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After the ordeal of the service, the dinner at Kenny’s house was almost a breeze. Kenny’s living room was exactly as Margo

had imagined it. There was, of course, a navy corduroy recliner. The walls were painted teal and had the texture of psoriasis.

There was a weirdly shiny silver shag rug, a painting of a battleship, and a small wooden sign that said Pray Hardest When

It’s Hardest to Pray in white script.

Shyanne had made a tuna casserole with raisins in it, a dish Margo remembered from her childhood whenever Jinx was in town.

Kenny was clearly still on a manic high and kept talking about Annie. Annie was the name of the anemic, breathy lead singer.

“I’m telling you, the Lord has special plans for that one. She’s also a very talented drawer,” he said.

Bodhi was asleep. When they got home from the service, Kenny and Shyanne had taken Margo down to the rec room and shown her

a beautiful white crib they’d bought and set up with blankets and stuffed animals, even a little mobile. They’d bought a video

baby monitor and a changing table pad. Margo almost cried; it was so sweet. Kenny grabbed her by both shoulders and said,

“We want you and Bodhi to always, always feel welcome in this house.”

She was touched and it made her feel guilty. If they found out how she made a living, she knew it would all be instantly revoked.

She’d have felt better about lying to them if they weren’t being quite so nice. Still, Margo had gotten used to having Jinx

around, and Shyanne and Kenny, despite their absolute sweetness and generosity, never reached out to help with Bodhi. It simply

wasn’t in their nature. They would just watch while Margo struggled, looking slightly frustrated that they were all being

interrupted by a baby. Margo had finally gotten him down, and by dinner, he was dozing in his new crib, where she could see

him on the video monitor.

“What does Annie draw?” Margo asked, blowing on her bite of tuna casserole.

“Oh, all sorts of things,” Kenny said, “dragons and horses, mostly.”

For whatever reason this made Margo think of Suzie masturbating to SpongeBob . She wondered what Annie masturbated to (she assumed dragons and horses, mostly).

“And Pastor Jim! Was he Holy Ghost filled tonight or what?!”

“He sure was,” Shyanne said. “I loved all that stuff about Joseph.”

Margo tried all night to be nice and complimented Kenny on everything. At one point she even commented on what a clean refrigerator

he had.

After dinner, they decided to open one present. Margo panicked, realizing she had not gotten anything for Kenny, only something

for her mother. Kenny waved this off. “I am rich in all the things that count,” he said, patting Shyanne’s white-jean-clad

thigh.

They had Margo open hers first. It was from both of them: three sets of pajamas for Bodhi. One made his feet into tiny lion

heads. “These are great!” Margo cried.

Then Shyanne had Kenny open one from her. It was a set of seven different novelty hot sauces. It turned out Kenny was into

spicy stuff, which Margo would never have predicted. Shyanne and Kenny had bonded over their love of the show Hot Ones .

And then Margo had Shyanne open the necklace she’d gotten her, with the tiny ace of spades charm. She’d never bought her mother

something so nice. It was solid fourteen karats. She said that.

“It’s solid fourteen karats.”

Kenny said, “Why is there an ace of spades?”

“Because it’s the highest card in the deck,” Margo said.

“I love it,” Shyanne said. “Oh, baby, I love it.”

She tried to have Kenny put it on her, but his fingers were too thick to work the tiny clasp, so Margo did it.

“It’s perfect,” Shyanne kept saying, and Margo could see that Kenny was getting more and more put out. She wasn’t sure if it was because of the association with gambling or anxiety that he hadn’t gotten Shyanne anything that would make her say that. Margo tried to mentally warn Shyanne to stop. Shyanne just kept going. “Where did you even find this?”

“Yeah,” Kenny said. “How did you know your mom would like something like that? Does she, I mean, does she have a love of playing

cards?”

