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SucculentRose and WangMangler lived in a stucco apartment complex that was quiet as a tomb. Margo’s footsteps echoed. She

didn’t see one single person on her way from her car to their second-story apartment.

SucculentRose answered the door wearing a garment that was clearly a descendant of the Snuggie, a hybrid of sweatshirt and

nightgown made of tan woolly teddy bear fabric. She was braless, and though Margo had already seen many pictures of SucculentRose

naked, the breasts were still very impressive in person, big enough that they moved slightly independently of the rest of

her body. “Oh my God, it’s so good to meet you!” SucculentRose cried, cradling Margo in a hug. SucculentRose still had on

last night’s eye makeup. It was even more lovely for being crumbly and blurry, and her platinum hair smelled like expensive

shampoo.

“This is silly, but what should I call you?” Margo said. While she could imagine calling SucculentRose Rose, she could not

imagine what she would call WangMangler.

“Excellent question. I’m Rose, and that is my real name just so you know, and you can call me that on the show, but she goes

by KC. I mean WangMangler. You know what I mean!”

“Got it,” Margo said, tucking her hair behind her ears.

“Do you use your real name?”

“I don’t,” Margo said. “Can we just—can we call me Ghost?”

“Of course! Oh my God, you are so cute,” Rose said. “You’re so nervous, I love it! Just know, KC will totally be rude, and

you will think she doesn’t like you and that is true. She doesn’t like anybody. But underneath all that she is goo and she

likes anyone who likes her, so just be brave. She is not a morning person.”

Right then a small white dog skittered into the foyer looking frantically around and barking.

“Hush,” Rose said, and picked up the little dog. “This is Biotch, and she is very, very old. Aren’t you? Aren’t you a little old bitch?”

The tiny dog gazed around, its eyes pearlescent with cataracts. It was a poodle mixed with something else. Rose kissed its

tearstained-brown muzzle.

“Come with me,” Rose said, and led Margo into the living room, which was almost hostile in its tidiness. White carpet, white

leather couch, black metal-and-glass coffee table. Rose sat on the couch and set Biotch beside her. Instantly Biotch peed

on the couch, yellow liquid seeping out from under her. “And this is why we have to have a leather couch!” Rose said, heaving

herself up to go get some paper towels. Biotch stayed where she was, crouched and shivering.

After the pee was cleaned up, Rose brought them coffee in large pink mugs. As she handed Margo a cup, she smiled and said,

“You are so hot!”

“Thank you,” Margo said, scrambling for something to say in return. “Your breasts are amazing!”

“Do you want to feel them?” Rose asked. “Come on, don’t be shy! Look, I can balance stuff on them. The forbidden end table!”

She stood and set her coffee mug right on the top of her breast. She turned this way and that and it stayed there quite steadily.

Margo did not have to fake her astonishment. Now she did want to feel them. What property might they have that would allow

a coffee mug to rest upon them so stably?

“Are they.. .?” She did not know if it was rude to ask if they were implants.

Rose said right away, “Oh, a hundred percent.”

“When did you get them?” Margo asked.

“Like, three years ago? But I always wanted them. Like, since I was six years old, I knew I wanted implants.”

“When you were six? Did you even know what they were?”

“Oh, absolutely. It was Dolly Parton, on TV at my grandma’s house. I don’t think I knew hers were implants exactly, I just

knew she was special. Like, she was not a regular person, she was Dolly Parton.”

Margo’s mind was quietly being blown by this. It was true. You couldn’t be a regular person with breasts like that.

Rose had majored in physics, it turned out, and even done about half of her master’s before dropping out. Margo asked to use the restroom so she didn’t have to talk about her own college experience.

Alarmingly, Rose was not in the living room when she returned, and Margo stood there awkwardly for a moment before she heard

Rose and KC talking. She crept down the hallway and peered in the doorway of the room that they were in. They had a whole

little recording studio set up and were sitting in rolling chairs in front of fancy microphones on scissor arms. It looked

like a real radio station, except that the tabletops were littered with granola bar wrappers and empty water bottles and what

was maybe a vape pen and what was definitely a purple butt plug.

“Oh good, come in here, we’re all ready!” Rose said when she saw Margo.

