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One of the first things Jinx did was clean the bathroom, and I mean with a toothbrush and a gallon of bleach. It was like

he was getting ready to perform surgery in there. He culled the half-empty shampoo bottles and made me choose only two out

of the vast array of scented lotions I’d accumulated over the past year.

His uniform was now a white T-shirt and gray sweatpants, a bold departure from his all-black lifestyle. I couldn’t get over

how much smaller and more normal he looked. The white shirt had teal lettering on it! Teal!

“I’m sorry, I can’t get over seeing you in clothes that aren’t black. You’re like a whole different person!”

“Kayfabe,” he said, shrugging. Kayfabe was a wrestling term that meant roughly “staying in character.” If you got hurt in the ring as part of a work, you might

wear a cast in real life, for example.

“You were kayfabing your street clothes?”

“Of course. Everyone kayfabes their street clothes.”

“I thought you just dressed that way.”

“Honestly, I’ve been dressing like that for so many years, I have no idea how I dress now. But for cleaning house, this is

better. Because of the bleach. You think you haven’t gotten any on yourself, but of course you have. I can’t tell you how

many shirts I’ve ruined.”

Next was the kitchen, where he cleaned the stove, lifting off grates I’d assumed were attached, making parts of the stove

white I hadn’t known were meant to be white. As he scrubbed and scoured, he listened to the dirtiest rap music I’d ever heard,

just blasting, Almost drowned in her pussy, so I swam to her butt . What did that mean, Lil Wayne? The only way that lyric made any sense was if he had been shrunk down Magic School Bus–style.

I didn’t know my father even listened to rap music, but he seemed to follow the careers and releases of even obscure artists. When he found out I didn’t know who J Dilla was, he almost collapsed. It became a kind of game between us: “Who is this?” I would ask, and he’d say, “This is Maxo Kream, he’s from Houston, he’d released some mixtapes before, but in January he released his first full album, and the kid has serious storytelling chops,” all the while loading non-dish items he had collected from around the house into the dishwasher to sterilize them: hairbrushes and combs, Bodhi’s teething rings, the cup that held the toothbrushes, and all the knobs and handles from the kitchen cabinets, which he had unscrewed.

“Have you ever heard of a game called Fortnite ?” I asked him.

He began doing a dance where he swung his arms in front and then behind his body in a confusing way. “Who hasn’t?” he said.

“Me, I guess.” I had tried to play Fortnite a couple of times since watching Arabella, stunned that it was completely free, and been horrified by how bad I was, getting

shot in the back of the head while I was trying to figure out how to open a door, accidentally walking off the roofs of buildings

and dying from fall damage. I played on my phone while Bodhi napped, desperate to somehow become part of that world.

One day about fifteen boxes of books were delivered. “Cheri wanted the space,” Jinx said, as he watched me drag them into

his room. Neither of us wanted him to reinjure his back, though I could tell it pained him to let me do it.

“You should get some bookcases,” I said.

“I hate bookcases,” he said.

When he unpacked the boxes, he stacked the books waist-high around the perimeter of the room organized by size. He still hadn’t

gotten a bed and simply slept in a maroon sleeping bag on the floor. He claimed this was good for his back, though he was

visibly stiff and in pain, and I didn’t see how sleeping on the floor could be helping. But when had my father ever not been

stiff and in pain? From my earliest memory he smelled strongly of Icy Hot.

It wasn’t clear to me if Jinx was okay or if I should worry. It was sort of like adopting an exotic pet you had no idea how to care for. Did he have OCD? He didn’t seem phobic of dirt exactly; if anything there was an almost lusty quality to the way he cleaned the bathroom drain, a disturbing glee at the glops of gunky hair he pulled out. I asked Suzie if she thought it was weird, if maybe there was something wrong with him. “Let him clean,” she said. “It’s fucking great.”

“But is it unhealthy?” I asked.

“I mean, he’s just lost his wife, his family, his career. If this is his coping mechanism, it seems pretty harmless to me.

Do you think he would buy us beer?”

Margo kept going back to OnlyFans. The money from Mark’s mother was somehow already half gone, just from rent and life and

a couple of hospital bills from Bodhi’s birth. She couldn’t ever be like Arabella, but the other accounts she followed still

seemed to be doing okay, and she was positive she could replicate what they were doing. They didn’t even seem to be famous.

If she was going to transition from a user to a creator and start charging money, she’d have to fill her feed with photos

as quickly as possible so if anyone became her fan, they’d have access to at least ten or twelve images. No one wanted to

pay fifteen dollars to see one lonely picture. So during Jinx’s manic bouts of cleaning, Margo was mostly locked in her bedroom,

trying to take pictures of her tits.