“Sure,” Margo said brightly. She had known that Shyanne probably wouldn’t be honest with Kenny about her poker addiction,

and she realized she’d not really thought it all the way through when she chose the gift. “I also just think she’s lucky.

We would always joke about that, if there was a school raffle or something, Shyanne would always win. She’s Lady Luck herself.”

Margo worried this was too pagan. Kenny only smiled, tousled Shyanne’s hair, and said, “I like that. Lady Luck!”

“Thank you,” Shyanne mouthed to Margo when Kenny went into the kitchen to fix himself another drink. He was drinking Jack

and Coke of all things. Margo winked back and smiled, but she was already so sad her blood had turned to black water, and

she was counting down the minutes until it would be appropriate to say good night and head downstairs.

“Merry Christmas,” she whispered to Bodhi’s small sleeping body when she finally made it down. Beside his crib lay a narrow

twin air mattress covered by a gaping too-large fitted sheet, and as Margo eased her weight down onto it, the plastic made

an elephantine farting noise. She stared at the ceiling of Kenny’s rec room, thinking about Mark of all people. Had he and

his wife pretended to be Santa, eaten the cookies, drunk all the milk, filled up the stockings? That made Margo wonder: What

did Mark’s wife think about him filing for full custody? Was there any chance he was seeking custody in earnest? She tried

to imagine it: Mark watching his real children open their gifts in the morning, Bodhi hovering like a ghost in the corners

of his vision. But if he did long for Bodhi, did genuinely want to know him, why not just call her on the phone?

It simply had to be an attempt to hurt her. To make her waste money, to scare her.

And it did scare her. Ever since she had uttered the words, they haunted her, floating through her mind in odd moments: an unfit mother . Margo did not actually worry she was a bad mother; like, if Bodhi could magically be consulted, she believed he would give

her a good report, except for maybe the night she was on mushrooms.

It was the word unfit that scared her, a mother who didn’t fit. A mother who wasn’t the right kind of mother like all the other mothers. A mother

without a ring, who was too young, who let men look at her body for money. She could almost hear Pastor Jim: “That’s right,

she would be stoned! Put to death! Or, at the very least, cast out!” Even her own mother had called her a whore. And the only

reason she was allowed beneath Kenny’s roof was because she was lying to them.

She didn’t think she was a bad person, but did bad people ever know that they were bad? Mark didn’t seem to, even though he

gave lip service to the idea. She thought of Becca saying, “Since when do you care about being a good person? I mean, you

were fucking somebody’s husband.” What if, inside, Margo was secretly rotten? What if the reason doing the OnlyFans didn’t

feel wrong to her wasn’t because it wasn’t actually wrong, but because she was so vile she could no longer detect all that

was wrong with it?

They began posting the TikToks on December 26.

“I shit you not,” KC’s voice can be heard, “there is a girl on our balcony.”

The camera blurs as it attempts to focus through the glass. On the balcony is a sopping wet Margo in a futuristic-looking

silver bikini. The light is behind her. She is mostly a silhouette.

“What do we do?” Rose says.

“How did she get out there? Like, from— Did she climb up?”

“We should let her in.”

“Are you crazy?”

Right then Margo slams both her palms on the glass, startling them. Biotch barks at her through the glass psychotically.

“Call 911,” KC says.

“She’s just a girl,” Rose says. “It’s not like she’s armed, she’s practically naked. This is ridiculous.”

Rose goes over and yanks open the sliding glass door. Margo does not move. She looks curiously at Rose.

“Hey,” Rose says gently, “are you okay? How did you get out here?”

KC comes closer with the camera, and you can finally see Margo’s face as the expressions ripple across it: confusion, delight,

fear. Finally, she says, “You have big, big tatas,” laughs, and then barfs silver paint all over Rose.

Margo, still in her bikini, is in a bubble bath, and Rose is trying to wash the silver paint off her face in the bathroom

sink. (That had been a real problem they’d not anticipated. The silver acrylic paint that Margo barfed through a tube they

taped to the side of her face away from the camera was not as easy to wash out as the acrylic paint they remembered from childhood,

perhaps because it was house paint, and they were all idiots.) KC is interviewing Margo.

