, OnlyFans would take its cut, and Jinx kept reminding her to mentally set aside 30 percent for taxes, which paying quarterly had made crushingly real.

Margo never would have guessed she loved money this much. In fact, in the movies and TV shows and books she’d read, you could tell if a character was the bad guy by how much he cared about money. And since she wanted to be good, she’d always been careful not to care too much about money. Now she wondered if all those Disney movies were merely propaganda to keep poor people content with their lot. We may be poor, but we’re the salt of the earth, we know what really matters. The rich are perverted by their hideous wealth—why, look at that Cruella de Vil! But good or evil, every single dollar was power. Power to hire a lawyer, power to control how she spent her time, power to change her appearance, power to command respect. Power to be who she wanted to be.

She had tallied it all up in an Excel spreadsheet, all the money JB had ever sent her. The total was over five grand. She had wanted to send it all back, some kind of grand gesture, but she was too afraid she would have to go to trial and might need every penny she’d just earned, so she wrote him a message instead:

The moment I told you my name was Suzie, I knew it was a mistake. A lie unlike the other lies I had told. If before we were playing a game, suddenly I was truly deceiving you. And I wanted to. That boundary, being in control of it. It felt impossible to let that go. There aren’t a ton of stereotypes around what being a “good” sex worker might look like, and I think the one I latched on to, the only one I understood, was to always ensure I was in control of those boundaries. I don’t know if you can understand this, but having a baby adds to that feeling of protectiveness. I stop short of telling you I wish I could go back and answer differently. I am not sure I could have, or even that I should have. It was a mistake that maybe I had to make, would always make no matter how many times I tried.

In that same exchange where I told you my name was Suzie, I also told you to stop paying me. And that was not a mistake. I wanted you to know that I wasn’t only writing to you to make money. I was writing to you because I wanted to. And I am glad that I had sense enough to make that clear. The good and the bad, they always seem to come all tangled together like this for me.

JB, you said I can’t have it both ways, but why can’t I? Why can’t being genuine and putting on an act coexist? Aren’t we all always putting on an act? I’m not trying to excuse myself or justify anything, I don’t think I need to. You said it yourself, you were paying me to lie to you. But I can’t stand the idea of you thinking you were an idiot for enjoying it. I found what we were doing beautiful. Writing you was the absolute best part of my day. I realize maybe you can’t build a real relationship on that. But you can sure as shit build an imaginary one, and I think what we built was a castle in the damn sky.

Sincerely,

Margo Jelly Bean Ghost

(That’s my full name, my true name.)

Chapter Nineteen

Ward called me at ten p.m.

“Why are you working this late?” I said.

“Can’t get you off my mind,” Ward said.

I laughed like a sheep bleating.

“No, really,” he said. “I just got an email from Mark’s attorney, wanted to let you know so you could sleep on it and I could get your take in the morning. I don’t know if this was a direct result of the mediation session or us asking for the depo, but they’re asking for a 730 eval.”

“A what now?”

“You hire a shrink to do a complete psych eval. They interview you, they interview people in your life, they observe you and Bodhi together.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “You think he’s retaliating because he doesn’t want to do the deposition? Like, giving me a taste of my own medicine?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Ward said. “They also stipulated that if the results of the 730 are good and the evaluator thinks you’re a good mother, they’ll let you keep full legal and physical custody with only weekly visitation.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that could be good!”

“It could be. They did stipulate that you would have to pay for the 730, which—fifty-fifty would be more standard. It’s a dick move.”

“How much?”

“Somewhere between five and ten k,” Ward said. I could hear the dim, sparkling sound of ice in a glass. I wondered if he was still in his brightly lit sterile office or if he was at home in a dark living room, maybe with the TV on but muted.

“That’s cheaper than a trial,” I said, though I did wonder how people who were not selling nudes on the internet paid for this kind of thing. Or maybe they couldn’t. Maybe people just... lost their kids.

“It definitely is. And you may have wound up having to do one in a trial anyway. It’s just— Margo, they will get into your business. It will be invasive. I don’t know if you’re ready for that.”

“Invasive how?”

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