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That Saturday, I loaded Bodhi in the car and drove to Newport Beach to meet my mom at Fashion Island, the rich-people mall,

to go wedding dress shopping. My mom used to work at the Bloomingdale’s there, when I was eleven or twelve, and once when

I’d been too sick to go to school and my mom had been too scared to call out again, I’d spent the entire day at that mall,

periodically throwing up in the women’s restrooms. It was a pretty place, all outdoors. There was a koi pond and many fountains.

I hated it there.

I met my mom near Neiman Marcus. She was wearing a matching two-piece Lululemon set in beige and a flowy cashmere sweater.

She looked like an elder Kardashian, only blond and with a flat ass.

“Do you want to get some coffee or something?” I asked.

“I’m all caffeinated and ready to go!” Shyanne said. “I’m thinking we do Neiman’s first, then Nordstrom’s, then Macy’s. Work

our way down. You never want to do the most expensive last. That’s when you’re tired and weak.”

So off we went into the hushed beige morgue of Neiman Marcus.

“I’m thinking,” Shyanne said, flipping through the sale rack in evening wear, “that I may want to play off white, like a nod

to traditional bridal white, but not trying to actually wear white? I’m thinking ecru, I’m thinking peach, something that

reads more cocktail dress than wedding dress.”

“How slutty?” I asked. Really my entire childhood had been a training course in how to help my mother shop.

“It’s Vegas,” she said, “and Kenny loves it when I show off the girls. I personally want something more modest, so a happy

compromise might be showing a lot of leg but a higher neckline. I am thinking shimmer, beaded or sequined, maybe pearl detailing.

I mean, it’s Vegas.”

“Do you want me to go to the regular ladies’ section and pull things?” I asked.

“Sure thing, Noodle,” Shyanne said. “I’ll be in the dressing rooms over here. Size four! And look for something for yourself to wear too!”

“I know what size you are,” I said, and pushed off, the stroller gliding over the thick-pile carpet.

I knew that this was her wedding, the only one she would ever get to have. She wasn’t going to have a big reception with all

her friends, she wasn’t going on a honeymoon (Vegas was to be the honeymoon, two birds, one stone; Kenny was a clever man).

The least I could do was attend. I was the person she loved most in all the world. I knew that.

But I viscerally didn’t want to go.

I found a peachy wrap dress by Diane von Furstenberg and draped it over the handle of the stroller. I spaced out for a while

imagining a video I could do where I poured different breakfast cereals over my breasts, then found three or four more things

I thought would suit Shyanne and found her in a dressing room.

The dressing room was gigantic. The stroller and I fit in there with loads of room to spare. There was even a comfy leather

chair for me to sit in, though my mother had laid the clothes she’d been wearing there. I picked them up, sat down, folded

the bundle so her underwear was no longer visible, and held the bundle on my lap. Under no circumstances would my mother allow

her clothes to touch a dressing room floor, a place she believed to be unimaginably filthy even in a Neiman Marcus. “If I

had a penny for every time someone has pissed in a ladies’ dressing room” was a frequent refrain during my childhood, though

from my count she would have wound up with only five or six pennies. Still, I guessed that was enough.

She was trying on a silver sequin number that would have been at home on the red carpet, complete with a plunging back so

low it showed her actual butt crack. She was turning this way and that, examining herself in the mirror. Whenever my mother

looked at herself in the mirror, she looked flat-eyed like a parrot.

“What do you think?” she whispered because Bodhi was asleep.

“I mean, it’s gorgeous, you look like a movie star,” I said. “What is Kenny gonna be wearing?”

She hiss-sighed, understanding my point immediately. Kenny would probably be wearing something god-awful, a maroon shirt and gray suit, and in that dress, she’d look like a showgirl who accidentally wandered into a wedding.

“Fine,” she said, “what did you bring me?”

I showed her the dresses I had picked out.

“No, no, no,” she said, sorting through and hanging them on the wall hooks for noes. She paused on the Diane von Furstenberg.

