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Margo’s truce with Jinx felt fragile. She hardly had time to think about it. She was too busy trying to manage her sudden

influx of fans. Having access to Suzie’s cosplay closet made taking interesting pictures a whole lot easier, though the complaints

about Margo’s camera quality on her ancient phone were constant. Did you take these with a potato? Are your nipples blurred out on purpose or are you just poor?

Keeping on top of the dick ratings was challenging too, even if she loved writing them. Congratulations on being the owner of a glorious Parasect! Special attack: Clit Clench. Weirdly, it was how much fun she was having that was hardest for her to process. The small cascade of neurochemicals each

time her phone dinged with a new message. The obsessive refreshing of the page to see if anything new had happened. The compliments,

the likes, the fire emojis—they were all intoxicating and kind of exciting. It reminded her of the early days of courtship,

when her whole life hinged upon the latest text or email. Except she was having this same reaction to crude messages sent

by strangers on the internet. She didn’t want it to be true, that these meaningless, highly artificial interactions could

create in her the same feelings as the actual relationships she’d had. She knew what she was feeling now wasn’t real, but

how real had anything she felt ever been?

Compared with the way she felt for Bodhi, her feelings for any of her former romantic partners were flimsy, like the clothing

for paper dolls that attaches with only those tiny folding tabs.

“Listen,” Jinx said one morning as they were eating some new disgusting bran cereal he had bought, “I’ve been thinking, Margo,

if you are really going to do this, I want you to do it right.”

Margo was mildly horrified, waiting for whatever he was going to say next.

“Now tell me the truth,” he said. “Are you paying quarterly taxes?”

She burst out laughing.

“I’ll take that as a no,” he said.

“I don’t know what quarterly taxes are,” Margo said.

“Well, are you going to file as self-employed or as a corporation?”

“Dad.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“You know, Margo,” he said softly, “now that I’m living here, I could watch Bodhi while you went to work. If you wanted to

go back to waitressing.”

Margo nodded, trying to brace herself. Of course he would try again to persuade her. He couldn’t just be offering to help

with her taxes. She could not explain how much the idea of returning to waiting tables filled her with dread. As dehumanizing

as running an OnlyFans was supposed to be, that was how dehumanizing waitressing actually was.

She was aware Jinx was watching her, and she wasn’t any closer to knowing how to respond. Then he said, “Waitressing sucks.”

“It really, really sucks.”

“I have heard this from many people,” he said, nodding.

“It’s exhausting,” Margo said, “and like, there’s no getting a raise or a promotion, there’s no growing . And that makes it feel like trying to run when you’re facing a wall.” She wanted to share more about Tessa and the penis

cake and making the salad boy eat literal dirt and Sean putting parsley around his dick, but none of it seemed bad enough

exactly to justify selling nudes. “And being away from Bodhi for that many hours in a row, even if you were watching him...”

She faltered, not knowing how to say it or if she was allowed to say something so ridiculous. “But it kind of makes me feel

like I’m dying?”

Jinx nodded again. “So you really want to do this,” he said. It reminded Margo of how Shyanne knew she wanted to keep the

baby even before Margo had admitted it to herself. She couldn’t explain why she wanted to have Bodhi, and she couldn’t explain

how badly she wanted to turn the OnlyFans into a success. Was it bad to want things? To want them as badly as she seemed to

want them?

“I do,” she said. And somehow it felt as formal as if she were getting married right there in the dining alcove.

“Okay,” Jinx said.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

Over the next few days, Jinx helped Margo complete the paperwork to become a corporation so she could write off her health

insurance and pay fewer taxes than if she filed as merely self-employed. He told her to move the remaining money from Mark

out of her checking and put it in a high-interest savings account, something she didn’t even know her bank offered. Her new

income also made Bodhi ineligible for his free health insurance, and Jinx helped her get that sorted too.

Jinx created his own OnlyFans account so he could understand the platform better, and Margo told him everything she had learned

so far. Their new plan was to do a copromotion every two weeks. “To build a fanbase who will stay subscribed month after month

takes time and a lot of work,” Jinx said. “Men like variety. Their natural inclination will be to subscribe to different girls

every month.”

“Okay, yeah,” Margo said, massaging her forehead. Jinx would certainly know about craving variety.

“But how do you override the male preference for sexual variety?” Jinx was clearly in a Socratic mood, high off giving so

much advice. “Love,” he said. “You have to make them fall in love with you.”

“I don’t think they’re going to love me,” Margo said. “I mean, half the time they’re telling me to kill myself or that my

nipples are crooked.”

“That’s just the internet,” Jinx said, “a disgusting place, really. This is kind of like trying to have a nice dinner party

in hell. Certain things you’re just going to have to put up with. So how do you make someone fall in love with you?”