KC did not even look up. She was stirring tea in what looked like a miniature bowl. She was so small sitting in the chair

that it was visually jarring.

“There’s yours,” Rose said, and gestured to the empty seat, which also had a tiny bowl in front of it. Margo sat and peered

into it, trying to understand what it was, a broth or tea that smelled of leather. Margo’s seat did not have a fancy microphone;

it had a more ordinary one that just sat on the desk. She noticed the headphones and put them on. The moment she did, she

could hear everything Rose and KC said with crystal clarity, like they were inside her mind.

Margo picked up her small bowl and took a tentative sip. It tasted like mushrooms and tree bark; it was truly vile. “What

is this?” she asked.

“Shroom tea,” Rose said.

KC was chuckling and did a soft impression of Margo saying, “What is this?” in a namby-pamby voice. It was loud in Margo’s

headphones.

“Oh, wow, wait, I’ve never done this before,” Margo said.

“Never would have guessed,” KC said.

“That’s so exciting!” Rose said.

“No, I’m so sorry,” Margo said. All their voices were the same volume in her ears, it was overwhelming. “I mean, I can’t drink

this.”

“Well, you have to do it,” KC said. “It’s part of the fucking podcast.”

“I thought you had listened to a bunch of episodes?” Rose said.

Margo froze. She had not listened to a single episode, though she’d written to KC that she was a big fan. “I mean, I did.

I just didn’t know it was, you know, required.”

“We do mushrooms every podcast,” Rose said gently. “That’s kind of the whole thing.”

Margo began sweating. She must have looked as terrified as she felt, because Rose softened and said, “Oh, sweetie, they’re

fun! Don’t worry! You’ll have a blast! Maybe only drink half the cup.”

Margo nodded, not even able to speak.

“We all drink the whole cup,” KC said with such quiet command that Margo knew Rose wouldn’t try to argue further.

Margo thought she might start crying. How was she going to be okay to drive home? How long would she have to stay here with

these scary people? When she finally did get home, how long until she could nurse Bodhi? She didn’t know anything about mushrooms

or how long they stayed in your system. Yet she could not imagine leaving. She picked up the little bowl, and Rose nodded

at her encouragingly. She took a sip.

“Let’s get this shit show going,” KC said, and Rose busied herself at the laptop and then started her intro to the show. While

Rose was talking, Margo pulled out her phone and frantically texted Jinx: They are making me do shrooms, no idea how long this is going to be, I am so sorry I am so freaked out. She pressed send and looked up right as Rose finished speaking and was looking expectantly at Margo.

“It’s so amazing to be here,” Margo said.

About two hours in and they were still recording. Margo had no idea how they would edit this down into an hour show. Both

KC and Rose had begun to look more and more like cartoon characters, their eyes glinting strangely. Biotch’s fur rippled like

fields of wheat. They had discussed how they each got into OnlyFans, and Margo confessed she’d not yet posted the full vageen.

“You haven’t?!” Rose gasped.

“You’ve got to make the most of that shit,” KC said. “Give that taco a real grand entrance.”

“Absolutely,” Rose said. “I wish I’d known. Back when I started, I didn’t understand that the first time I posted vageen I

should have charged, like, fifty bucks. Instead, I put it on sale, it was, like, three dollars. Do you know how sad that feels?

To be like, here is my beautiful little vageen, it’s worth three dollars?”

“Darling Vageen!” KC said, in a man’s bellowing stage voice. “Most precious Vageen!”

“That’s good to know, actually,” Margo said.

“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.

KC burped loudly into the microphone.

“How did you get into doing OnlyFans, KC?” Margo asked. She was becoming moderately less afraid of KC in part because KC was

utterly unselfconscious. She was scratching her crotch vigorously through her leggings as Margo asked this.

“Rose made me do it,” KC said.

“I didn’t make you!”

“You did, you said, ‘KC, if you’re going to waste your life doing drugs and fucking dudes, at least make money doing it.’

I was like, sign me up!”

“She doesn’t care,” Rose said, smiling. “Like, about anything. I do all her money because literally she would just have millions

of pounds of sand delivered to her parents’ house.”

“It’s free shipping! Rose. It’s free shipping on six hundred thousand pounds of sand. Like, how does that even make sense?