“This is interesting.”

“There’s a kind of seventies glamour to it. It’s understated,” I said. I knew it didn’t have beading or sequins, but in my

opinion she didn’t need the glitter. She needed a dress that said, I am getting married on purpose, and it is not a mistake .

She took off the silver gown and tried on the Diane von Furstenberg. At first it seemed too big, but when she pulled the waist

in and tied it, the fit was perfect. She looked beautiful and powerfully herself, a version of my mother I knew and recognized

and loved. “I don’t know,” she said, turning and looking at her butt.

I knew that if I pushed too much it would turn her against the dress, so I said nothing. She turned around, sighed, pushed

out her belly and slumped her shoulders. This was something she did, examine how she would look in her worst moments. It was

always better, she believed, to wear something you couldn’t look bad in than something you could only sometimes look great

in. “All right,” she said, her tummy pushed out as full as it could go. “It’s a maybe.”

While we were at Nordstrom, my mother asked if I had gotten that job at the seafood place, a lie I had completely forgotten.

“No,” I said. We were now in lingerie looking for a nightgown she could wear on her wedding night.

“Margo! What have you been doing?! You’ve got to get your ass in gear. It’s not like you to let something fester like this.”

“It’s just so complicated,” I said, “with childcare and—”

“Make Jinx watch the baby, he’s great with babies!” She was stretching a thong like she planned to use it to rope cattle.

“Well, Bodhi won’t always take a bottle.”

“Excuses,” Shyanne said, moving on to the next tower of underwear. She was right. I thought about Jinx saying I had nothing

to be ashamed of. Why couldn’t it be true?

“I’ve been doing some work on this website, and it pays pretty well,” I said.

“Filling out surveys? Margo, believe me, I’ve done the math, you wind up working for pennies an hour.”

“No, it’s basically. ..” I was trying to think of some way of saying it without the word porn . I kept trying to pretend it wasn’t porn, except it was porn. “It’s basically like a hybrid of porn and social media.”

Shyanne grabbed my wrist. Her fingers were icy cold. “Do not talk about this here,” she hissed.

Once we were outside the store and walking to Macy’s, she said, “So you’re doing porn ? I can’t believe you, Margo. I mean, honestly.”

“It’s not really porn, though,” I said. “There’s no sex, there’s no other person involved, it’s basically pictures of me in

my underwear.”

“I’m so disappointed in you,” she said. She was walking fast, and I was struggling to keep up with Bodhi in his stroller.

I couldn’t see him because of the sun visor, but I knew he had to be on the verge of waking. We passed the koi pond where

beautiful blond children in fine fabrics were laughing and playing. It felt like we were in a dream.

“Mom,” I said. “It isn’t, like—it isn’t that bad!”

“I didn’t raise you to be a whore.” She said this so quietly I wasn’t even sure if she’d intended me to hear it.

I didn’t say anything, we just kept walking, rushing like we were divers swimming for the surface. I wasn’t sure if we were

even still going to Macy’s, I was simply following her. It turned out she was heading to an isolated area next to an escalator

by a store currently under construction. There was no bench or anything, so we stood there awkwardly.

“No man will marry you now,” she said.

I’m not sure there was a thing she could have said that would have struck me as more ridiculous while also tapping directly

into my deepest fears.

“Future employers? Forget about it! Once it’s on the internet, Margo, it’s there forever.” Shyanne was trembling, she was so upset. Her mouth was pinched tight in a way that made her look suddenly old.

I didn’t know what to say. Bodhi started fussing, so I picked him up out of his stroller. He was hungry, and I was praying

my milk wouldn’t let down during this conversation.

“You have ruined your life,” she said.

I looked up at the escalator, out at the palm trees in the parking lot, anywhere but at her face.

“You thought he ruined your life?” She pointed at Bodhi. “Not even close. You ruined it.”

It almost didn’t matter if I didn’t agree with her, the shame was like an egg cracked on my head, cold and wet and dripping.

