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In the morning I woke to discover Jinx had been released from the hospital at four in the morning and taken a cab home. I

was furious he hadn’t called me.

“It was fine,” he said. “I lay down in the back of the cab.”

I wanted to ask him if the doctor had sent him home with painkillers, except I suddenly didn’t know how. I didn’t want to

be another nurse checking his hand for a ring, another person who looked at him and only saw an addict. “What did the MRI

say?” I asked.

“No disc slippage,” Jinx said. “Thank heavens.”

“That’s good,” I said.

Jinx was making tea in the kitchen. He paused, his magnificent hands midflight. “Would you like any tea?”

“No, thanks,” I said. He had turned on the overhead, but the light it produced was high-pitched and thin, humming green over

our skin. I watched him for a moment before turning back to my room.

Why didn’t I know how to ask him about this? Last night, I’d felt so close to him, tracing the veins on the top of his hand

as he lay in his hospital bed, talking about Rome, and this morning he felt like a stranger. Also, nine more fans had unsubscribed.

I knew it was my fault for not showing the full vagine. My dad could go on about persona and making guys fall in love with

you, but at the end of the day what these men wanted was simple: to kung-fu grip the original joystick all the way to googasm.

I was so pissed I didn’t even want to write back to JB. What did I want? What were my goals for myself? Actually, JB, my largest goal for myself is to become internet famous for being hot. Ever since I was a young girl, I had

a dream that one day men from all over the world would want to cum on my face... only it turns out I’m too much of a coward

to even do that! It felt good to mock myself in this way. Be cause I did want that. I wanted to be famous. 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.

Instead, I wrote about food.

Dear JB,

I am a big fan of fruity candy, with banana-flavored things being S-tier, lemon-flavored things a close second. Banana Laffy

Taffy—best candy in the world. Lemonheads—phenomenal. I like Runts especially. They always feel special because you can’t

buy them in the store, you have to find one of those machines like at the mall or in some crusty pizza parlor. Probably the

Runts have been in there since the early nineties, but they are none the worse for it because they are Runts—the Eternal Candy.

For special dinners, in our house the archetypal celebration dinner was steak and potatoes, but I never loved steak. I love

chicken wings. I understand that wing places aren’t fancy, so it seems like a weird choice. If I were going to a fancy restaurant,

I would probably look for some cream-based pasta dish. Anything that is a grown-up version of mac and cheese because I am

essentially a giant child.

Because I live in California, for fast food I am obligated to say In-N-Out, and believe me, it is very good, but, and I hesitate

to admit this because it is gross and I know it is gross, I really love Arby’s. If I am alone and sad, or alone and very happy,

Arby’s seems to draw me like the North Star.

In terms of the foods I can’t stand, okay, I don’t like seafood. Almost all of it. But I especially don’t like octopus. And I have had it at fancy places where the other person was rapturous about it, and I still didn’t like it. This borders on sacrilege, but I don’t like crab or lobster really either. I won’t refuse to eat it, but I’d never be like, “Hmmm, let me pay forty dollars to wrestle two ounces of delicate, tasteless meat out of the carcass of this oversized ocean insect.”

And figs. Fuck figs. Certainly they do not taste bad, and I can even imagine getting over the little pinging texture of the

seeds, but they are bland! Pomegranates are stupid and hard to eat, though they do look like encrusted rubies inside glowing

with ancient magic, so it’s like sure, I’ll swallow all these little seeds that are like nail trimmings. But figs? And they

are expensive! 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!

I realized I’d written him the truth, but I figured it didn’t matter. It was only about food after all. And he wouldn’t know

what was true and what wasn’t. I would never meet this guy.

And then, I didn’t even think about it, I wrote: What about you?

“What are you writing?” Jinx asked over her shoulder.

“Jesus!” Margo said, automatically slamming her laptop closed, even though there was technically nothing wrong with her messaging

JB.

Jinx had been milling around the apartment all day. He wasn’t supposed to lie down or sit for long periods. He also wasn’t

supposed to bend over or lift anything, so he was pretty much useless Bodhi-wise, though luckily Bodhi had been chill all

morning. Margo had recently ordered him a Jumperoo bouncer monstrosity that took up a quarter of her bedroom, played painfully

cheerful music, and had flashing light-up buttons. Bodhi was willing to sit in it and jostle around for twenty minutes at

a stretch. With Jinx injured, those twenty minutes and the time Bodhi spent napping were her only real chance to post or respond

to messages.

“Who is JB?” Jinx asked.

“Ugh, he’s a fan,” Margo said.

