"Margo's Got Money Troubles"

[fiefoe]

Rufi Thorpe's light-hearted novel about an Onlyfans start is very much a cut above the usual pop fiction fare, though I'm still not quite convinced that a smart girl like Margo would get herself into such a financial jam in the first place. To find two perfect beach reads during a summer without any beach trips seems a bit perverse.

• The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people’s names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know. And that’s fine, goodness knows you’ve fallen in love with books that didn’t grab you in the first paragraph. But that doesn’t stop you from wishing they would, from wishing they would come right up to you in the dark of your mind and kiss you on the throat.
• pressing the stupid red button of the crotch buckle with the requisite superhuman strength (seriously, she pictured a family of rock climbers, used to hanging by their fingertips off cliffsides, who then decided to design baby stuff),
• The narrator doesn’t do x or y because he has borderline personality disorder. He does x or y because the author is making him. You aren’t trying to have a relationship with the character. You are trying to have a relationship with the author through the character.
• there would always be one or two who jabbered the whole time like the professor was a late-night host and they were some well-loved celebrity come to promote the movie of their own intelligence.
• Mark was a part of all that. He was a wind chime in human form, dangling dorkily from the glorious tree of higher education. <> In the beginning, this made me feel like the power dynamic was in my favor. His professor-ness didn’t blind me to his foibles: I registered fully the ridiculousness of his pants
• There are people who venerate professional wrestling and people who look down on professional wrestling, and I worried Mark would be the kind to venerate the thing he looked down upon. I knew my carny-ass bloodline would be an instant fetish for him.
• The thing about Bodhi’s dad that was so confusing was that of course I only slept with him because he had the power, of course it was the fact that he was my English professor, my favorite class. And yet so much of what compelled me was the way he kept insisting that I had the power.
• “How old are you?” he asked Suzie. “Jesus, Margo, I didn’t mean to—” <> “Old enough to tell the dean, now pay the troll,” Suzie growled.
• Margo assumed it was part of some fantasy he had. She could not see a reason for having sex against a wall besides a fantasy really.
• * She didn’t really have any. Or she did, but they were internal somehow, secret even from herself. For instance, she did not like him, not really, and the secret of her disdain was like a folded promise waiting in a drawer within her.
• Kat the Smaller, who was very much a puker. Things entered and exited her with a whimsy Margo could not imagine.
• He was always ordering us things that filled me with mild dread, charred octopus or mussels that looked for all the world like the clitoris of a corpse stuffed inside a shell,
• It hadn’t occurred to her that she could cut it off; this whole affair had seemed to be kind of his thing. She’d been letting him drive. But the idea of hanging out with this middle-aged man without the sex—like, just having an older, dorky _friend?
• He was married, and he said that was how he and his wife did it, and they’d never had any mistakes! She felt incredibly stupid. For believing him, for having the affair with him, for having a uterus.
• You are wilder than anyone I’ve ever known.” <> And I liked that he called me that, even though the things Mark said about me never felt like they really had anything to do with me. They were more his fantasy of me.
• * It was confusing that he kept trying to frame the decision in terms of what I wanted. To me, want and should were two very separate things. In fact, wanting something was usually a sign that you did not deserve it and would not be getting it,
• I had a sudden image of my mother pressing her idea of who I was onto the actual me, like an acrylic nail, this big mask-shell of a face on top of my actual face.
• I looked in the mirror and could suddenly see how I looked just like her, a knockoff Shyanne, my eyes set a little too wide. Both of us had stupid faces, pretty and sweet; faces that seemed to imply there was nothing inside us at all.
• And when he’d leave again in a few days, the apartment would be so quiet, and we wouldn’t know how to talk to each other exactly, like we were embarrassed of ourselves and how we had behaved.
  “I ruined your life,” I said, not a question. I just wanted her to know that I knew.
  “You ruined my life so pretty, Noodle.”
• And then Bodhi was born, and Margo was alone with him in her room, like she’d been locked in there and told to spin straw into gold.
• That was the other thing: her boobs were everywhere. She’d forget to put them away, and one tit would be dangling there like a lazy eye while she finished whatever she was saying or took a bite.
• How much kindness would mean right now, and how unwilling anyone was to give it. How sacred the baby was to her, and how mundane and irritating the baby was to others. <> Margo felt so raw and leaking, so mortal, and yet stronger than she’d ever been. The option to throw yourself on the ground and have a good cry was gone.