“Where did you come from?”

Margo shrugs and continues playing with the bubbles in the tub, giving herself a pointy, conical bubble beard. Rose is cursing

as she tries to wash the silver out of her hair. “What even is this? Is this puke? What did she eat?”

“Look,” Margo says, and she pulls out the plug from the bathtub, laughing, delighted by the sound the drain makes as it begins

to suck out the water.

“No, you want to leave that in,” KC is saying when Margo puts the entire plastic bath plug into her mouth and starts to chew.

Wrapped in a towel, Margo is sitting at the breakfast bar.

“Ghost hungry,” she says.

“I know,” KC says. “I’m making you eggs.”

“Ghost hungry,” Margo repeats, picks up a pen, and puts it in her mouth.

“No!” KC says.

But Margo is already chewing the pen into pieces. (Margo had put about five uncooked rigatoni in her mouth and that is what she is crunching, but the noise was compellingly plastic-like.) Finally, she swallows. Then she says hopefully, “Tinfoil?”

Margo is passed out on the couch, piles of crumpled tinfoil around her. KC and Rose are out of frame, talking to the camera.

“This is not normal. I don’t know what the fuck is going on with this girl. We can’t get her to leave.”

“We should take her to a hospital, is what we should do,” Rose says.

“You were literally the one against calling 911.”

“Where do you think she came from?”

“You’re asking me if I think she’s an alien?”

“I mean, kind of. What else could she really be?”

Margo’s eyes slide open in a deeply creepy way, and she opens her mouth and a saxophone solo comes out.

Twitter poll:

Should we keep the smoking-hot alien we found on our balcony: yes or no?

4,756 people voted yes.

Suzie was excited about this until Margo pointed out that most of Rose’s and KC’s posts got three or four thousand likes.

“I don’t know, man,” KC said.

She and Rose were over for dinner at Jinx’s behest. He was making everyone oyakodon. He was shocked they’d never had it.

“See, guys, it’s not as easy to go viral on TikTok as you thought. I think it was just too weird,” KC continued. “We should

be doing the trends everyone else is doing.”

They had begun posting four days ago, and the vomiting silver paint hadn’t gone viral, but instead had been almost instantly flagged and taken down. None of the videos had gone viral.

“There is no such thing as too weird,” Jinx said. “People just don’t get it yet, what it is. It’s worth making another week.

I don’t think you can make a thing too weird for people to fall in love with.”

They all felt a little sorry for him. It was part of his old-man-ness, the way he was out of touch and couldn’t see that what

they’d made was childish and stupid and no one would fall in love with it. But he was at least right about the oyakodon being

delicious; Margo would have eaten that every day for the rest of her life, no problem. KC and Rose wound up drinking too much

wine and spent the night on the couch, and so the next morning had the festive air of a debauched slumber party. Jinx put

on an Asuka match and made everyone oatmeal with nuts and golden raisins stirred into it.

So they didn’t find out for several hours that they had gone viral. It was right when KC and Rose were about to leave that

Suzie opened TikTok and saw it. It was a clip none of them had really liked where Margo, in Amelia Bedelia–like fashion, plants

a light bulb in a pot and covers it with dirt, and KC and Rose keep telling her it’s not going to work. Margo just keeps looking

intently at the dirt, and suddenly a tiny dancing man appears and the camera zooms in on him and it’s Bruno Mars. It had taken

Margo forever to figure out how to paste in that GIF of Bruno Mars.

“Okay, okay,” Suzie was saying, “this is what I would call baby viral, but you have two hundred fifty thousand views.”

“Why did that one get so many views, though?” Margo asked.

