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Ward called me at ten p.m.

“Why are you working this late?” I said.

“Can’t get you off my mind,” Ward said.

I laughed like a sheep bleating.

“No, really,” he said. “I just got an email from Mark’s attorney, wanted to let you know so you could sleep on it and I could

get your take in the morning. I don’t know if this was a direct result of the mediation session or us asking for the depo,

but they’re asking for a 730 eval.”

“A what now?”

“You hire a shrink to do a complete psych eval. They interview you, they interview people in your life, they observe you and

Bodhi together.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “You think he’s retaliating because he doesn’t want to do the deposition? Like, giving me a taste

of my own medicine?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Ward said. “They also stipulated that if the results of the 730 are good and the evaluator thinks you’re

a good mother, they’ll let you keep full legal and physical custody with only weekly visitation.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that could be good!”

“It could be. They did stipulate that you would have to pay for the 730, which—fifty-fifty would be more standard. It’s a

dick move.”

“How much?”

“Somewhere between five and ten k,” Ward said. I could hear the dim, sparkling sound of ice in a glass. I wondered if he was

still in his brightly lit sterile office or if he was at home in a dark living room, maybe with the TV on but muted.

“That’s cheaper than a trial,” I said, though I did wonder how people who were not selling nudes on the internet paid for

this kind of thing. Or maybe they couldn’t. Maybe people just... lost their kids.

“It definitely is. And you may have wound up having to do one in a trial anyway. It’s just— Margo, they will get into your business. It will be invasive. I don’t know if you’re ready for that.”

“Invasive how?”

“They’re gonna want you to take the MMPI-2, which is a personality test, over five hundred questions. They will interview

you, interview Jinx, ask all sorts of questions. They’ll want to come to your house, observe you and Bodhi together.”

“Well, none of that sounds like a problem,” I said.

“No skeletons in your closet?” he asked. “It’s not going to be a problem if an evaluator comes out there? I mean, I’ve never

seen your house. I’m just saying, you might want to have maids out or something.”

“Oh,” I said. “No, my dad is a clean freak, our house is immaculate. It’s all good. And I’m not scared of the psych test.

I could be totally deluded, but I think I’m relatively normal.”

“All right,” Ward said. “Well, you sleep on it.”

I told him I would, even though I was elated. I had gotten the Caillou theme song stuck in my head earlier, and I hated that song, but now I hummed it buttery and smooth as I washed my face, flossed,

and brushed; checked on Bodhi in his crib and collapsed into bed. I’m just a kid who’s four, each day I grow some more! I was going to fucking ace a psych eval.

Reader, I could not tell in the slightest if I aced that psych eval or flunked it entirely. It was so weird I couldn’t believe

it was a real test.

The psych eval was my first meeting with the 730 shrink Mark had chosen. The court had given us a list of ten. Ward had me

eliminate five—I crossed off most of the men—and then Mark and Larry the Lawyer got to choose the final person. Her name was

Clare Sharp.

Dr. Clare Sharp was brunette, a little bit fat, pretty and confident. She wore an electric-blue blazer over a black T-shirt and pearl earrings. I liked her immediately. We met in her office, she explained the test, then left me alone to take it, wandering in every now and then to see if I needed anything. Her office was small and a little shabby, but chic in a Pinterest way. She had one of those weird wool woven-art things on the wall and kilim pillows.

The first question on the psych eval was: I like mechanics magazines. T/F.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to answer; I was mystified as to what this question could be trying to ascertain. Was it

some kind of decoy? The next one: I have a good appetite. T/F. Again, very clear I would be answering true, but as to the purpose of the question, I had no clue.

Some of the questions were obvious. Number 24 was: Evil spirits possess me at times. T/F. Hard to imagine who would be far gone enough to circle T on that one.

Other questions were harder to know how to answer. Someone has it in for me. T/F. I’d literally just been doxxed by my best friend; in a certain way, it would seem crazier to put F, but I put T, assuming this was a question designed to root out paranoia regardless of how warranted it might be. Same with: I prefer to pass by school friends, or people I know but have not seen for a long time, unless they speak to me first. Same with: I have never been in trouble because of my sexual behavior.

Much of the time I feel as if I have done something wrong or evil.

My family does not like the work I have chosen.

I believe that women ought to have as much sexual freedom as men.

Anyone who is able and willing to work hard has a good chance of succeeding.

I cry easily.

I have sometimes felt that difficulties were piling up so high that I could not overcome them.

Ward had given me only one piece of advice about this test, and it was to tell the truth. “Don’t just pick the non-crazy answers. Everybody is a little crazy, and they have stuff in there to see if you’re lying.” But it was scary to tell the truth. I did cry easily! I decided that I didn’t feel I had done something wrong or evil much of the time . Really, I had felt that way only in Kenny’s church or when I was in a fight with Shyanne. The rest of the time I hardly

felt evil at all.