• day care was only $300, but day care was, as the name suggested, very diurnal, just obsessed with daylight... But she was a night worker, which somehow denied her the right to affordable childcare.
• she scrolled Twitter, which was like being bathed in the dirty water of other people’s thoughts.
• When Margo could finally hear over the sound of her own heartbeat, Elizabeth was still talking. Every time Larry tried to interrupt, Elizabeth held up her hand and seemed to press the words right back inside him. <> “And in exchange, you would guarantee that you will not attend Fullerton College in the future,
• She had $15,000. Yes, she felt gross and degraded, but she had done it. She’d saved them. <> I like getting to be the me now watching the past me. It’s almost a way of loving myself. Stroking the cheek of that girl with my understanding.
• when she was aware of being looked at, Shyanne held her head differently. Her neck was longer, and she angled her face slightly down as though beauty were a kind of bridle she had to bite down on.
• Shyanne made a kind of throttled cry that would make sense only in the context of sex or sports or maybe gambling. It was the guttural, emotional noise of winning. <> “So, do we have your blessing?” Kenny asked.
• Margo was highly aware that she was not as pretty as she was hot. Shyanne had said it all the time. “You’re not pretty enough to have dirty hair, get your ass in the shower!”
• But when had my father ever not been stiff and in pain? From my earliest memory he smelled strongly of Icy Hot. <> It wasn’t clear to me if Jinx was okay or if I should worry. It was sort of like adopting an exotic pet you had no idea how to care for.
• * Margo was mostly locked in her bedroom, trying to take pictures of her tits. <> She ran up against the limitations of the genre almost immediately. She had only so many body parts and so many angles. Variety would have to come from somewhere else apparently—outfits, locations, a tripod so she could change up her poses more.
• * Taking care of Bodhi, monitoring her father’s closed door, endlessly refreshing her OnlyFans page to see that nothing new had happened, then making herself scan through job postings on Craigslist was like trying to make origami out of wet paper. The harder she tried, the more it all kept disintegrating in her hands. It was unclear how so many things simply not happening could be so stressful.
• * Congratulations! Your penis is a Tentacruel! With bulging pink glans and glittering dark blue veins, your penis is filled with quiet menace. When that mushroom tip glows red, you know he’s about to attack!
• It had not occurred to Margo before that cosplay and wrestling had anything in common, and yet Jinx wanted to know every detail. “So these orcs—” he said, leaning his face on his fist at the table, “forgive me, I don’t know a lot about orcs—are they from a specific franchise?”
• * Kat the Smaller had told her about TikTok, but Margo hadn’t gotten around to joining. It was a newer platform, the point of which Margo did not get... She watched kids do impressions of moms who wash your hair too roughly, moms who chastised you for having too many water glasses in your room, moms who were constantly opening and flapping trash bags. The most remarkable thing was how the TikToks were all loosely in response to one another... didn’t have to search for these things, she didn’t have to already know what she wanted, like on YouTube. They just came to her, all lined up, ready to be flipped through. It was like the missing link. If OnlyFans had the monetization but no discoverability, TikTok had pure discoverability without any way that she could see of monetizing it.
• Margo sent the $500. Then WangMangler messaged: I’ll pin ur post for 3 days but u have to run a promo making your account $4.99 so my fans get exclusive discount on your content.
• Margo kept thinking about Murder. How was her father okay with a guy like that, a guy who murdered people for money, who once famously punched a reporter and knocked out two of his teeth, yet he had this huge moral objection to her posting pictures of her boobs on the internet?
• * “Give me the baby,” Margo said, holding out her arms for Bodhi. <> Reluctantly, Jinx handed Bodhi over, looking as weirdly hostile and sad as a renaissance painting.
• She decided to broker a deal with Suzie. Clothes, and in particular costumes, seemed the easiest way out of the finite number of possible butt and boob configurations.
• “When I was little, I would masturbate to SpongeBob,” Suzie said. The abruptness of this gave Margo a little zing. She always kind of liked that, when things suddenly went sideways with another person.
• * Margo pondered this. “I feel like there is a way in which, even if a girl isn’t having sex with anyone, like even if she’s a virgin, if she shows her boobs or dresses for sexual attention, she’s still considered a slut. I mean, right?”
  “I guess,” Suzie said. “But it seems weird to say a celibate person is a slut. Like, you’re just pretending words have meaning at that point.”...