Margo felt it was obvious she did not know.

“What I am trying to say is that you need to think about your persona. You need to be someone worth falling in love with—you

teach them how to love you by showing them who you are.”

“Yeah,” Margo said. Because she could see that: Arabella and WangMangler both managed to be unforgettable, whereas most of the other accounts she’d seen tended to blur together into an undulating sea of boobs.

“Are you a heel or a face?” Jinx asked. “The bad guy or good guy?”

“This isn’t wrestling, Dad,” Margo said. It scared her that he’d even asked. She had hoped she was an obvious baby face. She

couldn’t imagine being brave or charismatic enough to be a heel. She and Shyanne both had those stupid, innocent faces.

“Everything is wrestling,” Jinx said.

“Honestly, I don’t think I have what it takes to be a heel.” Margo shrugged.

“So you’re a face,” Jinx said, like that was settled.

Margo sighed. None of this was helpful when all you were doing was taking pictures of your tits. Heel and face played off

each other, defined each other, like light and dark. Margo was alone in every frame, translated into nothing but pixels, frozen

and ready to be jacked off to.

Bodhi, meanwhile, was now three months old and mysteriously getting cuter and cuter. Once, in the very beginning, when Margo

was grocery shopping with a three-week-old Bodhi strapped to her chest, greasy hair slicked back in a ponytail, a woman had

stopped her to admire the baby and said, “They get even cuter.” Margo had been a little miffed, honestly. Bodhi even at three

weeks was the most beautiful and miraculous thing she’d ever beheld. That lady had been right, though. Margo kept wondering

what the apex of his cuteness would be and when it would begin its descent, but each day he seemed to be cuter than the last.

One day Margo bought some flowers from a stand on the corner downtown, tangerine-colored roses. She was wearing Bodhi and held the flowers up to his nose. He didn’t react. Then she pantomimed sniffing them herself and held the bouquet to him again. This time he sniffed, and his face lit up. He smelled the beautiful smell! She had told him about it, and he understood her. He had literally never smelled roses before. It was a miracle. They stared at each other, beaming.

It was Jinx who ordered a What to Expect the First Year book. It was at least two inches thick and stared at Margo reproachfully from her nightstand. Every single time she tried

to read it, she got creeped out by the weirdly sentimental way it was written. It was like ad copy. One part said, “Not only

won’t she get hooked from a day or two of pacifier use, but as long as your little sucker is also getting her full share of

feeds, enjoying a little between-meal soothing from a soothie is no problem at all.”

Margo had never even worried pacifiers were bad. She’d bought them in every possible color, even the girl ones. Jinx had seen

Bodhi sucking a hot-pink one and said, “Aww, look, the newest member of the Hart Foundation!”

Jinx’s talk about Bodhi becoming a wrestler was nonstop. It was always joking, she knew that. But she would never let Bodhi

become a wrestler.

“Why not?!” Jinx had asked, alarmed when she said so.

“Because they all die horrible tragic deaths!”

Jinx tilted his head to the side, half a nod, as if to concede that this was so.

“But you wouldn’t,” he said, tweaking Bodhi’s toe where he sat in his Bumbo on the carpet. “Because you’re too tough.”

The truth was Margo had never loved wrestling. On some level, she’d viewed it as the reason her father was constantly leaving.

Murder and Mayhem, even more than Cheri and the kids, were the reason he left them again and again. A teenage Margo couldn’t

help watching Monday Night Raw and thinking, For this?

Now that Jinx was living with them, wrestling was on all the time, and she found herself watching it in a new way. For one thing, she was now an Arabella superfan. As an adult, it was much clearer that the stunts they were doing were amazing, especially the high flyers. She was a lot more interested in their biographies too. Jinx personally knew almost everybody, and the anecdotes were simply off the chain. Did she know that the Hart boys had a pet bear growing up? And they’d drip Fudgsicles on their toes in the summer and let the bear lick them clean? Jinx watched a lot of old matches in Japan. He loved Tiger Mask and the Dynamite Kid, who always triggered stories of the truly awful pranks the Dynamite Kid would pull, putting lit cigarettes in Jake’s snake bag so his snake would get pissed and bite him, or injecting his tag team partner Davey with milk instead of steroids. “He had the temperament of a terrier dog,” Jinx would say.

These men were fucked up and frequently deranged. They were also devoted, Margo couldn’t help but feel, to something that

could only be called art.

Suzie also got into watching wrestling with Jinx; in a way it was LARPing adjacent. “Wrestling is not fake,” Jinx used to

say, “it is merely predetermined.”