Just think of how hard it would be for them to get rid of it!”

After that they all puked, and then KC said she was a sea cucumber and lay down under the desk, so the microphone picked up her voice only dimly. They discussed the men who wanted to dismember them or dissolve their bodies in acid. “It does get easier to tune out,” Rose said, “but then one day a guy will comment with something simple, like, just ‘butterface’ under one of my pictures, and I’ll start sobbing.”

“Oh, I definitely want to die,” KC said in her faraway voice. “Like every day.” Why wouldn’t she put on her headphones and

sit at the mic? Why was she insisting on living in the dark, echoey shadows of the actual conversational space?

“You don’t want to actually die,” Rose said. “She’s afraid of blood; if she even sees a tiny bit of blood, she passes out.”

“That’s true. I’m very squeamish,” KC said.

“I guess my real question,” Margo said, having got caught up in her own train of thought, “is why is time only going in one

direction? Like, does anybody know why?”

“Well, I mean, if we could move at the speed of light, we could stop time altogether,” Rose said.

KC sat up. “We have to leave this room,” she said. “The laptop is fucking evil. Like, look at that. Just look at that fucking

thing.”

They all stared at the laptop. It did seem weirdly malevolent.

They wandered into the living room, which was bright with warm daylight. “Oh my gosh, KC, you were so right,” Margo said.

“It’s much better in here.”

“It really is,” Rose said. They all three collapsed on the carpet of the living room. Biotch, surprising them all, approached

Margo and curled up next to her.

“Why does she like me now?” Margo said. “She didn’t like me before, and now she likes me.” Margo stared into Biotch’s little

tearstained face. “Maybe she can read my mind,” she continued. “Oh my God, that reminds me, I have something to ask you guys!”

“What is it?” Rose asked, suddenly serious.

“Are you on TikTok?” Margo asked.

KC started laughing. “That was so anticlimactic!”

“No, I mean, I have this idea,” Margo said. She was worried she was not going to explain this right. She stroked Biotch’s tiny body. Her breasts were so swollen and nodular from needing to nurse they felt like heads of cauliflower under the skin, and she missed Bodhi so much that if she thought about him for even a second, she would begin leaking. She’d called Jinx from the bathroom at one point and arranged for him to come pick her up when they were finished. There was no way she could drive, and she’d cried because she thought he was mad at her even though he kept telling her he wasn’t. If she did all this for the sake of this idea and then managed to fuck up the pitch, she wasn’t sure she could live with herself. “I have an idea. And I know from the bottom of my soul that if you guys trust me, I can make us extremely famous. And rich. Filthy rich. But also famous.”

“Yeah, okay,” KC said, “this is a drag. Are you really being like this right now? Are you delusional, or is this, like, a

scam?”

Rose shushed her and said, “What do you mean, sweetie?”

Margo stared at the popcorn ceiling, which seemed to be moving like snowflakes. “Okay, so you know Vegeta and Goku? That is

like TikTok and OnlyFans.”

“Which one is Vegeta?” KC asked, skeptical.

“I guess TikTok,” Margo said.

“TikTok is not Vegeta,” KC said, “no way.”

“What I am saying is the fusion-ha. Fusion-ha! Because OnlyFans has no discoverability, but lots of monetization, and TikTok

has all discoverability, but no monetization. They are made for each other. They are, like, destined to interlink. And if

you use them together—it’s like a superpower. Monetization and discoverability united.”

“So you are essentially saying we should make TikToks,” KC said. “I mean, duh, I’m the one who told you to get a TikTok in

the first place.”

“No, I’m saying we should use TikTok to build our personas, and for that we need to work together. If you only have one character,

you’re naturally limited in what you can do. Mr. Beast works better because he has his friends on the channel. We need that.

We could play off each other and make subplots and prank each other, and it would give us something to do that was PG enough for other social media.”

“Now you want us to start a YouTube channel?” Rose asked.

“Well, probably, yeah,” Margo said, “but I think we should start on TikTok. Okay, look at it this way, KC: the fact that Rose

loves you balances you. Her sweetness makes your bitterness less toxic feeling.”

“Toxic!” KC said, and rolled over onto her belly.