“If you had told me you were thinking of doing this, I could have stopped you!” She was crying now, wiping away the tears

with the pads of her fingers, trying not to stab herself with her nails. “I’m so sad, Margo, and so disappointed. I don’t

even know what to say. I thought I raised you better than this.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It felt like my mouth was numb. All my skin was numb, actually. 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.” “Men love hearing their own names, always call people by their name.”

“Mama,” I said, terrified I would start crying. “The thing is I’m good at this, and I think—”

“I don’t care how good you are at it! Jesus, I can’t believe you would even say that.”

“It’s not just about sex, though,” I tried to argue, thinking even as I said it about all the guys who dropped my account

because there wasn’t enough sexual content. “It’s about building a brand and using social media and—”

“No, this is about giving people everything they need in order to decide you’re a piece of trash who doesn’t deserve shit. This is about losing the respect of every single person who would ever help your sorry ass even a little.”

I thought about Jinx and hospitals and engagement rings and men strapped to teeter-totters being eaten by starving bears.

But I had no clue how to narrativize any of that for Shyanne, how to put together all the puzzle pieces in her mind the way

I had been putting them together in mine.

“Mamamama,” Bodhi said, grabbing a fist of my hair. “Mamamamam.”

The first time he ever called me that.

“I’ll do Macy’s on my own,” Shyanne said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Mamamamammama!” Bodhi cried, delighted with himself. He shook his little fist with my hair clenched in it.

Shyanne stalked off, up the escalator and toward Macy’s. I hugged Bodhi tight to me.

“Mama,” I said.

“Ma Ma Ma Ma,” he said.

“Yes, I’m Mama,” I said. He yanked my hair. “Are you hungry?” I asked, wiping the tears off my cheeks. “Let’s find a place

to nurse.”

I found a bench and pulled out a boob, didn’t even cover up with a blanket. Just nursed for all the rich people to see.

Suzie had convinced Margo that her target demographic was nerds, and she ought to familiarize herself with their major franchises.

“I’ll put you through nerd school,” Suzie said, “it will be great!” Nerd school was mainly, it turned out, playing video games

and watching anime together, and Margo secretly thought perhaps Suzie had only wanted a friend. She didn’t object. She liked

Suzie more and more, she found.

That night after playing Minecraft with Suzie for a couple of hours and dying repeatedly by falling in lava, Margo tried to write JB. She looked over the questions he had sent. The sadness of the day with Shyanne had left in her a deep well. She thought she could use it. Maybe she could pull the dagger out of her gut and put it into his. That was what writing was, wasn’t it? She decided to answer his question about childhood pets. More and more she’d begun simply telling the truth when she answered his questions, then changing things around to match the lies she’d already told. It made her think of the old classroom arguments between Mark and Derek, about how characters weren’t real people.

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.

JB,

My mom was pretty anti-pet growing up, but we did wind up adopting a cat when I was eight or nine. We don’t know where she

came from, and she only had three legs. She was beautiful, a Siamese mixed with something else. She had those bluebell-colored

eyes, and she was white with tiger stripes. We didn’t know how she lost her leg. It was one of her back ones, cut off at the

knee. We figured it must have been done surgically or else how would she have survived, so someone at one point had been willing

to shell out however many thousands of dollars for this cat. But she wasn’t wearing a collar and there were no lost cat signs.

She kept hanging out on our doorstep and meowing to come in, so eventually my mom just held the door open and Lost-y (we eventually

named her Lost-y) sauntered in like she already knew the layout.

And she was the most superior cat. She would use one paw to hold down my head while she aggressively licked my hairline, and

if I moved at all she would bop me with her paw to keep me in line. She would eat any and all human food. I once saw her eat

a whole piece of lettuce, just wolf it right down.

Then one day when I was thirteen, she didn’t come home. I hung signs everywhere. I went out on my bike calling for her. I couldn’t stand not knowing what had happened to her. Had she been hit by a car? Was she living with another family? Had a coyote gotten her?