“No, because it’s like,” Suzie began, “TikTok shows it to three hundred people, and then if engagement is high enough, they

show it to a thousand people, and so on. So people didn’t ever see the other clips, they only saw this one because that first

group of three hundred people really liked it.”

“Okay,” Rose said, “that makes sense.”

KC was looking at her phone. “I have ten new fans!”

“Ooh, let me log in and check mine,” Rose said. Rose had five new fans. They checked Margo’s and she had three. It was not by any means a rousing success. But it was enough to convince them to keep going.

KC’s voice: “She’s claiming the vacuum is sentient.”

“Rigoberto,” Margo says, nodding and pointing at the Roomba.

“That’s a Roomba,” Rose says gently.

“No,” Margo says. “Friend.”

“He’s your friend?” Rose asks.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” KC says.

On New Year’s Day, Margo was shopping at Target, which had become in the months since Bodhi’s birth a sort of spiritual home,

when Jinx’s number flashed on her phone.

She picked up, but the voice was Suzie’s: “Okay, do you know KikiPilot?”

“Ummm, no?”

“She’s a YouTuber, she got famous streaming Star Wars: Squadrons .”

“Okay,” Margo said, gently swaying from side to side to keep Bodhi asleep.

“Anyway, she picked us up! She did a whole reaction video to the TikTok series from episode one—she watched them all!”

“That’s so cool!” Margo said.

“You are not getting it!” Suzie grunted in displeasure, and there were muffled sounds like fabric was being rubbed over the

phone and then it was Jinx: “The video already has a million views, and it was only posted two hours ago.”

“Holy fucking God,” Margo said.

“Come home right now and watch it.”

It turned out that Kiki was insanely beautiful and hot. Margo felt that plastic surgeons should study Kiki, use calipers to

measure her face so they could make other people look more like her.

“Honey,” Suzie said, “plastic surgeons are the ones who made Kiki look like that in the first place.”

The YouTube video reacting to Hungry Ghost was eight minutes long. In the intro, Kiki said she saw the Bruno Mars clip on

TikTok and then watched the whole series. Kiki played through each clip of the series, making commentary throughout. “You

see people do skits on TikTok, and I’ve even seen recurrent themes or characters, but I’ve never seen anything exactly like

this. I want to know what these girls are gonna do next.”

By the time they had finished watching it, the video had three million views. As Suzie clicked around to show them more Kiki

videos, Margo saw that almost every single one had between twelve and fifteen million views. She’d been nursing Bodhi, and

he suddenly detached and used her sweater to pull himself more upright and belched like an old man.

“How much money do YouTubers make?” Margo asked. “Like per view?”

“It depends, but between three thousand and five thousand per million views. So on a video like this one, about sixty grand.”

“She’s making sixty k on an eight-minute video?” Margo could not process this information.

“This is what she used to look like,” Suzie said, and hit play on one of Kiki’s earliest videos.

Margo was fascinated. It was so difficult to pinpoint what was different, and yet Kiki looked like an entirely other person.

A pretty but normal person. Her eyes were slightly asymmetric and her lips were thinner. Was her chin different somehow? Her

hair was certainly much thinner back then. 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.

KC and Rose came in, excited and chattering. Jinx and Suzie had called them right after Margo and told them to come over to

celebrate. Jinx put on some music and made red beans and rice and corn bread. They let Bodhi have a tiny pile of the softest

corn bread crumbs, and he mashed them around with his little hands and then sucked them off his fingers in ecstasy.

All night, Suzie tracked their TikTok accounts and the girls their OnlyFans. By ten p.m., all of their TikToks had over a million views. Every single one. The real question was whether this would translate to new fans and at what rate. Links to their individual OnlyFans accounts were in a Linktree on the main HungryGhost TikTok account. It was the big unknown, how many people would even click to follow, let alone click to their OnlyFans and subscribe. So far, KC had more than a hundred new fans, Rose had almost eighty, and Margo stopped telling everyone because she felt so embarrassed. But before she went to bed, Jinx grabbed her in the hallway. “Tell me. You don’t have to tell them, just tell me.”

