Page 75 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“And thank you for this contact sheet and this whole little bundle,” she said, holding up the file I’d given her. It made me think of the kids complaining in senior English class about the big paper we had to write for our final project with a cover page and table of contents, whining about how we’d never need to do this in real life. Guess what, Seth! You’ve got to write a report to keep your fucking kid!

The next day, I tried to put the psych eval out of my mind. We had TikToks to film. Rose and KC had both gone bananas for the new scripts. Suzie had read them too. She had come to me in my room, waving the printed-out pages at me. “Now this—” she said, “this is leveling up.”

The moment I turned Ghost heel, I had almost fifteen ideas in less than twenty-four hours. Ghost’s alien nature still worked in an Amelia Bedelia–like way, maybe even better now that she was evil. In one skit, Ghost sprays KC’s butt with Lysol and says, “I’m sorry, it said to spray on flat surfaces.” I’d been practicing and had developed a creepy smile with unseeing eyes, heavily based on the way my mother looked at herself in the mirror.

It was food pranks that really interested me, though. Ghost makes Rose and KC eat Popsicles she has made by freezing blue toothpaste in molds. She feeds them apple slices she’s rubbed with jalapeños.

I had gotten these ideas remembering Tessa and how she’d fed the salad boy potting soil and shaving cream. He’d spent all night throwing up in the bathroom, and everyone had laughed. Looking back, it seemed like Tessa had actually poisoned him. Couldn’t he have gone to the police? There was an undercurrent of real evil there, and it intrigued me. Evil witches in forests who made houses out of candy to lure children. Poisoned enchanted apples. It was very old, our sense that food, the thing we needed most in order to stay alive, could be used against us. I wanted to use that for Ghost, to make her a truly unforgettable heel. I even wrote Snoop Dork into the script. Ghost feeds him a burrito filled with crushed-up Viagra, and he winds up with a boner for thirty-six hours. I argued we should have him really do it so he could go to the ER and we’d film that, but KC vetoed it.

I’d wondered about the phrase “Hungry Ghost” when Mark first wrote that poem. What did he mean by it? How could ghosts be hungry? But it made perfect sense to me now: The longing for the food you could no longer eat. The memory of having a body. People were constantly giving ghosts food, offerings of persimmons and oranges, pan de muerto on the Day of the Dead; even Halloween was about nothing so much as candy. What the dead wanted, above all else, was to eat, to cram their mouths full, to feel the calories flood their bloodstream, to be part of it again: life. Bloody, squirming, pulsing, hungry life.

We shot all day and had an early dinner/late lunch. Rose and I picked up Yoshinoya and ate it on the balcony, while Suzie, KC, and Snoop Dork went across the street to Chipotle. Jinx had said he didn’t feel well enough to come, so I had Bodhi on my lap, which made eating a challenge. He kept trying to plunge his little hands into my rice bowl.

“Can I ask you something?” Rose said.

“Of course.”

“Why didn’t you— I mean, why did you keep him? When you found out you were pregnant.”

I thought about this, slowly chewing the tiny perfect bodies of the rice. “I mean,” I said, “I think I was just stupid.”

Rose laughed. “I thought maybe you were religious or something.”

“No,” I said. “Though, I mean, at the time I did feel morally conflicted. But there’s nothing like having a baby to make you solidly pro-choice!”

“Why, though? I mean, it’s so clear you love Bodhi, and you’re a great mom.”

“No, no,” I said. “It’s not about that. I’d do it all again. But, like, I didn’t really know you could still die having a baby, or, you know, tear. Kind of inevitably. Down there. And then for the rest of your life when you sneeze, you pee a little. Some women tear way worse and they wind up not able to control their poop all the time. It changes your body in irreversible ways. One of my tits is now a full half cup size bigger than the other.”

“Well, yeah,” Rose said. “I mean, of course it’s going to change your body.”

“You can’t tell me that if it was men and a medical decision would result in their penis splitting open and them not being able to hold their pee for the rest of their life, they wouldn’t think that should be their own decision.”

Rose snorted as she was drinking her Diet Coke. “Yeah, that’s pretty hard to imagine.”

“They would be like, ‘Look, this is my penis we’re talking about here!’”

Bodhi was getting obsessed with touching my food, so I stood and bounced him.

“And I didn’t understand how not set up the world is for women to have babies. The whole childcare system is unworkable. Like, it ruins your life. You can’t choose that for someone else. You shouldn’t be able to make someone do that.”

“Yeah,” Rose said a little wistfully. “So you don’t think you’d be doing this if you hadn’t had a baby?”

“OnlyFans? I mean, it wasn’t plan A! But it doesn’t seem like it was your plan A either, right? I mean, you were doing physics.”

“True,” Rose said.

“Do you ever think about going back?” I asked.

“Not really,” Rose said.

“Why did you leave grad school again?” I always figured she’d run out of money.

Rose smiled in a funny way. “Well, I started my OnlyFans, like, my second year? To make money. Which was kind of perfect because I could make my own hours. I mentioned it to another girl in the program, and she told everybody, and it just became a big, big thing for some reason. And they asked me to leave the program.”

“They what? How could they legally do that?!”

“Well, they didn’t, it wasn’t like they kicked me out. I tried going to my adviser to figure out what to do because it was kind of getting out of hand—there was this one guy in particular who took offense for some reason and wrote an email outing me to the entire department, asking if these were the kind of values the department held, like ‘this is supposed to be a hallowed space for science’ and blah blah blah. And my adviser was basically like, ‘I don’t know what you should do. Maybe leave?’ So I left.”

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