  “It’s because you know. It’s because you’re in control of it! That is what makes someone slutty or not slutty!”...
  if sex wasn’t shameful and being paid wasn’t shameful, then why was it shameful to have sex for money? Or sell pictures of your boobs or whatever? Where was the shame coming from? How was it entering the system?
• People treat sex workers so badly and with such disdain, and I didn’t want that for you, but somehow that just resulted in me treating you with disdain for being a sex worker, and that’s not what I want to do or who I want to be.
• * Weirdly, it was how much fun she was having that was hardest for her to process. The small cascade of neurochemicals each time her phone dinged with a new message. The obsessive refreshing of the page to see if anything new had happened. The compliments, the likes, the fire emojis—they were all intoxicating and kind of exciting. It reminded her of the early days of courtship, when her whole life hinged upon the latest text or email. Except she was having this same reaction to crude messages sent by strangers on the internet. She didn’t want it to be true, that these meaningless, highly artificial interactions could create in her the same feelings as the actual relationships she’d had. She knew what she was feeling now wasn’t real, but how real had anything she felt ever been?
• waitress: “It’s exhausting,” Margo said, “and like, there’s no getting a raise or a promotion, there’s no growing. And that makes it feel like trying to run when you’re facing a wall.”
• “What I am trying to say is that you need to think about your persona. You need to be someone worth falling in love with—you teach them how to love you by showing them who you are.” <> “Yeah,” Margo said. Because she could see that: Arabella and WangMangler both managed to be unforgettable, ... “Are you a heel or a face?” Jinx asked. “The bad guy or good guy?”
• * That was one of the things Mark had told her, that as far as neuroscience was concerned, free will couldn’t be real. That our brains only invented explanations, justifications for what our body was already getting ready to do. That consciousness was a fabulous illusion. We were inferring our own state of mind the same way we inferred the minds of others: thinking someone is mad when they frown, sad when they cry. We feel the physiological sensation of anger and we think, I’m mad because Tony stole my banana! But we’re just making stuff up, fairy tales to explain the deep dark woods of being alive.
• A kindly fan, one who didn’t unsubscribe, suggested I begin making longer videos. He suggested two and a half minutes as being a standard “jack-off length,”
• I’d also never been able to so fully imagine him as the wild milk-white bull my mother first fell for, the young man from Middle-of-Nowhere, Canada, screaming, “Look at me! Love me!” <> “Oh yeah,” my dad said. “That’s the heart of it. Boys on trampolines fooling around with their friends. That is the beautiful seed wherefrom the wrestling flower sprouts. But you know, almost all my friends are dead.
• about violence and how much we love it and how we can’t stop. And just as all roads lead to Rome, all histories of blood sport lead there as well.”
• “They would make these long seesaws, like teeter-totters. And then they’d chain criminals up at either end, and let in, you know, a dozen starving lions and bears, and watch as the men all pushed off with their legs, trying to be the one in the air, even though they knew that when their counterpart was done, you know, being eaten, that weight would be removed and they’d come crashing down and be eaten as well.”
• Sometimes wrestlers would sneak a razor blade into a match and cut themselves at their hairline so that they’d bleed; they called it “adding color” to a match. Abdullah the Butcher’s head was practically grooved from all the scars.
• I wanted to make a lot of money, absurd amounts of money. I wanted power: raw and cold and green. But every single time I thought about hittin’ the kitten on camera, I felt like I was going to puke. <> Obviously, I would never say any of this to JB. Not only because it didn’t cast me in the best light, but because the dream of being famous was silent, urgent, and embarrassing. Closely kept as a birthday candle wish.
• _They come on salads that are like twenty-five dollars for five shreds of bitter lettuce and then these ugly cut-open figs that look like their insides are riddled with tiny tumors. We’ll call you back if we’re interested, figs!
• “You should make, like, an advent-calendar-type countdown to your vageen!” Rose said. “And it can be your Christmas gift to all the men in the world!” <> Margo suddenly imagined photoshopping her vagina to contain a tiny baby Jesus at its center, like a manger.
• “No, what percentage of our proceeds would we owe to you? You’re basically proposing engineering this huge publicity machine, so I assume we’d have to pay to be part of it.”
  “Oh, wow,” Margo said, “yeah, I hadn’t gotten that far. Let’s just see if it works?”...
  “Sweetie,” Rose said, “I’m just worried you’re not thinking enough about what’s in it for you. Are you sure you should be volunteering to do all the work? This isn’t some group project in school.”
