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About a week later, the doorbell rang. Bodhi was asleep, and Margo paused to see if he would wake up, but then the knocking

started, so she scooted to the door and opened it a crack.

On or off TV, Jinx always wore the same thing: black jeans or leather pants, black turtleneck, black leather blazer. Like

some kind of unholy priest. On his long, thin fingers he wore many rings, and he often clasped his hands together in ways

that looked strange and artificial. He would fold them up like you fold an umbrella.

He had never called her back, but she always saw Jinx on his terms, and he often showed up unannounced. It wasn’t even that

odd that he had his leather duffel bag with him.

“Have I come at a bad time?” he asked, delicately pitching his voice low in case Margo had someone over.

“No, I’m just— You haven’t returned any of my texts in, like, weeks, and I left you a voicemail, did you get it?”

“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “I came as fast as I could. I didn’t have my phone because I was in rehab, they don’t let

you have your phone. When I got it back during discharge, I had about a million voicemails. I listened to yours and I drove

straight here. Can I come in? I can write you a check right now.”

“Oh,” Margo said. “Um, yeah. But I figured out the money thing, so...” She held the door open for him. She knew her father

had been in rehab before. They had always sort of glossed over it. She wondered if this meant things were bad for him.

Jinx ducked slightly as he entered the apartment. “This is nice,” he said.

She hadn’t entirely realized he’d never seen her apartment before. “Do you want something to drink?” Margo asked, and Bodhi

began to wail from the back room. “Let me get him, and then I’ll make you some tea or something.”

Jinx loved tea. It started with green tea in Japan. Now he was deep into herbal teas and disgusting drinks made of tree bark, and he could tell you the medicinal properties of plants in great detail, though Margo was never sure whether any of it was real. “Rosehips are just tremendous for inflammation,” he would say, holding a teacup in his folded crane hands.

Margo returned with Bodhi firmly latched on to her left tit. She thought it would be weird nursing in front of her dad, but

he didn’t seem uncomfortable at all. “As soon as he’s done, hand him over. He is absolutely precious. He’s amazing, Margo.”

Jinx looked at her, and his eyes were glassy with tears.

Margo had a strange feeling of vertigo. This was maybe the first time she’d ever made her father proud, or at least the first

time she was aware of it. “So are you in town?” she asked, crossing over to the kitchen to put water on for tea.

“Yes, and on a semipermanent basis, I think,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Mayhem is retired now,” he said.

Margo had known Murder and Mayhem her whole life, and a visiting Jinx had often meant a visiting Mayhem, Mayhem being much

more interested in hanging out with little kids than Murder. Before he got into wrestling, Murder had been an enforcer in

some L.A. street gang. That was how he got his ring name, from actually murdering people.

“I thought you were going to— What was his name?” Jinx had been in the middle of transitioning, though Margo had gotten a little caught up in her own drama and now had the feeling she was missing vital pieces of the story. Murder had died of a drug overdose five years ago. Mayhem had tried to keep going as a singles act, and he’d limped along for a few years. People wanted him in matches because at that point he and Murder were iconic, part of history. But realistically, Mayhem was too old, and his back was starting to go. When Mayhem finally officially retired, Jinx had started working with some new guy who was kind of a loose cannon, or that was his gimmick. She brought the tea to Jinx on the couch and sat in the chair across from him to nurse.

“Billy Ants, yes, and that didn’t work out. I don’t know if I’ve spoken about this with you before, but Cheri and I are getting

a divorce.”

He had certainly never spoken to Margo about it before. He rarely spoke about his marriage and his other family, his real

family.

“Oh,” Margo said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he said, leaning back and crossing his impossibly long legs. “It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

Bodhi, milk drunk, lurched back into profound slumber in Margo’s arms, her nipple popping out of his mouth with a squelch.

“Here,” she said, getting up and rolling the sleeping baby into his arms.

“Come here, you perfect little one,” her father said. He did not use a baby-talk voice, yet there was some extra lilt of sweetness

in the words. He began bouncing Bodhi with obvious finesse.

“You’re good with him,” she said. She’d never pictured her father as being good with babies, maybe because of all the black

leather or how much he looked like Beerus from Dragon Ball.

“Well, I’ve had a few,” he said quietly. Five with Cheri, and then Margo. “And my little brothers and sisters.”

Jinx was the second of nine. Margo had never met any of them and didn’t even know all their names.