“That looked like a really long message. I didn’t know you wrote things like that to them.”

“I don’t usually, but he pays me per email. A hundred bucks.”

Jinx raised an eyebrow.

“I just make shit up. Like, I don’t tell him anything about me. I made up a character and everything.”

There was a pause. Margo looked him right in the eye. Because it was true. Where was the lie?

“Impressive,” he said, and smiled, nodding. He was not making any move to leave her room.

“Do you think you could walk to the park?” she asked, figuring if she wasn’t going to work, she might as well do something

nice for Bodhi.

“I’m worried,” Jinx said. “If it went into spasm and I was away from the house.”

“Well, aren’t you still on the muscle relaxers?”

“I didn’t fill the prescription,” Jinx said.

“Dad!” Margo scooped Bodhi up from the Jumperoo and went out to the living room, where it wouldn’t feel so claustrophobic

with her dad hovering.

“Well, it was late, and I didn’t want to tell the cab to stop at the pharmacy, and— I mean, I would rather not take them.”

Margo was trying to get it all straight. “So what all did they prescribe? Are muscle relaxers the same as pain pills? Or are

they something different?”

“They prescribed both muscle relaxers and pain medication. And they are different.”

“What kind of pain medication?”

“Vicodin. Not my favorite, if that’s what you’re asking. I mean, they’re great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not like a script

for eighties of oxy or something.”

“Right,” Margo said. “So... do you want to fill them? Or, I mean, how are you even supposed to function? Like, you’re in

pain.” She could see it now that she was really looking at him. He was all gray colored and sweaty, the muscles in his face

strained and tense.

“But I don’t want to start something— I don’t want—” He broke off. He was almost panting. She waited. “I want them so much that it frightens me, and I can’t tell if I want them because I’m in pain or because I’m an addict.”

“You’re in pain,” she said. “Okay, what if I keep your medication for you. Like in my room, hidden, and you don’t even know

where it is. And I give it to you only when you need it.”

“We could do that,” Jinx said, looking up at her, his head nodding rapidly. “We could do something like that.”

Margo was amazed. He had come around almost instantly. “Okay, did they call it in? Where are we going? This is exciting, we’re

leaving the house! Wanna get food while we’re out? Something gross?”

“Like what?” Jinx asked.

Margo wiggled her eyebrows seductively. “Like Arby’s?”

JB wrote back with lists of his favorite and least favorite foods, and Margo found herself rapt. She had to admit he had a

point about Pringles: they did taste like someone had already chewed them before you. He said he loved Rocky Road ice cream, which.. . there was nothing

wrong with Rocky Road, she would eat Rocky Road at any time of the day or night, but there was something weird about it being

your favorite. Like, better than cookie dough? Really? She thought it was kind of cute that he would venerate this utterly

boring ice-cream flavor. He was such a puzzling mix of traits. She kept thinking about that pearl necklace tight on the beautiful

skin of his throat.

At first, she’d assumed the fact he was writing girls online and paying them to write back meant he was lonely, the kind of

lonely that made people, especially men, a little desperate. But now she wasn’t so sure what kind of person he was, besides

a rich person. If she answered all the questions he sent, he’d owe her $1,000. How did a guy in his twenties have that kind

of money, and why would he spend it on this?

She was nursing Bodhi in bed and trying to type a response one-handed.

JB,

Sir, I regret to inform you I have raised my rates. Your answer regarding snack foods was so delightful that from now on,

I will require you to answer one question for every question I answer from you. In addition to, you know, the money. Deal?

For my next question, I have to know: Is JB your actual name, or does it just stand for Jelly Bean? I can’t stop thinking

of you as Jelly Bean!

Xo,

??

“So how much of wrestling is actually real?” Suzie asked that night as they were watching NXT . Margo’s eyes bugged out of her head, shocked that Suzie didn’t know not to ask this.

Jinx was remarkably calm as he answered: “That’s a bit of a forbidden question, Suzie. You can ask it of me, I’m not saying

I’m mad, but you will get knocked unconscious for asking another wrestler that. Once, a guy started talking about how wrestling

was fake in a bar, and Haku said, ‘Oh yeah? Let me show you how fake,’ and he bit the guy’s nose off.”

“Oh my God,” Suzie said. “Like off-off?”

“O-F-F,” Jinx said, and nodded emphatically. “But as to your other question, nobody knows.”

“Nobody knows?” Suzie asked.

“How much is fake. It’s all fake, it’s all real, the lines are blurry. Where does the character end and the self begin? It

doesn’t help that a lot of the angles are taking real-life dynamics and making them larger than life. There was one move Vince

did with Jeff Hardy that was so profoundly unethical, it made all of us uncomfortable.”