I finished the test and crushed the tiny room-temp bottle of Poland Spring water Dr. Sharp had given me. It was a marvel they

could tell who was crazy at all. How would Kenny answer the questions on this test? He would obviously choose F for I believe that women ought to have as much sexual freedom as men.

But there were so many I’d answered false that I knew he would answer true:

I believe in life hereafter.

I have never indulged in unusual sex practices.

I daydream very little.

I would like to belong to several clubs.

I have been inspired to a program of life based on duty which I have since carefully followed.

It was hard not to feel like the test was made for him, designed with Kenneth himself as the model of mental health. And if

Kenny was what sane was, maybe I wasn’t. I mean, he was the one who believed in invisible beings controlling every aspect

of our lives. I kept telling myself it couldn’t be. Dr. Sharp had multiple degrees. She wouldn’t use a test where the “right”

answer was that women shouldn’t have as much sexual freedom as men, would she?

When she came back in, Dr. Sharp seemed just as normal and cool as before. “So, when do you come in for your interview? Do

we have that next Tuesday?”

I nodded.

“And thank you for this contact sheet and this whole little bundle,” she said, holding up the file I’d given her. It made

me think of the kids complaining in senior English class about the big paper we had to write for our final project with a

cover page and table of contents, whining about how we’d never need to do this in real life. Guess what, Seth! You’ve got to write a report to keep your fucking kid!

The next day, I tried to put the psych eval out of my mind. We had TikToks to film. Rose and KC had both gone bananas for

the new scripts. Suzie had read them too. 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. Ghost makes Rose and KC eat Popsicles she has made by freezing blue

toothpaste in molds. She feeds them apple slices she’s rubbed with jalape?os.

I had gotten these ideas remembering Tessa and how she’d fed the salad boy potting soil and shaving cream. He’d spent all

night throwing up in the bathroom, and everyone had laughed. Looking back, it seemed like Tessa had actually poisoned him.

Couldn’t he have gone to the police? There was an undercurrent of real evil there, and it intrigued me. Evil witches in forests

who made houses out of candy to lure children. Poisoned enchanted apples. It was very old, our sense that food, the thing

we needed most in order to stay alive, could be used against us. I wanted to use that for Ghost, to make her a truly unforgettable

heel. I even wrote Snoop Dork into the script. Ghost feeds him a burrito filled with crushed-up Viagra, and he winds up with

a boner for thirty-six hours. I argued we should have him really do it so he could go to the ER and we’d film that, but KC

vetoed it.

I’d wondered about the phrase “Hungry Ghost” when Mark first wrote that poem. What did he mean by it? How could ghosts be hungry? But it made perfect sense to me now: The longing for the food you could no longer eat. The memory of having a body. People were constantly giving ghosts food, offerings of persimmons and oranges, pan de muerto on the Day of the Dead; even Halloween was about nothing so much as candy. What the dead wanted, above all else, was to eat, to cram their mouths full, to feel the calories flood their bloodstream, to be part of it again: life. Bloody, squirming, pulsing, hungry life.

We shot all day and had an early dinner/late lunch. Rose and I picked up Yoshinoya and ate it on the balcony, while Suzie,

KC, and Snoop Dork went across the street to Chipotle. Jinx had said he didn’t feel well enough to come, so I had Bodhi on

my lap, which made eating a challenge. He kept trying to plunge his little hands into my rice bowl.

“Can I ask you something?” Rose said.

“Of course.”

“Why didn’t you— I mean, why did you keep him? When you found out you were pregnant.”

I thought about this, slowly chewing the tiny perfect bodies of the rice. “I mean,” I said, “I think I was just stupid.”

Rose laughed. “I thought maybe you were religious or something.”

“No,” I said. “Though, I mean, at the time I did feel morally conflicted. But there’s nothing like having a baby to make you

solidly pro-choice!”

“Why, though? I mean, it’s so clear you love Bodhi, and you’re a great mom.”

“No, no,” I said. “It’s not about that. I’d do it all again. But, like, I didn’t really know you could still die having a

baby, or, you know, tear. Kind of inevitably. Down there. And then for the rest of your life when you sneeze, you pee a little.

Some women tear way worse and they wind up not able to control their poop all the time. It changes your body in irreversible

ways. One of my tits is now a full half cup size bigger than the other.”

“Well, yeah,” Rose said. “I mean, of course it’s going to change your body.”

“You can’t tell me that if it was men and a medical decision would result in their penis splitting open and them not being

able to hold their pee for the rest of their life, they wouldn’t think that should be their own decision.”

Rose snorted as she was drinking her Diet Coke. “Yeah, that’s pretty hard to imagine.”

“They would be like, ‘Look, this is my penis we’re talking about here!’”

Bodhi was getting obsessed with touching my food, so I stood and bounced him.

“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.”

“Yeah,” Rose said a little wistfully. “So you don’t think you’d be doing this if you hadn’t had a baby?”