  “Um, hello, you guys, I have a thousand Instagram followers, you have thirty thousand. There is no way that working with you two isn’t a huge, huge step up for me.”
• Margo tried to think about Jinx and what he was really like. The overwhelming feeling of being on mushrooms had mostly subsided, but her mind still felt childlike and fresh, like being in her own head was the most wonderful thing in the world. “Magic,” Margo said, surprising herself. “Like he has access to, I don’t know, a kind of vast subterranean network of power or . . . like, he’s like a disgraced wizard or something. But, I mean, he’s also a middle-aged man who, you know, obsessively cleans and can’t keep his dick in his pants and makes pasta from scratch.
• * That they should all wind up in this parking lot under a completely cloudless sky about to embark on this adventure together felt so ludicrous as to be almost weightless.
• “I am from another planet and I do not understand your world, though I like it here very much. Feed me memes and tinfoil and cute cat videos. Give me your boredom and your sadness and your anxiety: I will eat it all. I will eat the buttons off your shirt, your darkest secrets, your keys, locks of your hair, your memories. Come play with me in a world we make up together. I will only kill you a little bit and you will like it.”
• I didn’t know how to argue, even as I knew that if anything, she’d raised me for this. “Beauty is like free money.” I thought about the things Shyanne said all the time when I was doing my OnlyFans: “Never smile too big at a man too quickly, a shy small smile will make him think he earned it.” “Never sit with your purse on your lap, it’s blocking your coochie.”
• Mark was always insisting that characters weren’t real, that they had no psychology at all, having no actual body or mind. They were always a pawn of the author. Our job, he insisted, was to try to understand the author, not the character. The character was merely the paint—we needed to try to see the picture the paint was making. <> Margo didn’t know if she believed that or not—surely characters sometimes took on a life of their own—but it made her feel better about lying to JB somehow. Like even if she was lying, it was okay because she was using the lies like paint to try to tell him something real.
• Lady and the Tramp: A dog without a collar is just an animal. If the world doesn’t know you are loved, then you’re trash. I think that’s even true of people. Maybe. Sometimes. Or I fear it is. That being loved is the only way to be safe.
• Margo knew that if things were different, she could find a way to make Shyanne likable like this. Every person can be face or heel, flip back and forth, depending on what you showed. Show him putting his sunglasses on a kid, he’s a face. Show him cheating and distracting the ref, he’s a heel. She knew this was because real people were both good and bad, all mixed up together, only the screen made everyone into basic silhouettes... Even when it came to herself, Margo could see it both ways: hometown girl makes good, defies capitalist patriarchy, or teen whore sells nudes while nursing, too lazy to work.
• * They wrote to each other three, four times a day. It felt like an art project almost, answering each other’s questions, like if they were careful, they could use these messages like Ziploc bags to store reality itself.
• “A hundred percent,” Jinx said. “There is nothing to worry about. This is just the way rich white people say ‘fuck you.’ Trust me, I know their language, I’m practically fluent.”
  Part of this game is that you are going to realize certain things before I do. This is called “narrative irony.” I know because Mark put it on a test once.
• *How had she known what parts of herself to change? Margo imagined the view count moving the plastic surgeon’s hand like a Ouija board, showing him what Kiki’s subscribers wanted.
• what we did at recess, our favorite toys. It felt like I could touch the sublime by memorizing all of JB’s memories. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful human achievement? To learn everything about a person you would never meet?
• “Oh, I know,” Margo said. She knew this was not because he didn’t have the money, but because the money was already being spent on full-time tuition at Barnard, and weddings, and on things for his real kids.
  “But a plane ticket, or help moving, or a few thousand here or there, you can always ask me for those things.”
  Margo was going to cry if he kept talking, both because it was too nice and because it was still not enough.
• “It’s okay. I mean, I’m okay. It’s weird, though. It feels unsafe to have so many people mad at me. I don’t know how trolls do it. Or heels in wrestling—like, what is it like to have a whole stadium of people booing you?” She didn’t mention that her mother was one of those people, or that she’d been disinvited from the wedding, or that Mark was suing for custody, or that Kenny had slept in the rec room, or that the Virgin Mary had been raped.
  “There’s a kind of freedom in that, I bet,” Rose said.
  “How so?”
  “Like how comedians have to bomb. If you don’t learn how to bomb, then the audience has you on such a tight leash, you’re stuck saying only the things you think they’ll like.”