“Oh, was this the CM Punk thing?” Margo asked.

“Yes, exactly,” Jinx said, and continued explaining. “Jeff had for many years been struggling with substance abuse problems, which is common in wrestling because of the chronic injuries involved, but Jeff had a reputation for being particularly out of control and unreliable, and so Vince turns it into an angle and has him go up against this guy, CM Punk, whose whole deal is that he’s straight edge.”

“Oh, cringe!” Suzie said.

“So you can see that the line between real and not real gets a little—a little fractal.”

“But, like, in the ring. How much in the ring is real?”

“It depends. I mean, does it hurt? Yes. Do you get injured? Yes. Are they out there socking each other as hard as they can

in the head? No, they wouldn’t be able to work six nights a week the way they have to. It’s more like it’s choreographed.

You don’t ask if a ballet is real just because it’s choreographed.”

“Right,” Suzie said, though it was clear this answer didn’t entirely satisfy her.

“That’s the magic,” he went on. “It has to be authentic to work, but it’s also, you know, by definition fake. You’re dressed

up in neon spandex and holding a microphone—that is not how fights actually happen.”

“What do you mean it has to be authentic to work?” Margo asked.

“I mean, the match, even if it has incredible acrobatic spots, still must have the psychology of a real fight. And if a persona

is too fake, it doesn’t work, you’ll never get over. It has to ring true. But it can be a hard thing to understand about yourself,

to say, ‘These are my defining qualities, condensed, distilled.’”

“Yeah, that seems superhard,” Margo said. Inside, her gears had already begun to whir. Maybe she’d been thinking about it

all wrong. She didn’t need to become more like Arabella; Margo could never be that thrillingly, bluntly aggressive. Certainly

she couldn’t ever play Fortnite that well. Maybe what Margo needed was to become more herself. “I thought you were saying, like, make up a character and

then be that, but you’re saying turn myself into a character. Almost like turning yourself into a cartoon.”

“Exactly,” Jinx said. “Exactly that. But it can be hard to see yourself well enough to turn yourself into a cartoon!”

“I practically already am a cartoon,” Margo said.

Jinx squinted at her. “In what way?”

“I’m so goofy,” she said. “I’m cheesy.”

“I would never describe you as goofy or cheesy in a million years,” Suzie said.

“No?”

“No, you’re way too scary to be goofy.”

“Scary?!”

“Yes,” Jinx said, thoughtful, “you are a little scary. I mean, I’m scary! Maybe you got it from me.”

Suzie was nodding. “That’s true, you are both very, very scary.”

“Wait, are you saying I’m a heel?” Margo asked.

“Yes,” Jinx said, considering. “I do think you’re a natural heel. I know you wanted to be a face. Don’t think about it as

being mean, think about it as being... disruptive.”

Margo picked at an ingrown hair on her calf. “I don’t see, like, right now I’m not a heel or a face, I’m not a person even,

I’m a set of tits. Like, how are you supposed to make a character when it’s just pictures of your body?” Arabella had Fortnite, she had something to play, to do. Margo didn’t have anything like that.

“That is exactly the question,” Jinx murmured. He was visibly more relaxed since he’d taken his medication, almost euphoric.

“How to go from being another pair of anonymous tits to the only pair of tits that matter? It has to feel real, but how to

capture it? That way you throw yourself around in the world like you’re invulnerable, when of course you can’t be and you

are going to get terribly hurt, and yet there is something beautiful about the abandon, the recklessness, and—and kind of

the bravery of it.”

Never in one million years would Margo have guessed her father understood these things about her.

“What you need,” Jinx said, “is buddies.”

“Buddies?” Suzie said.

“To play off. You need to build that heat. Heat’s what puts the butts in the seats.”

Margo knew what he meant immediately. He had mentioned buddies before, but she had only been thinking of it in terms of cross promotion, not in terms of actually producing content. “I need to interact with people. I need other characters to help differentiate myself, so that I’m not just a pair of tits. A face needs a heel, and a heel needs a face.”

“Exactly,” Jinx said. “Bingo, kid.”

Margo had gotten this far in her thinking before, but she’d always stumbled trying to imagine how another person could enter

her content without, you know, having sex with her or something. The answer had been right in front of her all along.

“We need to cut promos,” she said.

Not the match. She needed the hype in the weeks before the match. How had she missed it? The promos were almost the most important

part—they were the reason the audience cared about the fight enough to watch it.

“What do you mean promos?” Suzie asked.