She ran up against the limitations of the genre almost immediately. She had only so many body parts and so many angles. Variety

would have to come from somewhere else apparently—outfits, locations, a tripod so she could change up her poses more.

In the first series of photos she took, her tits looked like they were exploding from her bra like a can of crescent rolls after you’ve smacked it against the counter. All her bras from before she had Bodhi were too small now. She needed to buy lingerie, but the idea of going to Victoria’s Secret and spending a fortune made her sick to her stomach. Finally, she had the inspired idea to take pictures in the shower, giving up the bra entirely, and the even better idea to smear her tits in Vaseline so the water would bead on them.

You were supposed to write a little description about the kind of content subscribers could expect on your page in your bio.

Margo was struggling to write it and wound up searching for more accounts to see how other girls were doing it. Again, she

had to go through Instagram or Twitter. Why did OnlyFans make it so difficult to find new accounts to follow? It was madness!

Twitter was how she found WangMangler99, who was fierce and dark haired and as small as a child, but with giant boobs. Her

profile picture showed her next to a refrigerator for scale, and a lot of her posts centered on her tininess: holding her

bare foot up next to a Coke can, or sitting in an ordinary dining room chair, feet dangling without touching the ground, or

else making weird hentai orgasm faces, eyes crossed. Her OnlyFans bio read as follows: “Feed is NSFW, expect to see tits and

ass, if you want to see more, you pay more. I also rate dicks. If you want to get your wang mangled, send me a dick pic and

a $20 tip, and I’ll send you a critique. This is not an account where I will pretend to love you. The only man I will ever

love is Goku.”

Margo was astounded people would pay twenty dollars to have their dick insulted. Though, if you were worried it was small

or ugly, maybe it was better to know for sure. But she still didn’t like the idea, which was why in her bio she wrote: “Lonely,

hot girl in financial free fall, please help me make rent this month. I’m new at this and I show boobs and butt, but haven’t

worked up the courage to show more. Maybe you can encourage me? I also rate dicks. If you want to find out what Pokémon your

dick most resembles and what attacks it might have, send me a $20 tip and I’ll provide a full write-up.”

For two days nothing happened, and Margo felt stupid for starting the account, because of course nothing had happened; how would anyone find her? OnlyFans made it impossible! She was also distracted because something was clearly happening to Jinx. His cleaning mania had ended, and now he spent almost all day locked in his room. “Are you okay?” she asked him one evening when he finally emerged. He had even procured an electric kettle, allowing him to make tea in there. Maybe that’s what had been making him come out all along: his intense need to boil water.

“Yeah, it’s, uh, I think it’s brain chemistry stuff. I probably should work out, that always helps, I just don’t want to get

injured, so I... I don’t know.” He’d stopped shaving his head and had wiry tufts above his ears.

“Are you going to look for a job?” she asked. Margo had no idea about his financial situation. She assumed he had plenty of

money but thought he could use a project.

“I would probably have to travel, and I don’t know that I’m stable enough for that yet.”

“What about volunteering?”

He looked at her as if he had no idea what she was saying. “At what?”

“I don’t know, like at the library? Or...?”

“Huh” was all he said before scurrying away to the bathroom. That was the other thing: the amount of time Jinx spent in the

bathroom. She could not fathom what he was doing in there. He seemed to poop three times a day, and each session was an hour-long

ordeal. Was he constipated? Was it diarrhea? Was it a prostate thing? Should she make him go to the doctor? He kept talking

about a therapist and seemed to talk to him by phone, though she doubted the therapist had the real lowdown on these concerning

toilet behaviors.

Taking care of Bodhi, monitoring her father’s closed door, endlessly refreshing her OnlyFans page to see that nothing new

had happened, then making herself scan through job postings on Craigslist was like trying to make origami out of wet paper.

The harder she tried, the more it all kept disintegrating in her hands. It was unclear how so many things simply not happening

could be so stressful. She created HungryGhost Instagram and Twitter accounts that led to her OnlyFans through Linktrees like

she had seen other people do and tried to follow other girls on those accounts, but still nothing happened. Sometimes she

opened Arabella’s account just so she could gaze upon her hostile, smirking face for strength.

And then she got her first fan.

U1134967. Right away he sent her a twenty-dollar tip and a dick pic to be rated. Margo opened it on her phone and studied the penis for a long time as she was nursing Bodhi. She wanted to get it exactly right.