Jinx relaxed back into the couch with Bodhi, careful not to wake him, and began examining him, uncurling his tight little

fist. “He’s going to be big,” he said.

“How can you tell?” Margo knew he wouldn’t be. She wanted to pretend.

“Look at how long and thick his fingers are.”

The love-drunk look on Jinx’s face made the back of Margo’s throat hurt. Had her father looked at her like that when she was

a baby? It was overcast outside, all white cloud cover, and the living room had a kind of elegant gloom to it.

“Does Shyanne know you’re in town?” Margo asked.

“Yes, she’s the one who sent me over here.”

“Oh, you went there first?” Margo asked. Jinx seemed unaware that earlier he’d claimed he drove straight to Margo’s.

“Well, yes, I didn’t have your address. And I needed to talk to her about something. I met Kenneth.”

It was just like Jinx to call him Kenneth instead of Kenny. Margo bet it bugged the shit out of Kenny. “How was that?”

“Well, he’s a fan.”

“No shit!?”

“But yes, the timing is ironic. I think Shyanne was perhaps shocked.”

“What timing? Wait, were you thinking of getting back together with her?”

“That was the plan,” Jinx said, nodding. “I brought roses and everything.”

“Well, you could have told her about the plan!”

Jinx shrugged, repositioned Bodhi more upright against his chest. “Yes, well, my life has been in a state of disarray, if

I’m being honest. And then I get here, and you don’t even need my help, so I guess—I guess I needn’t have come!”

“Dad,” Margo said. She was annoyed that he was now playing the victim because she no longer needed money. In her mind, she

should get to be the hostile one at least a little bit longer. But he looked sad, so she said, “I always want to see you.

I was desperate for you to meet Bodhi.”

Jinx smiled, shook his head. “It’s probably best I didn’t tell Shyanne the plan. It was half-baked at best. And maybe we’ve

been saved from each other in a way.”

Margo didn’t know what to say to that. Jinx was the love of Shyanne’s damn life. “She would leave him in a heartbeat for you.”

“That’s nice of you to say,” Jinx said, “but there is a lot of water under that bridge. All those years, I think they were

very hard on her.”

Margo wanted to argue, she wanted to tell him Shyanne’s feelings for him had never changed, that it had always been him and

would always be him, and if they got together now, it would make everything she’d been through worth it. “I think you should

at least talk to her about it,” Margo said.

“Maybe I will, but there are things between us that would be difficult for you to understand.”

“Why? I mean, I’m not exactly a kid anymore.”

“No, of course,” Jinx said, recrossing his legs in the other direction and looking up from the baby. “I seem to be constitutionally

incapable of being faithful to any one woman, and I doubt that has changed. Shyanne was fixated on Cheri, but in many ways,

Cheri wasn’t the obstacle, and removing her does not entirely alleviate the strain between us, even if Shyanne believes it

would.”

“I mean, couldn’t you just... not?” Margo was thinking that he was old now—how many hot babes could he possibly be pulling?

It was one thing when you were twenty-eight and touring the world as a pro wrestler, but a fifty-year-old underweight man

unable to keep it in his black leather pants was a much sadder thing.

“Well, naturally that was my own assumption as well, that it was a behavior I could and should have control over. But I have

never been successful, so I don’t know why I would be successful now.”

“And then there was rehab,” Margo said. She badly wanted to talk about it, even though there was a dignity to her father she

feared disrupting, like pissing off a cat by picking it up. “How did that go?”

“Oh, you know, it’s a cycle,” he said. She did know it was a cycle. It was a cycle every professional wrestler went through:

get injured, take pain pills so you can work injured, get more injured from working injured, take more pain pills. For a lot

of wrestlers this compounded with life on the road and rowdy nights with lots of drugs and alcohol, but that wasn’t so much

Jinx’s problem. Jinx’s role, really, was more to be Mayhem and Murder’s mom: making sure they made their flights, arguing

with them about how many Somas it was acceptable to take, keeping them in line at hotels. Murder was a horrible prankster

and had once pooped in the elevator of the Waldorf Astoria.

Despite this, and despite no longer working in the ring, Jinx had four or five different surgeries on his spine over the years,

none of them hugely successful, or maybe one had been for his hip, she forgot, but she knew he’d had both knees done too.

Not taking the pain pills at all wasn’t really an option.