Margo cut her off. “And Rose could easily come off as stupid, but it is obvious she isn’t because how else could she have tamed a creature as complicated as KC?”

“Rose is not stupid,” KC said.

“Yes, we know that because we have met Rose, but there is no way you can tell she was almost a physicist from her breasts

alone!”

Rose reached out and took Margo’s hand and squeezed it. “I love you,” she said. “We say yes.”

“We aren’t saying yes to shit! TikTok isn’t worth investing in. I know girls who have lost whole 100k accounts just for linking

to their OnlyFans.”

“We’ll use Linktrees,” Margo said.

“TikTok is strict, though, you can’t do nudity, you can’t do all sorts of stuff.”

“We don’t need nudity. Okay, okay,” Margo said, handing Biotch over to Rose so she could stand and demonstrate. “So you pick

the hottest sound on TikTok, something dance-y, and you see Rose doing a little dance, wearing clothes but hot, and you are

thinking, Okay, hot girl dancing, but then you notice the couch behind her, like, moving, and KC is inside the couch and is

slowly climbing out, and then the video ends when she jump scares you. Or when you jump scare her. Whatever, it ends on the

scream.”

Neither KC nor Rose said anything.

Margo was desperate. She wished she weren’t high so there was any hope she could express the magnitude of the vision that

had been growing in her for the last twenty-four hours. “Instead of turning you into a body for someone to fuck, working together

will turn us into people . We will humanize each other. If they see us doing normal things, it will make it feel more real when we do sexy things!

We will become more than dolls!”

“Sweetie, I did not know you were this smart!” Rose said.

“I just don’t think it’s worth it,” KC said. “Like some TikTok, sure, but after what happened on Instagram, I don’t like putting

all my eggs in one social media basket.”

“What happened on Instagram?” Margo asked.

“SESTA-FOSTA,” Rose said. “We both got into doing OnlyFans because of Instagram, actually, we were big into the festival scene so we had these huge accounts—”

“I had over five hundred thousand followers!” KC cried.

“And both our accounts got deleted and we had to start all over. Like six months ago, because we had linked to our OnlyFans

accounts in our bios. She doesn’t want to get burned again.”

“Fair enough,” Margo said. “That’s totally fair. But there’s no other platform where it’s as easy to go viral as TikTok. And

I think it’s worth trying. Like, what’s the worst that happens? And we can cross-post the videos on Instagram, we can put

them on YouTube, it doesn’t have to just be about TikTok. Think of it as focusing on PG content.”

“What kind of percentage are you thinking?” Rose asked.

“Percentage of people who would subscribe if we went viral?” Margo asked. “I mean, I have no idea, but even if it were one

percent, if you go viral big enough...”

“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?”

“I’m not seeing any downside to at least trying this out,” Rose said.

“I still think it’s stupid,” KC said.

“Let me write it. Give me a week, and then we can meet, and you can see if you want to film it.”

“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.”

“Oh, true that!” KC crowed.

“Okay, that kind of makes me feel better,” Rose said.

“I also have to tell you something else,” Margo suddenly found herself saying, because she saw in that moment that it couldn’t be any other way. “I have a four-month-old baby. We’re going to have to work around him, like only shooting certain days or having him in the background. My dad will be watching him, so you will have my undivided attention. I just can’t spend eight hours away, I can’t, it would kill me.”

“Your dad?” KC said.

“Yeah, but he’s cool,” Margo said.

“A four-month-old baby?” Rose asked. “Are you shitting me?”

Margo could feel the idea crumbling around her. She’d been stupid to think they’d agree to this in the first place. Maybe

she’d even told them about Bodhi to ruin her chances because she was afraid of wanting this hard, of dreaming this big.

“I’m sorry,” Margo said. “I didn’t mean to lie to you guys. I just—”

“It’s not fucking fair!” Rose said, and threw a piece of dog hair fluff she’d peeled off the carpet at Margo. “How do you

have that fucking waistline?! Four months! Four months ago you pushed a baby out of there?”

“We need to back up and talk about your dad here,” KC said.

“I’m not worried about the dad,” Rose said.

“I don’t want some old dude up in here with a baby—it’s weird.”

“My dad is Dr. Jinx,” Margo said. It was worth a shot.