After she set Bodhi down in his Rock ’n Play, she pulled out her laptop and wrote the following:

Congratulations! Your penis is a Tentacruel! With bulging pink glans and glittering dark blue veins, your penis is filled

with quiet menace. When that mushroom tip glows red, you know he’s about to attack! As both a water and poison type, your

penis is passionate but prone to jealousy, easily seeing slights where no harm was intended. He needs lots of coddling and

gentle licks. His primary weaknesses are psychic and electric types, so stay away from redheaded witches with stars in their

eyes! Your Tentacruel’s special moves are Ooze Attack (extremely potent pre-cum, watch out for accidental pregnancies), Clear

Body (in which your penis completely disappears, which can happen when it’s cold out or if you hear your mother’s voice),

and Poison Prison (in which you ask a girl for so many reassurances that she loves you that she stops loving you, completely

understandable and luckily avoidable!). Tentacruel is your penis’s fully evolved form, and he has an HP of 120. I rate it

a 10/10, tantalizing Tentacruel.

She pressed send, as nervous as the first time she text messaged a boy in middle school. She was still staring at her computer

screen when the notification dinged. Another twenty dollars and a message: That was awesome, way better than I was expecting! Not sure how you knew about Poison Prison, but you were sadly right on

there, hehehe. You’ve got a fan! More people should know about this account!

Encouraged by this, Margo diligently posted several times a day for her single fan, U1134967. Since it was only him, her posts

grew sillier and less self-conscious. One day, she wrote on her boobs in eyeliner boobs and just posted that. He commented with a laughing emoji and sent a ten-dollar tip, suggested she make a video of her boobs bouncing. That was an entire genre she hadn’t even thought of. She made a video clip of her boobs bouncing as she pulled off a shirt, one where she jiggled them with her hands. She even made a clip of herself jump roping naked (during which she definitely damaged the popcorn ceiling of her bedroom).

Then one day (incidentally the same day Jinx left the house for three hours and came back with a small ficus tree, which he

asked her to help lug up the stairs so it could live in his room—still no bed, still no bookcases, just a sleeping bag and

a tree and maybe two hundred books), Margo got two fans at once: U277493 and RocketRaccoon69. Most guys left their handles

completely anonymized, and Margo was grateful when they didn’t because it made it much easier to keep them straight. Neither

of her new fans asked for their dicks to be rated, which was a little disappointing, but she kept posting and the fans kept

trickling in.

At the end of three weeks, she had twenty fans paying $12.99 a month each. After OnlyFans took its 20 percent, it was less

than she could have made in one night at her old restaurant, and she certainly was no Arabella. But she had time to figure

it out, another month or two at least. Mark’s mommy had made sure of it.

“So do you think you’re clinically depressed?” Margo asked Jinx one day as he was folding laundry in the living room. He loved

doing laundry, he said it was soothing, and he had taken over the chore for them all. Margo felt weird about this. He folded

her panties into tiny little packet-balls. But she would do almost anything to avoid lugging Bodhi along with their dirty

clothes down to the basement. There was simply no good place to put him while she loaded the washer.

Jinx was pairing sets of Bodhi’s tiny colorful socks. “Probably,” he said.

“Maybe you should think about getting on an antidepressant,” Margo said.

“I’m not sure an antidepressant would help,” Jinx said. “I think my problem is more of a fundamental failure to attach to

other people. I’m not sure that, without love, Zoloft could really do much for me.”

Margo thought about this. She knew that she’d always felt her father was a kind of distant planet, but she hadn’t known he felt himself to be a distant planet. She’d assumed he was closer to other people who were not her.

“I just feel like you need, I don’t know, a world. You need people. What about going to some twelve-step meetings?” she said.

He had mentioned NA before, hadn’t he?

Jinx frowned and sighed. “This is going to sound conceited and ridiculous, I realize, but in some circles, I am sort of famous,

and it can make those meetings very awkward. People record your shares with their phones and post it online. Terrible.”

“Oh, right,” she said.

“What about you?” he asked.

“What about me?”

“Well, are you going to get a job, or go back to school, or what’s the plan?” He paused from folding a tiny pair of footed

pajamas and stared at her.

“Touché,” she said.

Jinx laughed. “Two aimless sailboats lost in the harbor.”

“I don’t know what job to get,” Margo said. “Like, all I’ve ever done is wait tables.”

“So, wait tables.” Jinx shrugged. “I have named my tree.”

“You named your tree?”

“Yes,” Jinx said, “I have named my tree Earnest.”

“That seems like a good tree name,” Margo said. In that moment she almost wanted to tell him about the OnlyFans. Jinx hadn’t

been judgmental about Arabella; he’d even said, “Good for her.” Her instinct to hide it was almost entirely because she didn’t

really know Jinx that well and it seemed like her private life, not his business. Then again, here she was suggesting he was

clinically depressed, so evidently she didn’t mind sticking her nose in his business.