“But, like, how did you know to go to rehab?” Margo asked. She didn’t understand why he didn’t just take his pain pills as prescribed, one a day, or a pill every four to six hours, or whatever. For him to be abusing them seemed to imply he wasn’t taking them and hoarding them and then taking a lot at once. She’d simply never dared to ask about the nitty-gritty of how it all worked.

Jinx was clearly hesitating, wondering how much to tell her. Finally, he looked up and, staring her directly in the eye, said,

“I’d begun using heroin and was having a relationship with a young woman named Viper.”

“Oh, gross! Dad! ” Margo was loud enough that Bodhi jerked awake on Jinx’s chest. Margo reached out so Jinx could hand him back. Jinx simply

bounced Bodhi a few times and he fell back asleep.

“Shyanne mentioned that you might be in the market for a roommate, and I badly need a place to live, but if we’re going to

be living together, I want to be honest with you even if that causes you to think less of me.”

He was still looking right at her. Jesus, what did he think? There was no way she could think more or less of him, he was

almost a fictional character to her, a Greek god, a distant planet whose orbit brought him close only once or twice a year.

She’d seen him more on TV than she ever had in person. It was painful to want it to be more than that, so she kept him carefully

contained in her mind. But now he was talking about living in her house. On a semipermanent basis. The idea was both thrilling

and scary.

“Well...” Margo didn’t know how to say what she needed to say because it was the kind of thing she’d never in her entire

life said to her father. “I do really need a roommate. And it would be neat to see you every day. But.. . I need you to

be clean if you are going to be around the baby.”

“Margo,” Jinx said, “I am clean, and I want to be clean. I’m the one who checked myself into rehab. I finished my thirty days

with flying colors; I am an active participant in my recovery. I would never, ever want you to see me like that. There will

be no— There will be none of that here.”

“Why don’t you move in with Andrea or Stevie? Or one of the boys?” Margo suddenly asked. It seemed weird that Jinx would choose her over his real daughters. As was only natural, Margo stalked their Instagrams an absolutely unhealthy amount. Andrea had gotten married over the summer, and Stevie was going into her senior year at Barnard. In almost every way they were superior to Margo. They wore nice clothes, went to fancy restaurants, took exotic vacations. Neither of them had Jinx’s mushy nose, or they had gotten it surgically altered in their early teens. The boys didn’t have social media accounts, except Ajax, who was doing MMA. The boys were less interesting to her.

“Honestly, because when I discussed it with my therapist, we both thought the strain of those relationships might cause me

to relapse.”

“Okay,” Margo said. She felt guilty that this pleased her and did her best to ignore it. “But then why not rent your own place?”

“Uh, because then I would definitely relapse. There would be no one to... perform sanity for.”

“Oh,” Margo said.

“‘Act as if,’ they say in NA,” Jinx said. “Fake it till you make it. But it’s okay to say no, Margo. I understand if you don’t

want me here. I should have come to write a check and see the baby. Or not write a check and see the baby.” Jinx was now sad

in a way that alarmed Margo. His cheeks were trembling or twitching, and his eyes looked wild.

“No, I wasn’t asking because I was hoping you would move in with one of them instead!” she said. “We desperately need a roommate,

and I’ve been dreading trying to find one, and I love you. You know I love you. Do you know that? Dad?”

Jinx was looking down at Bodhi. He didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he almost whispered, “Well, I love you too,”

and he was crying.

Margo got up and scooted around the coffee table to sit next to him. She leaned into him experimentally, his leather jacket

cold on her hot skin. He turned his shoulders slightly so she could lean all the way against him.

“You can stay,” she said. She pulled away slightly and saw the im print of her cheek from her tinted moisturizer on the sleeve of his leather jacket. “Of course you can stay.”

Ultimately, after a conference with Suzie over Chinese food, Jinx took Kat the Larger’s bedroom because it was, well, larger.

They decided to hold off on getting a fourth roommate because Jinx argued the fourth bedroom should be turned into a nursery

for Bodhi. Couldn’t they each pay $1,333 instead? Suzie seemed stressed out by this. Jinx was completely oblivious. Margo

grabbed her later in the hallway as Suzie was exiting the bathroom. “I’ll pay your three hundred, don’t worry about it,” she

whispered.

“Are you sure?” Suzie asked, plainly relieved.