“OnlyFans? I mean, it wasn’t plan A! But it doesn’t seem like it was your plan A either, right? I mean, you were doing physics.”

“True,” Rose said.

“Do you ever think about going back?” I asked.

“Not really,” Rose said.

“Why did you leave grad school again?” I always figured she’d run out of money.

Rose smiled in a funny way. “Well, I started my OnlyFans, like, my second year? To make money. Which was kind of perfect because

I could make my own hours. I mentioned it to another girl in the program, and she told everybody, and it just became a big,

big thing for some reason. And they asked me to leave the program.”

“They what ? How could they legally do that?!”

“Well, they didn’t, it wasn’t like they kicked me out. I tried going to my adviser to figure out what to do because it was

kind of getting out of hand—there was this one guy in particular who took offense for some reason and wrote an email outing

me to the entire department, asking if these were the kind of values the department held, like ‘this is supposed to be a hallowed

space for science’ and blah blah blah. And my adviser was basically like, ‘I don’t know what you should do. Maybe leave?’

So I left.”

“Oh, Rose. That makes me so mad! Every day, I’m like, The world is complex and wondrous, everything is so nuanced, and then I turn on the computer, and it’s like, ‘Look at my dick, look at my dick, dick, dick, dick, dick!’”

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. And they all said the same thing, they all opened their hungry

little penis mouths to ask for more. More vagina, more sexiness, “talk to me,” “show me,” “cum for me.” Their need was colossal,

it did not seem possible it could be satisfied, least of all by pictures of my weird little vagina. And yet it was so. They

loved that silly Rigoberto video. I had plans to make another one where I fucked myself with a Dyson, though really this was

just an excuse to buy a Dyson. It made me both hate my fans and love them. I needed them desperately, and yet I wished they’d

all go away, even only for a day, so I could breathe and think and be a person.

“No, I totally know what you mean,” Rose said. “The thing about horny men is that, yes, they are annoying. It’s easy to hate

them. But at the end of the day, horny men are people. And they are in need, and they are in pain, or they’re fixated on something,

and they deserve as much kindness as we can stand to offer them. That’s kind of my take.”

“You’re a saint,” I said. But it broke my heart in a way. To think of all those dicks belonging to real people. To think of

sweet Rose, kicked out of grad school, trying to be kind to them.

Right then KC and Suzie got back, knocked on the sliding glass door to get our attention, then smooshed their open mouths

on it and blew, puffing up their cheeks.

We had one more TikTok to film, an eating contest between me and Rigoberto. The bit was that we’d show Rose filling two paper

plates with shaving cream (switching mine out for Cool Whip off camera), then Rigoberto and I would have a contest of who

could eat it faster. I genuinely had no idea how that part would go. I assumed Rigoberto would dust me, but I was going to

give it my all. Rose and I reluctantly left our perch on the balcony, the dusk beginning to gather around us, and went inside.

I changed into a red bikini and assumed my position on the tarp.

Late Monday night I got a message from JB.

I’ve been thinking, JB wrote. When you fall in love with a book, is it the character or the author you’re falling in love with?

HungryGhost: I mean, I guess both?

JB: And only one of them is real.

True, I admitted.

JB: And the fake one is the only one you get to actually know. But you can kind of feel the author under there, beneath the surface

of the fake world you’re inhabiting. Their imagination is the water you’re swimming in, the air you’re breathing. They’ve

made every table and every chair and every person in the whole book.

I couldn’t breathe.

JB: I’m just saying, even if everything you wrote me was a lie (and I know, not ALL of it was a lie, but even if it was!), then

in some sense I would still know you, at least as well as I feel I know Neal Stephenson or William Gibson or whatever, and

honestly, I feel like I know them better than I know anyone in the world. Do you know what I mean?

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. And we don’t have that. We might keep mistaking what’s fake for what’s real between

us, like people eating wax fruit and wondering why it tastes bad. Like, there is writing each other these emails, and then

there is trying to actually, you know, date. If that’s even what you’re suggesting.

Was that presumptuous, to call it dating? He had never said he wanted to date me. But what else could we be talking about here? Did I even want to date him? The moment I posed this question to myself, I discovered that I really, really did.

JB: Can we switch modalities? Can I call?

My phone was buzzing seconds after I typed yes.

“I think I should fly out there,” he said.

“Whoa, what? Really?”

“Why not? I could get a flight for as much as I used to pay you to answer three questions.”

“That’s kind of disturbing to realize,” I said. My heart was racing and it was unclear if I was panicked or excited. I was

pretty sure I was both.

“Only for the weekend. And I can meet your baby and we can just... see where it goes.”

Fuck, I was going to have to tell Jinx. Fuck! “Okay,” I said.

“Okay? So what airport should I fly into?”

Jesus Christ, was I really going to do this? And then I told him to fly into Long Beach or else Ontario, LAX as a last resort,

giddy as a kid on Christmas.