Bodhi was already asleep in his crib. Margo had tried to stay up with everyone else, but she was desperate to be alone.

“How many?” Jinx whispered.

“Um, almost four hundred?”

He squeezed her shoulders with his giant hands and folded her into a hug.

“You’re gonna be so famous,” he said into her hair.

“No, I’m not,” she said, out of reflex.

“Darling, I’m afraid that you are very wrong.”

JB messaged me that night. Not about the KikiPilot stuff; he wasn’t aware of any of that.

JB: Jelly Ghost, I think I’m getting confused. About what’s real and what’s not. I think I need to take a break.

I wrote back immediately: Confused about what?

JB: All this started out as a kind of game, like an experiment, but now it’s getting confusing. I may need to take a step back.

I just wanted to let you know so you would understand you didn’t do anything wrong.

I knew on some level that he was saying he was developing real feelings for me, and I knew that should have worried me. Instead, it felt more like an exciting upping of the ante. Maybe it was the leftover excitement from the KikiPilot video, but I didn’t want him to take a step back. I wanted to keep going, not because I knew what we were doing or where it was going. It was like I had become addicted to it. There was a purity to our messaging that I found intoxicating. We’d been working our way through grade school, trying to remember everything we could about each year, our teachers and classmates, our lunch boxes and backpacks, the books we read, 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?

I wrote: The thing is, writing these messages with you has become the most interesting thing I get to do.

JB: Yes, that’s the same problem I’m having.

HungryGhost: So why is that a problem again?

JB: Aside from the staggering financial impact, I just feel weird. I don’t even know your name.

“Staggering financial impact” was worrying. He had always acted like the money was nothing. I wrote: I mean, I have one. Does it really matter what it is?

JB: It doesn’t matter what it is, only that I don’t know it? Maybe?

I lay in bed, listening to Bodhi’s sleeping breath in the dark. Did I really believe JB would use my name to hunt me down

and kill me? It was hard to imagine, given everything I knew about him now, and yet he could be lying to me the same way I’d

been lying to him, or twisting things so they didn’t sound as bad. Don’t be an idiot, I thought. Don’t be stupid.

My name is Suzie , I wrote, and the moment I pressed send I knew I had made a huge mistake. I had lied to JB plenty, and honestly, I had never felt that bad about it. But this time I felt like I’d played the wrong chord on a piano, the shame was that immediate and ringing. He’d been asking for something real from me, and I hadn’t even lied well . If I thought a first name was enough for him to hunt and kill someone, which I obviously did not, I had just given him my

roommate’s name .

Suzie is a beautiful name , he wrote.

I was going to throw up. Don’t pay me anymore , I wrote on impulse.

JB: What?

HungryGhost: It’s too much money.

It really was an absurd amount of money. He’d paid me almost four grand in the last month. It also felt like he was saying

he felt stupid for valuing what we were doing together, and I didn’t want him to feel stupid. I valued it too. And I could

have shown him that by telling him my real name, and I hadn’t. This was another way I could show him.

He didn’t write back right away, and I didn’t know what was happening.

HungryGhost: JB?

JB: I’m embarrassed. Not paying, or at least not paying so much, would be a huge relief. I was kind of digging myself into a

hole. But I also loved sending you the money! Like sending you a tip and watching it go through was this thrill, and I liked

feeling like a rich guy, but I knew it was totally out of control.

You idiot , I wrote, though I was grinning.

JB: See, before you didn’t know I was an idiot!

HungryGhost: I like it better that you’re an idiot.

JB: Thank you, Suzie.

And I tried not to feel sick hearing him call me that. Because I knew there was no way I could ever tell JB the whole truth.

If I told him I was a college dropout with a baby and no real career prospects, all this would evaporate. This was the kind

of spell that worked only at a distance. All I could do was try to enjoy it while it lasted.