“Totally,” Margo said, though she didn’t know why she felt compelled to spare Suzie the extra rent. She still had no idea

what she was going to do, but she had the money from Mark’s mother in the bank and that was more than Suzie had.

When she returned to the living room, Jinx was watching some indie wrestling program that seemed to be nearly three-fifths

comedy show and only two-fifths wrestling.

“Oh, I didn’t know Arabella went to Ring of Honor,” he said.

“Who?” Margo asked, curling up on her end of the couch. Bodhi was asleep on Jinx’s chest. It was weird not to be holding him

all the time.

“The one with the bright pink hair. She was with WWE, then her contract got terminated because she’d... Well, have you

heard of OnlyFans?”

“No, what’s that? Is that like Cameo?” Margo knew Jinx made a sizable fraction of his living now from a site where people

paid him to record videos wishing their husband happy birthday or whatever.

“Oh, no, not quite. OnlyFans is more... it’s pornography, essentially. Celebrities or people with large internet followings have unfiltered, X-rated social media accounts, and you can pay whatever amount per month to follow Arabella and see whatever saucy pics she posts. This is nothing new, pro wrestlers have been making pornography for ages—good for her and all, I hear she makes quite a bit of money—but WWE didn’t want to be associated with it. I’m glad Ring of Honor picked her up. She’s nice. She loves video games.”

Margo sat, digesting all this. She and her father had never remotely discussed pornography before. Jinx could be weirdly prudish

in conversation. “Like how much money?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know, but when Triple H first told her she had to quit OnlyFans or leave WWE, she said she made more in a month on

there than in a whole year wrestling. I mean, I don’t know the details of her contract, but if that’s the case, it seems like

a simple decision. You’re not gonna blow your knee out taking nudes, or accidentally break your neck and wind up paralyzed.”

She knew he was talking about Droz, who had wound up in a wheelchair after D’Lo Brown broke his neck on SmackDown . Jinx made a point to visit him once a year or so.

“How famous do you have to be to do it?” Margo asked.

“Oh, I think anybody can do it. It’s just a matter of whether people will follow you. Look at that, she’s about to do her

finisher, watch.”

Margo watched as Arabella choked the other girl with her thighs while doing a one-handed push-up. It looked awesome.

“How does she make something so stupid look so good?” Jinx marveled.

That night in her room, Margo nursed Bodhi and was waiting for him to fall all the way asleep so she could move him. Her top

was off, and she could see herself in the mirror, one of those cheap college dorm ones you hang on the door. Her boobs were

huge. She’d never had boobs this big before. On impulse, she gave a squeeze and sprayed the mirror with milk.

And that is when she thought: Any man would pay to see this.

Margo was highly aware that she was not as pretty as she was hot. Shyanne had said it all the time. “You’re not pretty enough

to have dirty hair, get your ass in the shower!” “You’re not pretty enough to have that kind of attitude, Miss Noodle!” Her

face was not as angular as her mother’s, and she had Jinx’s mushy nose. Shyanne was always trying to contour it and turn it

into something better.

Margo knew her mother was trying to pass down wisdom and skill, the dark art of turning an ordinary person into a minor goddess by means of paint and fabric, but what she also heard was: Your face needs to be covered. To be loved, you should put this face over your face. It was even okay if it hurt, if it burned, if it accidentally tore out your eyelashes. “Beauty is like free money,” Shyanne

used to say as she did Margo’s face.

Margo transferred Bodhi to his crib and pulled out her laptop. She didn’t know why she was so curious about it. She had the

money from Mark’s mother. She wasn’t desperate, though it was alarming how quickly that money was already disappearing. She

went to the OnlyFans website and clicked around. It was hard to see what it entailed without signing up, but signing up was

free, so why not?

She needed a username. Think of something sexy, she thought. Though suddenly it seemed entirely mysterious what made something

sexy. Since having Bodhi, sex felt impossibly foreign, like something in another world or half remembered from a dream. Sex

adjacent, she thought, but her brain kept generating ideas like BoobsMcGee and TwatLord. Finally, she typed: HungryGhost .

And then she was in.