She still wasn’t sure if starting the account had been a stupid idea or if she should keep going. But when she thought about applying for server jobs, she felt like she couldn’t breathe. And as badly as her OnlyFans was doing, she at least felt a glimmer of hope about it. After almost a month, she was beginning to understand the problem. OnlyFans had no discovery algorithm. It didn’t show you accounts unless you already followed them, and there was no general feed you could explore to find new ones. This had to be why it seemed to work only for people who were already famous or had a larger platform. And yet a lot of big accounts seemed to be run by girls who weren’t famous at all. How were they finding new fans, or rather getting found by them?

“How do you build celebrity?” she asked.

“Like, how do you get over or how do you build heat?” Jinx asked.

“I don’t know,” Margo said. “Both? What’s the difference?”

“Well, I mean building heat generally means picking fights that piss off the audience. Hate is just as powerful as love, more

so where ticket sales are concerned.”

Margo thought about WangMangler and Arabella, how utterly unconcerned they were with being likable. She wasn’t sure she could

ever be like that. “Well, then what about getting over, like getting the crowd to like you? Like, how come some wrestlers

get famous and other wrestlers don’t? I know it’s not only athletic ability.”

“Right. I mean, the short answer is persona. But usually the wrestling ability needs to be there, at least in my opinion,

though God knows Vince has tried to give guys a big push on looks alone.”

There was no Vince McMahon, Margo thought, and that was part of the problem. If it were a matter of pleasing an asshole like

Vince, she’d have a better idea of how to go about it. “How do you get hired by WWE?”

“Work for a smaller wrestling outfit so someone can see you work.”

“How do you get hired by the smaller outfit? Like, how does a wrestler get their first-ever job?”

“I mean, a lot of times they’re coming from a dynasty. They get into it because their dad was in the business, all their brothers

or cousins are in the business. But sometimes they’re just coming from an athletic background, whether it’s football or they

wrestled in college or even bodybuilding. But if you’re not from some dynasty or special background, I think you just make

a tape.”

“A tape of you wrestling?”

“Yeah. With your buddies or whatever in the backyard.”

“What if you don’t have any buddies?”

“Gosh, I don’t know if you can become a wrestler without buddies.” There was something weird and Canadian about the way Jinx said “buddies.”

“You need buddies,” Margo said, still thinking.

“Buddies are essential,” Jinx said. “I didn’t know you were so interested in wrestling.”

“Oh,” Margo said. “Yeah.” She was not.

“Would you want to watch some matches with me?” Jinx asked. “Maybe tonight. I could show you some wrestlers starting out,

if that’s what interests you.”

He seemed so excited she couldn’t bear to say no.

“Maybe Suzie would watch too,” Jinx said. “Maybe we should make dinner. Should I go to the store?”

“I mean, yeah!” Margo said. “Why not?”

“Do you like lasagna?” Jinx asked.

“Who doesn’t like lasagna?” The idea of lasagna was making this whole idea more exciting. The bigger Bodhi got and the more

he nursed, the hungrier Margo found herself. “Garlic bread?” she asked.

“I don’t think we need garlic bread too, it’s so much starch already.”

Margo pooched out her lower lip. “Sooo hungry,” she pleaded. Then she pretended to die, falling off the couch.

“Are you dead?” Jinx said.

“Dead of hunger,” Margo said, eyes still closed. She waited a beat, then stuck out her tongue as a symbol of even greater

death. They both heard Bodhi wake up crying on the baby monitor, and Margo popped up like bread from a toaster. “Please!”

she said as she scooted down the hall. “I’m still dead! So, so dead!”

That night Jinx cooked lasagna, and he made the pasta from scratch, a thing Margo had not exactly known you could do. “How

did you learn to cook?” she asked, as she watched him rolling the dough thin with a rolling pin she was pretty sure they had

not owned before. It didn’t make sense that Jinx knew how to cook. So many years of his life he’d been on the road in hotel

rooms without kitchens.

“When things didn’t work out with Billy Ants, I retired,” Jinx said, “and Cheri—you know, for so long she wanted me around more, and then suddenly I was around more, and”—he laughed, though it was the saddest little laugh Margo had ever heard—“I guess I was around a little too much. Anyway, I started taking classes. That was one thing I wanted: homemade food. And Cheri was like, ‘I raised five kids, I cooked every damn night, I’m not making a whole pot roast just for you!’ So I thought, Well, then I’ll make the pot roast! But she didn’t... I don’t think she liked me making the pot roast either, for some reason.”