But in a way, wasn’t everything? Margo wondered. That was one of the things Mark had told her, that as far as neuroscience

was concerned, free will couldn’t be real. That our brains only invented explanations, justifications for what our body was

already getting ready to do. That consciousness was a fabulous illusion. We were inferring our own state of mind the same

way we inferred the minds of others: thinking someone is mad when they frown, sad when they cry. We feel the physiological

sensation of anger and we think, I’m mad because Tony stole my banana! But we’re just making stuff up, fairy tales to explain

the deep dark woods of being alive.

The first week after the WangMangler promo, about fifty people canceled their subscription, and I decided that was normal.

Buyer’s remorse. The next week another fifty people canceled, and some of them wrote decidedly angry messages about why. This

account was a scam. There were no pictures of my vagina. The problem was simple: my account did not contain material it was

possible to jack off to.

A kindly fan, one who didn’t unsubscribe, suggested I begin making longer videos. He suggested two and a half minutes as being a standard “jack-off length,” so I tried to aim for that. I knew the guy had probably meant a video of me masturbating, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not while Jinx was watching Bodhi on the other side of the door. It felt too real.

The last copromotion we’d run was a total bust, and we spent $500 to get forty new fans. I was beginning to have a sinking

feeling, like the account I’d thought I was building was slipping through my fingers.

It was around this time that I received a strange message. Obviously, I received a lot of strange messages. This one was strange

because it was direct and professional. It said: I see you do written dick ratings, would you be open to other written work? —JB.

I don’t think a single fan had ever referred to what I was doing for them as work before. It was refreshing. Most of the messages

were things like, hey, and u r so hot ; sometimes they were telling me to shove a knife up my pussy or drink drain cleaner. One guy offered to pay me $500 to film

myself pooping into a soup can. It was out of the question; I would have trouble pooping in a soup can even without the pressure

of being filmed. So JB’s message was distinctly different from what I usually received. I was intrigued but also worried he’d

ask for fanfic erotica where I made us have a threesome with Logan Paul or something.

I clicked through to his profile so I could enlarge his pic. Most guys didn’t upload anything, their profile stayed an outline

of a head, like a children’s board game; others posted their abs or dick, or an anime character, or a Pepe the Frog meme.

JB’s was a close-up on the face of an aged black pug, its muzzle flecked with white.

I wrote back in the chat: Is the dog in your profile pic yours or just a random internet dog?

He wrote: My dog.

HungryGhost: Name, please?

JB: Is this a test?

HungryGhost: Yes.

JB: I’m going to fail.

HungryGhost: Why?

JB: His name is Jelly Bean. My niece named him.

I considered this. You pass. What kind of written work did you have in mind?

JB: $100 to tell me about your family’s holiday traditions.

I stared at the screen.

My brain was ticking. I couldn’t think of how this information would be useful to him. And if he didn’t want it for practical

reasons involving a scam, it meant he wanted it for emotional reasons. He was asking for something real from me. He was trying

to get at the me behind the pictures. It made me angry, though I couldn’t define exactly why. I just kept thinking, How dare

he!

Why? I asked.

JB: I think it’s hot thinking about you being a real person.

I raised my eyebrows, but it was not a bad way of spinning the terrible, swollen loneliness that would drive a person to ask

for this. And a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks, after all, and there was no way I was letting little Jelly Bean get anything

real from me.

So I lied. I made up a whole different family, said I had an older brother and my dad was in sales, and Dad would always get

these bonuses at work that were like hotel points and airline miles, and every Christmas we’d take a vacation, spend Christmas

in Hawaii or Paris or Bermuda. This sounded too idyllic, too made up, even though I was stealing it from Becca’s actual life,

so I added a bunch of stuff about how there was so much pressure to be happy on these trips, but really, I just wanted all

those normal things: the Christmas tree, the stockings, our house feeling like magic. And instead, it was always a hotel room,

white sheets, blue-toned art on the walls; some gifts would appear, only a few, the wrapping a little smooshed, so I knew

they’d been stuffed in my parents’ suitcases. My brother told me there was no Santa when I was six, but I still wished we

could all pretend. I wished my dad did a better job hiding his affairs. I wished my mom did a better job hiding her boredom.

Honestly, I kind of had myself choked up by the end, even though none of this was true. I pressed send. The $100 tip came

through immediately. Then he offered to pay $100 for a description of my mother. Like a portrait of her. He was interested

because I said she was bored.

You poor sick puppy, I thought, then spent the next hour composing a portrait of my fictional mother. I tried to make it interesting.

The rough outline of the parents, the salesman dad and bored mom, I’d stolen from Becca—but I couldn’t exactly say where the

rest of it came from. It was fun: making things up, pulling each detail out of the dark of my mind like a rabbit from a hat.