The first thing she did was search for Arabella, but nothing came up. She checked the spelling, mystified. Did Arabella not

actually have an account, or was there something intentionally weird about the OnlyFans search algorithm? In frustration,

she went to Arabella’s Instagram account, clicked through her bio to a Linktree. Buried at the bottom was a link that said

Cum follow me 18+ . Margo clicked and was finally taken to Arabella’s OnlyFans page, though she couldn’t see any of her posts without subscribing

and paying money. Arabella’s account cost an astonishing twenty-five dollars a month to follow. Margo felt like Scrooge McDuck,

unwilling to part with her cartoon golden coins. But in the end, she was simply too curious. Once she had full access, she

scrolled through Arabella’s feed, trying to understand it. She’d been expecting nudes, maybe something in between the kind

of selfies you would send a boy and something more professional like Playboy or Penthouse . Most of what Arabella posted were pictures of her playing video games in her bra and panties. There were some videos that were grayed out; you had to pay extra to see. One of those was titled “Rubbing One Out After Insane Vic Roy.” Margo wasn’t sure she wanted to see that; she didn’t know what a “vic roy” was. But she clicked open a free one, astounded to see it was eight minutes long.

There was Arabella, her hot-pink hair hanging a little stringy around her face, wearing a black leather bra with little chains

connecting the nipples, split screen with a video game Margo had never seen before and was instantly captivated by. Arabella’s

character in the game was a sexy girl in a magenta-pink teddy bear suit. Margo watched as the pink bear parachuted down from

a blimp onto a cartoonishly beautiful Technicolor island covered with buildings and lakes, little roads and trees, an entire

world to explore. Arabella was chewing gum. She said, “Let’s go to Tilted, always like to go to Tilted.” She landed gracefully

on top of some sort of multistory concrete apartment building and began digging a hole through its roof with a pickax. The

game play moved so fast Margo had a hard time even visually processing what was happening as the pink bear collected glowing

weapons and moved through rooms, eventually coming upon what appeared to be a moving angel made of stone, which she immediately

killed, saying, “Hello there!” As Arabella sped down the stairs of the apartment building, she came upon other players in

quick succession: a buff blond guy, a gigantic nutcracker, a hot girl in a red triceratops costume. Arabella killed them almost

as quickly as Margo could register them on the screen. After killing triceratops girl, Arabella broke her silent, gum-chewing

concentration and gave a little battle cry—“Come at me, biiiiiiitch!”—as her teddy bear character on-screen started breakdancing.

Margo could not stop watching. In the game there were grocery store shopping carts you could push and ride around in, there

was an ever-encroaching purple storm, there were canteens of mystical blue fluid you could chug to become shielded, all of

it visually spectacular. Margo had never gotten into video games. She’d really only seen Nintendo, which felt a little babyish,

or else like Call of Duty, where everything was gritty and chaotic, and there were definitely no hot girls in bear costumes. This was the first game she’d seen that made her want to actually play it. After that video she watched three more. This was not what she was expecting Arabella’s account to be like at all.

Margo clicked around and subscribed to three other random accounts she found on Instagram, girls who had mentioned OnlyFans

in a post or comment, each of them fifteen dollars, and none was like Arabella’s. They were much more in line with what she’d

expected: a bunch of nudes and sexy talk and purple devil emojis. You could buy a photo set or video based on a thumbnail

and a single sentence of description, “Wednesdays make me horny: self-play, vibrator, feet.” It seemed improbable that men

really wanted sex this badly, and yet they did, there was an entire economy based on how badly they wanted it, and for a moment

Margo understood the sexual desire she felt was mild in comparison. She would never pay fifteen dollars to look at a guy naked.

You could buy two, possibly three sandwiches for fifteen dollars. You couldn’t actually see how many fans someone had on their

OnlyFans, but judging by their Instagram followers and general engagement, none of the other accounts she followed had as

many fans as Arabella did.

Margo still didn’t think she would start an account and begin posting, though she was intrigued. She’d pictured OnlyFans as

a sad garden of desperate, fake-horny girls trying to be what men wanted, all of them crying, “Pick me, pick me!” She hadn’t

imagined Arabella in a fantasy world dressed as a hot-pink teddy bear merking people left and right. Margo knew she couldn’t

be that—she wasn’t that badass, and she was hopeless at video games—but what if she could find her own thing?

“Maybe a bunch of people will want to fuck Mommy,” she whispered, looking over at Bodhi in his crib, softly snoring like a

baby pig.

And that is how she became HungryGhost. Alone, in the dark, lit up by a laptop screen, with her baby, steadfastly refusing

to think about her father injecting heroin and fucking some woman named Viper.

Or that is how I became HungryGhost. It is hard to tell which one of us it was.