Margo, who had always resisted fully hating Cheri as a kind of instinctive counterbalance to Shyanne’s intense hatred for

her, was suddenly finding herself really hating Cheri. What kind of bitch could be displeased by a guy taking cooking classes

and making them pot roast? Though she realized this narrative did not exactly account for the heroin use and Little Miss Viper.

Presumably those things happened later and not concurrent with the pot roasting.

As things began to smell better and better, Suzie was lured out of her room. “Hey, I’m working on a new cosplay,” she said.

“You guys wanna see?”

Margo did not want to see.

“Cosplay!” Jinx said, instantly fascinated. “You dress up as... characters?”

“Yep!” Suzie beamed.

“Tell me more,” Jinx said, slitting the membranes of the sausages and pinching their pink flesh out into the hot pan.

It had not occurred to Margo before that cosplay and wrestling had anything in common, and yet Jinx wanted to know every detail.

“So these orcs—” he said, leaning his face on his fist at the table, “forgive me, I don’t know a lot about orcs—are they from

a specific franchise?”

But he did make garlic bread, thank God, and it was glorious.

After Margo survived a seemingly interminable number of wrestling matches, each one triggering such lengthy oral histories Jinx felt the need to pause the video, worried she would miss even a second of the action while he told yet another weird story that seemed to involve a wrestler shitting themselves, when she finally slipped off to her room to put Bodhi down for the night, she turned on her bedside lamp and lay on the center of her rug and stared at the ceiling.

Buddies, she thought. Buddies.

The OnlyFans girls, Margo thought, had to be either promoting themselves on other platforms or doing some form of cross-promotion.

They had to be helping one another out; they had to be buddies. Filled with sudden conviction, she opened her laptop, navigated

to WangMangler’s account, sent a $100 tip with a message that said: I’m new to OnlyFans and desperately need fans. Would you be willing to do a cross-promotion or give me tips on how to market

myself?

Ten minutes later she received a response: Your account is cute. You should make a TikTok. I’ll push you on my page for $500.

Margo was shocked at the price. Would it be worth it? She checked and WangMangler had over 100,000 followers on Instagram.

Even if only a fraction of them subscribed to WangMangler’s OnlyFans, it was a staggering amount of money at $15.99 a person.

Which on the one hand made the request for $500 seem petty; WangMangler certainly didn’t need her $500. But on the other hand,

WangMangler seemed to know what she was doing and believed $500 was a reasonable price. If Margo landed even thirty-eight

or thirty-nine fans out of the deal, she’d at least break even. And she technically had the money.

Margo went ahead and made a HungryGhost TikTok account. Kat the Smaller had told her about TikTok, but Margo hadn’t gotten

around to joining. It was a newer platform, the point of which Margo did not get. Kat the Smaller said it was like Insta for

videos, but that made no sense because you could post videos on Insta, so why use an entirely different app? After she made

an account and began exploring, however, she discovered that TikTok was an entire world.

She watched an elephant dunk a basketball. She watched cleaning hacks and dance moves and teen boys pretending to be their teachers. She watched people throw cheese slices on other people who weren’t expecting it. She watched cats getting baths and hedgehogs drinking from bottles. She watched kids do impressions of moms who wash your hair too roughly, moms who chastised you for having too many water glasses in your room, moms who were constantly opening and flapping trash bags. The most remarkable thing was how the TikToks were all loosely in response to one another. Someone would make a video using a certain song, and then lots of people would use that same song and make their own videos, each one a distinct interpretation of the original. And she didn’t have to search for these things, she didn’t have to already know what she wanted, like on YouTube. They just came to her, all lined up, ready to be flipped through. It was like the missing link. If OnlyFans had the monetization but no discoverability, TikTok had pure discoverability without any way that she could see of monetizing it. It was somehow now four in the morning.

She wrote back to WangMangler.

K I set up a tiktok where shd I send the $500? If I send thru here I know you’ll lose 20%

??

WangMangler wrote back the next morning with her CashApp. Margo sent the $500. Then WangMangler messaged: I’ll pin ur post for 3 days but u have to run a promo making your account $4.99 so my fans get exclusive discount on your

content.

Margo gasped. She had been betrayed! If her subscription was only $4.99, there was no way she would make back her money. WangMangler

had all the leverage. The $500 was already sent; if Margo refused to lower her subscription price, WangMangler could shrug

and decline to run the promotion. Margo logged in to OnlyFans and lowered the price. Then she ran to the bathroom and puked

absolutely everywhere.