  Margo was frozen looking out her window, her phone pressed to her head. She had not associated freedom with being hated before. It made perfect sense.
• “I have to warn you, though, the courts frown on one parent trying to prevent the other from having a relationship with the kid. It’s a big red flag.”
• “What is going on?!” Derek whined, aware we were making fun of him even if he still didn’t get the joke. His instincts were so bizarre. I could only guess he was the youngest of a group of siblings.
• we would speak nonsense to each other as a weird kind of love language. “The ace up my sleeve keeps adding insult to injury,” he would say. “You air your dirty laundry against all odds,” I would reply. <> It felt like that, the custody battle. Like all the words had stopped being attached to anything. We were reduced to “Petitioner” and “Respondent.” And maybe Mark would be able to stack up his meaningless words higher than mine, even though I was the only one who loved Bodhi. But there were no words on any of these forms for love.
• for hours and hours each day I was looking at pictures of dicks and writing things like, Whoa! That is a Bulbasaur that would leave any lady sore! Each penis was so isolated, the only thing in the frame, and they seemed like a series of blind, hairless, oddly defiant little critters.
• I saw my mother’s wedding as a series of Facebook posts.
• “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.
• * 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.
• * “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,
• Everyone had always known, could see that there was something about me that wasn’t worth investing in. The way they could so easily throw me away. Mark, Becca, my old boss Tessa. My own mother,... And why shouldn’t I be? I was a liar and a whore. I’d alienated literally everyone in my life except my ex-addict pro wrestler dad, who was like, “Attagirl, keep selling those nudes!”
• * The sadness from the morning didn’t exactly go away; it dried on me and slowly crumbled, leaving me covered in little flakes, like if you eat a glazed donut in a black shirt. That was how it was being a grown-up. We were all moving through the world like that, like those river dolphins that look pink only because they’re so covered in scars.
• Margo would have given anything to be wearing a pilled cardigan instead of the black blazer. What had she been thinking? She should have dressed for sympathy, not power! <> “We are here today to try to come to an agreement,” the mediator, Nadia was her name, said,
• Mark could state the exact same facts of her life as she did—her age, the baby, her work—and make it sound like she was some tragic figure. The idea that she might post naked pictures of herself and remain psychologically healthy seemed not to have occurred to him.
• * 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.
• 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.
• * 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... But good or evil, every single dollar was power.
• _ 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.
• 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... I had gotten these ideas remembering Tessa and how she’d fed the salad boy potting soil and shaving cream.
• “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.”
• * Every day, on my phone, on my computer, they were always there. I thought of my fans now as a garden of little worms, like Ursula the sea witch’s garden of lost souls, but with dicks.
• I knew exactly what he meant, but maybe because of the custody stuff with Mark, or everything with my dad, reality did not seem as trivial as it once had. <> The thing is, though, I wrote, a book isn’t a relationship. There are these built-in guardrails that keep you from knowing the author. The end of the book is like a chasm, cutting you off from them.
• * There is a desperation to a novel that is unsettling. The world so painstakingly re-created in miniature; this tiny diorama made of words. Why go to all this trouble, to create me, to seduce you, to enumerate so many different breakfast cereals? To make the cunning tiny apartment, the itsy-bitsy Jinx? It’s like going to meet your new boyfriend’s family for the first time and discovering they are all paid actors. It’s almost easier to believe I’m real than to understand what’s actually going on. The desperation that could have caused anyone to invent me in the first place. The urgency and need that would require creating an imaginary space of this size and level of detail. <> And it really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?
• “But why, when methadone has a success rate of sixty to ninety percent, and twelve-step programs have a success rate of between five and ten percent? Why would you insist people adopt the less successful, less science-backed treatment option?” These were the longest sentences I’d managed to speak the whole time. <> “In the eyes of the California court system, methadone is just another name for heroin.” She shrugged.
• I felt guilty for spending a night on my own, for sleeping with JB, for thinking it was okay that I was allowed to be young again just for one night. The needles in my closet. “I’m a bad person,” I gasped.
  “No,” Jinx said. “No, honey, you’re not a bad person.”
  I closed my eyes.
  I couldn’t trust him.
  He was a bad person too.
• but I couldn’t imagine him coming over now. I felt like I’d throw up. The idea of seeing him and being excited and happy was almost grotesque.
• Whenever Margo thought of herself as a real estate agent, she imagined her body with someone else’s face pasted on it, the scale slightly off so the head was too big like a Barbie. She tried imagining a JB doll grasping the Margo doll with his stiff arms, kissing her with his numb plastic lips.
