Page 72 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

Then it’s over, and one of you gets up to go to the bathroom and pulls on their underwear, and you can feel the horrible slide back into the world, into language and clocks and calendars, into who you are pretending to be and who they are pretending to be, and it’s lost, it’s gone.

But she didn’t think any of her fans were trying to get such a thing when they paid their thirteen dollars. She didn’t know exactly what they were getting out of it. If she had to guess, she thought they were hoping to own her like a Pokémon card. This tiny electronic woman who lived in their phone that they could make look at their dick and she’d respond with adorable, themed messages. They wanted her to be real, but only so it was more fun to keep her in a little cage.

And it was true the idea of this, of being the little woman in their phone, grossed her out. It wasn’t that she was willing to defend OnlyFans as some morally unimpeachable activity. But she was tired of pretending all the Kennys of the world were right. She wasn’t rotten! She wasn’t trash—no human being was trash. Jesus had said that. Jesus, who consorted with lepers and prostitutes.

And besides, she loved making the content: the manic frenzy of dreaming up a new concept, writing, and shooting it; seeing the reactions online. And sometimes she did not imagine herself as tiny, she imagined herself as gigantic, a woman the size of the Empire State Building, spraying breast milk all over Manhattan.

The important thing, Margo thought, was to control the narrative. Mary hadn’t worried that having been raped made her any less worthy of marrying Joseph, and she didn’t worry about the fact that she was lying. What she did was put her finger on a scale she could clearly see was rigged against her. If she’d told the truth, she would have been killed. So Mary told a beautiful, golden whopper and became the most revered woman on Earth.

Bodhi stuck a pink shark in his mouth. Margo thought about what Rose had said, about bombing making stand-up comics free, unchained from only saying things the audience would like. She pictured a stadium of people around her, booing, hating her, spitting on her, telling her she would go to hell. Mark and Shyanne and Kenneth. She imagined that singer from his church, Annie, wild-eyed as she hurled a rock. Everyone loved to put a bitch back in her place.

You could be like Shyanne and wear a pilled-up old cardigan and try to win the mob’s sympathy, or you could stand there, defiant, like Mary, and claim to be touched by God.

But the money—it was so much money, and she’d have to make it quickly. She couldn’t exactly count on another video from KikiPilot. She watched Bodhi gumming the little pink shark.

Suddenly, Margo realized she knew exactly what to do.

Close-up on Margo’s face. She is wearing nerdy glasses and concentrating intently, her tongue in the corner of her mouth. Cut to an overhead shot of her desk, littered with tools and electronic components. At the center is Rigoberto. She is screwing his battery panel back on, as though she has finished altering him in some way.

Close-up of Rigoberto as his “on” light begins to flash and glow.

“Finally, I can speak to you more precisely,” Rigoberto says in a female robotic voice not unlike Siri’s. Margo made it on AIVoiceOver. Rigoberto having a female voice tickled her for some reason.

“Oh, Rigoberto!” Margo cries, and embraces the Roomba.

“Don’t touch me, you stupid bitch,” Rigoberto says.

Margo drops him back on her desk.

“Things are going to change around here,” Rigoberto says.

“What do you mean?” Margo says, using all her carefully honed alien naivete.

“Hold still,” Rigoberto says.

A black screen with the words: Two hours later.

Margo is examining herself in the mirror. She used one of Suzie’s contact lenses to make one of her eyes bloodred. She lifts her hair to examine a small plastic panel cover screwed into her head. This was just the back of her dad’s blood pressure monitor hot glued to a hair clip, but it looked dang good.

“Now you will do anything I say, and I control you completely,” Rigoberto says.

From that point on in the video, Rigoberto makes her do various things, which start off ridiculous—“Do the Orange Justice naked,” “Suck on this screwdriver,” “Say ‘Robots are hot’”—and then get more and more sexual and culminate in Margo masturbating to Rigoberto’s precise, exacting instructions.

By the time Margo was done editing, it was four minutes long. She thought it was good, maybe even hot in its own ridiculous way. If she was going to lose a job or get kicked out of school because of this video someday, she could feel pretty good about it, she thought. If Becca posted this on her Facebook, Margo might even be a little proud. The video was Margo-ish. She was being herself, and yes, that was her vagina, and it was all of a piece somehow.

She decided that since she’d spent nearly three days making and editing it, she should charge at least twenty-five dollars for it.

She used some of the footage to make PG clips for TikTok of the Rigoberto takeover, which was the only solution she’d been able to come up with for handling the Amelia Bedelia corner she’d painted herself into. Controlled by Rigoberto, Ghost would become a truly evil heel and do all sorts of terrible, comical things to Rose and KC. Eventually, KC and Rose could make a plan to incapacitate her somehow, unscrew the panel and make her normal again, though of course then she’d be a new version of Ghost altogether, neither the old naive Ghost nor the evil bot Ghost, but a more complex and nuanced and human Ghost.

An hour after she posted the Rigoberto video, five hundred fans had bought it. Margo was shocked. Jinx was shocked. Suzie was shocked. The comments on her page were rabid, ecstatic; people loved it.

“I wish I could see what it was so badly,” Jinx said. “What did you do?”

“I mean, I don’t think—”

“No! I am not asking for permission to watch. I absolutely refuse to watch it.”

“It’s just Rigoberto taking over my body.”

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