“TikToks,” Margo said. “We’ll make TikToks.”

“Who is we?” Jinx asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Margo said. “Buddies.”

“Buddies,” Jinx said, cracking a smile, nodding.

I went to WangMangler’s account that night and found the photo that had been bothering me. It was WangMangler in a bikini

at the beach. Behind her you could see a pier, and on the pier was a kind of hut, a little hexagonal building with a red roof.

I zoomed in as far as it could go. I wasn’t 100 percent, but I was pretty sure that building was a Ruby’s Diner and that the

pier was at Huntington Beach. I noticed on her website that she also had a podcast with another girl who did OnlyFans named

SucculentRose, so I went and subscribed to her account and poked around.

SucculentRose looked like an adorable sexy puppy. She had long platinum-blond hair that hung down her back in an unbroken sheet. She was plump with dramatic fake eyelashes and breasts so big and perfectly spherical it was like a twelve-year-old boy had drawn them on her. Her account wasn’t as interesting as WangMangler’s and she didn’t seem to do dick ratings. She only had fifteen thousand Instagram followers, about half as many as WangMangler. She was very obviously a baby face.

I clicked over to WangMangler’s account and sent her a message saying I’d realized we might both be in Southern California,

and if that was true, could I ever be a guest on her podcast? I received a message from SucculentRose saying yes, they were

in Huntington Beach, and did I live close enough to drive there? The timing was perfect because their guest for that week

had canceled. Could I come to their apartment to record tomorrow? She and WangMangler were roommates, as it happened. I checked

with Jinx. Yes, I could go tomorrow. Suzie would call in sick and help with Bodhi since Jinx still couldn’t handle lifting

him. SucculentRose gave me the address. It was all set. I had no idea what I would say on a podcast and figured I would have

to just deal with that in the moment.

Margo still hadn’t heard back from JB, and she tried not to let it bother her. Around midnight, right as she was about to

fall asleep, her obsessive phone checking was rewarded.

Ghost,

JB is my name, and no, it does not stand for Jelly Bean, sadly. It stands for Jae Beom.

A name for a name?

JB

Margo’s heart was beating fast. She didn’t know if it was from fear or excitement. Part of her wanted to tell him her name.

How could it hurt? There had to be thousands of Margos in the world. But later, if he killed her, people would say, “I can’t

believe she gave him her name!”

You’re never going to believe this, she wrote, but my given name is Jelly Bean.

That’s a beautiful name, he wrote.

Elegant, Margo supplied. Sophisticated.

JB: So we are both JB then.

HungryGhost: You mean all three of us are JB. (I am including your dog.)

JB: A coincidence too large to be anything but the signature of destiny.

HungryGhost: Well, my mom let your niece name me, so...

JB:

HungryGhost: Can I ask you another question?

JB: Only if you answer one of mine.

HungryGhost: Deal.

First grade school crush, JB prompted.

HungryGhost: Easy. His name was, I shit you not, Branch Woodley, and his mom was a big hippie, and he would use the tinfoil his mom wrapped

his sandwich in to make a tiny hat so the teachers couldn’t read his thoughts. We would pretend to communicate with the trees

by touching their bark with our eyes closed. My question for you is: Are you doing this question thing with other girls on

here?

JB: No.

HungryGhost: Just no? I don’t get anything more than that?

He sent a $100 tip.

Margo stared at it, a little peeved. Then a message came through:

JB: Have you ever shat your pants?

HungryGhost: Yes.

She pressed send. She had shat her pants during a chemistry final in high school after eating too many mango habanero wings

the night before.

JB: I don’t get anything more?

HungryGhost: You don’t get naked, I don’t get naked.

JB: Fair. Honestly, I was doing this whole thing as kind of a troll. I heard of OnlyFans and I wondered what it was about. You

were one of the first girls I followed. I don’t know. It seemed more interesting to talk to you than anything else, like maybe

that’s a nerd impulse. The only time I ever got a lap dance I tried to talk to her too. Maybe I just too firmly sexually imprinted

on Truth or Dare when I was twelve?

Margo had always loved Truth or Dare and nodded slowly, considering this. And really, she wrote, if you can’t tell the truth to a stranger on the internet, then who can you tell the truth to?

Another $100 came through, and a message:

JB: You don’t have to tell me the details of how you crapped your pants if you don’t want to, this isn’t a fetish thing about

poop for me. I was just hoping for a funny story.

HungryGhost: Well, the first thing you need to know is that my chemistry teacher was inexplicably from New Zealand with a thick, thick accent

I found challenging to parse...