I just hope she knew how much we loved her. I hope whatever happened that she was able to face it because she knew these two

weird monkeys that lived in a creepy old apartment building from the ’70s loved her.

Love,

??

She read it over and added some stuff about her imaginary dad and imaginary brother, Timmy, and then took out the last sentence

entirely. Presumably her fake family lived in a real house, and the line just didn’t work as well if she changed it to “four

weird monkeys who lived in a respectable, middle-class home.” The email didn’t seem as deep or special as the others, and

she worried JB wouldn’t like it. She had not managed it, the transfer of the dagger from her gut to his.

She hovered over the last paragraph and then started typing.

I just hope she knew how much we loved her. It bothers me that we never got her a collar, that we never made the effort to claim her, to say, “This cat is ours, beloved

by us, call us if you find her, contact us if she dies in your yard!” In Lady and the Tramp there is this moment where Tramp finally gets a collar, and it’s a symbol of being loved. If you get taken to the pound,

someone is gonna come get you. The dog catcher is different with a dog wearing a collar. 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.

Sincerely,

Jelly Bean

She was not entirely satisfied, though she knew it was closer, and she was tired. She thought for a moment, trying to decide how she should spend her next question of him. She added: PS: Please write me a portrait of your mom. Then she pressed send and went to bed.

Here is the portrait JB wrote of his mother and sent to her the next morning:

Jelly Ghost,

Both my parents were born in Korea, but they didn’t meet there, they met here. My mom is super loud, very pretty, and she’s

always talking to strangers. She builds—I’m not sure how to say this—inappropriately close relationships with clerks? It would

embarrass me so much as a kid, I don’t know why. She was wild about movies, wanted to see every single thing that came out.

She was a real regular at Blockbuster. The guys that worked at Blockbuster, they were mainly like nineteen-year-old white

boys with spiked hair, I don’t know, not a natural pairing for a middle-aged Korean woman, but boy, did they love her. She

would bring cupcakes when it was one of their birthdays. They talked movies endlessly. I got so mad because she invited one

of them, Philip, to my thirteenth birthday party, and I kept trying to explain to her that it was weird, but she just couldn’t

understand. I remember he got me a magic eight ball. I still can’t believe he brought a gift.

She’s obsessive about cleaning the house, like no molecule of dust has ever settled in that house, I’m surprised she hasn’t

plastic-wrapped my dad. They love each other. I mean, I think it might be more accurate to say he worships her, even though

a lot of the time he plays at being aggravated. My mom has a lot of Lucille Ball energy and she’s constantly getting into

weird situations, like she accidentally knocked over this Hell’s Angel’s bike and it became a whole thing and my dad had to

pay hundreds of dollars.

I have a younger brother and my mom dotes on both of us, spoiled us rotten, but not in a normal way. She was always playing video games with us and could beat all my friends. She’s never worked a job because my dad made good money, but randomly in her fifties started working as an aide at our local high school because she “wanted something to do.” These kids love her, like they tell her all their crushes, and she helps them resolve fights they have with their parents, and she’s always coming home talking their slang.

I’m definitely closer to my mom than my dad. It’s just a more intimate thing, my relationship with her. My mom demands to

have an intimate relationship with everyone, you can’t get away from her fast enough, three minutes in and she’s trying to

advise you on your bowel movements. I love her. She was a great mom.

—JB

Margo found this description of his mother so charming she read it four times. It was not what she’d been expecting. Perhaps

because he had so much money and was spending it so recklessly, Margo had envisioned JB as some bored rich kid. And he might

still be that, but certainly this portrait of his mom made her like him a whole lot more.

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. The resulting image could appear either way depending on which

way you turned it, which details you showed.

But that happened in real life too. So much so that sometimes it made her dizzy. 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.

And what about JB? Who was this guy, and how would she ever be able to tell from the carefully selected fragments he gave

her?