• “How have you been?” I asked, determined to outlast her coldness. I followed her as she followed the puppy, and she answered all my questions tersely with fake hurt. She was milking it almost beyond my ability to feign contrition when suddenly we lit upon the topic of her gambling in Vegas. She was like the sun coming from behind clouds as she described her system of waking up in the middle of the night, sneaking out of the hotel room, gambling until four, and then crawling back into bed before Kenny woke up.
• _“Margo” has a moderately impaired self-concept and consistently estimates herself to be both superior to and inferior to others. She is conflicted about her identity and role in the adult world and attempts to shield her vulnerability with an affected attitude of power and dominance. She is currently experiencing manageable levels of anxiety and depression, though these feelings center primarily on the custody dispute and her relationship with her mother.
• I squinted at him. “Because less than a year ago you were having me sign an NDA promising to drop out of Fullerton College and never tell anyone Bodhi was yours.”
  “Feelings change. Don’t I have the right to my own emotional journey?”
  I sighed. It was so tiresome wading through his self-righteous posturing. He wasn’t even very good at it.
• “I’m trying to decide exactly what I’m going to do, which is why I’m asking. To me, it seems absurd that a man I slept with over a year ago gets to decide how I make a living, but that’s the position I find myself in.”
  “I have to confess something,” Mark said suddenly, with an I’ve been a bad boy excitement. “I bought your Rigoberto video. And I have to say, from an artistic standpoint, I was really quite impressed.”
  So weird, so gross. “Thanks,” I said, praying he wouldn’t say more.
  “It just— It wasn’t what I had been picturing,” he said.
  As much of a nitwit as Mark was, I knew what he meant. I hadn’t been expecting Arabella’s account to be what it was. I hadn’t expected to think pro wrestling was a form of art. I hadn’t expected infidelity to be about cuddling or drug addiction to be about eating Milky Ways.
• 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.
• 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.”
• I had always thought that love was supposed to come from other people, and somehow, I was failing to catch the crumbs of it, failing to eat them, and I went around belly empty and desperate. I didn’t know the love was supposed to come from within me, and that as long as I loved others, the strength and warmth of that love would fill me, make me strong. <> As I finally drifted off to sleep, I pictured myself like Arabella, violent and half naked, only instead of shooting people with glowing cartoon guns, I was loving them so big, so hard and real, that the world began to crack at the power of it. My mother’s face flew into fragments, shot through with golden beams of light; Jinx’s skeleton body was lifted into the sky.
• “At this point,” I said, “I think your first concern should be assessing your own legal risk. Here is a letter from my attorney, Michael T. Ward, asking you to stop entering my home without a warrant. The last time you were here, you entered under false pretenses by claiming that you would take our child unless we complied,... Maribel pulled the binder over for the first time and began really looking at it. She skipped all the case files and read the letter from Ward.
• “Right,” I said, breathless. It almost felt like she was backtracking. And I needed her to feel like backtracking was possible, would be easy. “That makes sense to me. Because our lawyer was so upset that he wanted to press charges immediately, but I said to him, ‘Ward, I think CPS really wants to help. They’re the good guys. Let’s give them a chance to show it.’”
• “Margo, you’re gifted at the writing, the character you made up for Ghost. And I thought, what if we started a consulting company? Where we offer this in-depth data-driven analysis of their target demographic to OnlyFans content creators and make ad recommendations. Lots of companies could do that—they aren’t right now because they don’t even know what OnlyFans is, but they’ll figure it out eventually and provide stiff competition. We could do more than that. You could offer them a critique of their character, of their persona, and give them ideas for how they might tweak it to make it more successful. I mean, we could even offer a prestige service where you write actual scripts for them.”
• * What JB was offering, it was beyond even my own wildest ambitions. JB was offering me the chance to become Vince McMahon.
  I hesitated, really thinking about it. Then I let out a Ric Flair “Wooo!” into the cold February afternoon. “Hell yeah, we are,” I said. “We’re going to be the most awesome, ethical, kick-ass pimps of all time! I mean, if sex work can be a legitimate profession, why can’t being a pimp?
• one adventure leading to the next, and we would never die, and we’d be young forever, and we would scream to the crowd, “Look at me! Look at the beautiful, insane things I can do with my body! Look at me! Love me!”
  Because that’s all art is, in the end.
  One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them.