“Are you joking?” KC asked. And Margo’s heart rose in her chest because she’d guessed right.

“Who is Dr. Jinx?” Rose asked.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” KC said again.

“No, he’s Dr. Jinx. So it’s not normal dad vibes. He’s picking me up, you can meet him if you want. I was about to text him

to let him know we’re done.”

“But who is he?” Rose was still lost.

“He’s from wrestling, not a wrestler, but like in that world—he’s a goddamn celebrity!” KC explained.

“He’s not a celebrity,” Margo said.

“He’s an icon! He is literally iconic,” KC said.

“Who is this person?” Rose demanded. And so they wound up watching YouTube clips of Dr. Jinx and Murder and Mayhem.

“What is your dad like?” KC asked, completely amped at the idea of meeting Dr. Jinx for real. “Like, in person?”

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. If that makes any sense.”

KC lay there, staring at the ceiling, absorbing this. “Actually,” she said, “that makes perfect sense.”

Forty-five minutes later, Jinx texted that he and Suzie and Bodhi were outside. He had brought Suzie to drive Margo’s car

home for her. The meeting that then occurred between the still-high KC and Rose, in their pajamas out in the bright midafternoon

light of the parking lot, and her dad, dressed in his blacks like he knew this very thing would happen, KC jumping up and

down and saying lines from famous promos he’d done, Rose crouched and peering in the back window at the sleeping Bodhi, Suzie

cackling at them all, magenta lipstick on her teeth—that image of them bullshitting in a parking lot would remain one of Margo’s

most precious memories. KC tapping an empty Dasani water bottle on her thigh, Rose’s absurd fluffy slippers against the black

tar asphalt, the warped shiny reflections of their bodies on Jinx’s car, a huge group of seagulls suddenly flying overhead.

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.

That night Jinx decreed Margo was not allowed to nurse for twenty-four hours, to which Margo said, “Ya think?” But they had already gone through all the frozen milk, so Bodhi had to have formula, which did not go well, and Margo felt horribly guilty. She pumped multiple times in the night and through the next morning, throwing out everything and feeling the shame like a film on her skin. But it was a thin film, the kind of shame one might be able to scrub off in the shower.

The next day she woke before all of them and opened her laptop.

She hesitated. Part of her wanted to write a message to JB. He had recently asked her about the best sandwich she’d ever had,

but she didn’t want to waste this energy. Instead, she opened her OnlyFans account, clicked edit on her account description,

and deleted everything except the description of the dick ratings. She sat there for ten minutes thinking, trying to write

a new intro paragraph. Then she wrote: “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.”

Then she exited out, opened Microsoft Word, and began writing the script.

By noon she’d written storylines for her, KC, and Rose, enough TikTok ideas that they could post daily for a week. She wrote

out ideas for tweets and IG posts for them all as well. When she was done, she printed out two copies on her ancient inkjet

printer that trembled and moaned like little Biotch, one for Jinx and one for Suzie.

“Margo,” Jinx said as he gave her his notes at dinner, “I honestly don’t know if this is a brilliant or a terrible idea.”

“I know,” Margo said. But she did not feel afraid.

“I do know one thing: you need to tell Shyanne.”

“What— Why?” Margo was brought up short. She didn’t see why anything in the scripts would make Jinx think she needed to tell

Shyanne.

“If this blows up?” Jinx said. “If you get internet famous? That would be a helluva way for a mom to find out her daughter

is doing porn.”

“It’s not really porn, though,” Margo said.

Jinx just looked at her. “Promise me you’ll tell her.”

“Okay,” Margo said, though she still had no intention of telling Shyanne.

“Not only for her sake,” Jinx said, “but for you. What you’re doing, honey, it’s not shameful. It’s not something that needs

to be secret. You should be proud of yourself. What you’re doing—I think it’s amazing.” He patted her on the shoulder, and

Margo moaned because now she knew she was going to have to tell Shyanne. She was supposed to see her next weekend to go wedding

dress shopping.

After dinner, Margo rewrote her scripts with Jinx’s and Suzie’s notes, sent them to KC and Rose with proposed shoot times,

and then she lay in bed trying to imagine how on earth she would ever tell Shyanne.