Page 96 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

That black blazer, I thought. Worth every penny.

That night, I looked at the pink binder I’d been putting together for CPS. In it, I’d made a twelve-month financial plan for transitioning to real estate based on a template I found on a website called Templates4Everything.com, which had absurd slogans like “Cut your business time in half!” I flipped through the pages. I closed the pink binder. Set it on my desk. Regarded its flat bubblegum exterior.

I hated the entire plan. I hated the binder. I hated the idea of going into real estate, of spending hours and hours a day away from Bodhi to pursue something I didn’t want to do and had no idea if I’d even be good at. I hated Maribel. I hated being tongue-tied and cowering. I hated having to toe the line of rules I knew were stupid. I hated being afraid.

But I was afraid. I could feel the blind, blunt grasp of bureaucracy closing around my life. The scariest thing about Maribel, I realized, was that she wasn’t a true villain; she was kind of an officious busybody convinced she was on the side of right. Someone completely inane in charge of whether I kept my baby. I wanted to do whatever would get her to leave me and Bodhi alone. If that meant following the rules, then I’d have to suck it up and follow them. Or at least that’s what I’d thought before I talked to Mark.

When lo, a vision came unto me. And that vision was of Ric Flair, his tan old-man skin gleaming with oil, his peroxide-blond shoulder-length shag shimmering. Ric Flair, greatest heel of all time: a man who would beg his opponents for mercy and then jam his thumb in their eye, a man who won pretty much only by cheating, a man so famous for pretending to pass out they named it the “Flair Flop.” And in this vision, the Nature Boy appeared before me in his glittering bejeweled robes, lit by a neon glow, and said unto me: “Margo. To be the man, WOOOO, you gotta beat the man!”

I opened my laptop and did a couple of quick searches, my pulse racing. I clicked and clicked, reading the articles as fast as I could. It’s amazing what you don’t find if you aren’t looking for it. I called Ward even though it was ten at night and I’d already bugged him earlier about Mark getting to meet Bodhi. He picked up on the first ring.

“Hey, Ward,” I said. “Wanna make a little more money and help me with some case research? I think I may have been going about something all wrong.”

Like any woman fully in charge of her destiny, I tried to stack the deck in my favor, in this case stopping on the way to buy Ward donuts. When I got there, Ward said, “I’m really not sure what you’re hoping to accomplish with this, Margo, and I don’t want to get your hopes up.”

I set the pink box on his desk, the aura of Ric Flair enveloping me like a protective shield. “Ward, quitters never win, and winners never quit.”

He opened the box and pulled out an apple fritter. “Jesus Christ, they’re still warm.”

“So did you know there’s no legal precedent for how CPS handles cases against moms who have OnlyFans accounts?”

“Yeah,” Ward said, his mouth full of fritter.

“Well, you know who owns OnlyFans?”

Ward shrugged.

“Leonid Radvinsky. And the other big website he owns? MyFreeCams,” I said. “And I got to thinking, OnlyFans is really a social media spin on a camgirl site, and camgirl sites have been around pretty much as long as the internet.”

“And how were they ruling?” Ward asked.

“Guess,” I said.

“Judging by this apple fritter, I would say they ruled very favorably.”

“And you would be right,” I said. “But I don’t want to print out pages from some Google search; she won’t believe it if it’s coming from me. I need you to make it all official and lawyer-y.”

“Right, right,” Ward said. “You need me to scare the shit out of her.”

“Exactly.” I jerked my glazed donut away so Bodhi couldn’t grab it. “And I need to know if there are any cases that don’t fit that pattern too.”

“The thing is, Margo, we can do all that, but the research is going to be expensive. And I’m not sure it will actually get them to stand down. This would all be a lot easier if she’d done something wrong.”

“She entered without a warrant,” I offered.

“Yeah, but you let her. If someone says, ‘Can I come in?’ and you say yes, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Well, she didn’t exactly say ‘Can I come in?’”

“Then what did she say? Exactly. What exactly did she say?” Ward asked.

Despite his initial skepticism, the meeting with Ward was long and manic, and by the end we’d eaten more than half the donuts and formed a plan. The following week was fairly uneventful. It made me uneasy. When you’re going to do something stupidly brave, it helps to have less time to think about it. Still, I took all the old papers out of the pink binder and filled it with all new papers, carefully organized with a table of contents. We had no idea when Maribel would return. It could be any moment, or it could be weeks. The pink of the binder became slightly more radioactive with each passing day.

Meanwhile, Jinx found a darling house to rent with a pool he claimed was for Bodhi. “Dad, he can’t even swim yet,” I said. But I was happy he’d be close by. It wouldn’t be so bad, I realized, having a little more distance. I had to trust that it would remain that way. Before with my dad, leaving had always meant him being all the way out of my life. It was going to take some time for me to learn exactly how we could make this work.

I thought of JB constantly and, even though I knew it wasn’t healthy, read his old messages. But I knew I couldn’t prioritize him.

I also thought of Shyanne. I’d cooled down some, and I knew I didn’t mean it, what I’d said to her about staying out of my life. She was the only mother I had, and she was flawed, and it sucked, but I loved her. It made me sick, honestly, picturing her in Kenny’s condo, that clean and ugly place, hopped up on energy drinks, sneak playing poker on her phone. I couldn’t leave her in there. I’d have to find some way of making peace with her, though I had no idea exactly how I would do that. All of it made my heart hurt.

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