Margo's Got Money Troubles
by Rufi Thorpe
Contents
Chapter One
Overview
Margo, a nineteen-year-old new mother, navigates a fraught birth and lonely homecoming while recalling the affair with her married professor, Mark, that led to Bodhi’s birth. The chapter establishes Margo’s shaky support system, her vulnerability, and Mark’s manipulations, setting stakes around responsibility, power, and identity.
Summary
The chapter opens in a playful second-person frame about starting a novel, then pivots to Margo’s baby shower, where her boss Tessa unveils a vulgar penis cake to make light of Margo’s situation: nineteen, unmarried, and pregnant by her professor. Margo laughs along but later cries, recognizing Tessa’s love as both mean and affectionate.
Pressure from Shyanne, Margo’s mother, and from the professor to get an abortion underscores Margo’s defiance in keeping the baby, even as this choice distances them. During labor, Shyanne shows up late with a fancy teddy bear and spends the night playing online poker, yet fiercely defends Margo’s chosen baby name, Bodhi, by slapping a mocking nurse. After an exhausting delivery, Margo is flooded with love and worry when Bodhi is placed on her chest.
Released from the hospital without help, Margo panics over basic logistics—detaching the car seat, carrying bags, managing pain—and hauls Bodhi to her shared apartment behind a gas station. Terrified of harming him and crushed by solitude, she nurses him and falls asleep beside him, feeling as if she’s stranded on an abandoned space station.
The narrative shifts to Margo’s recollection of meeting Mark in 2017 in his class on unusual points of view. Mark praises her writing, questions why she’s at a junior college, and invites her to coffee. Their rapport builds as he mentors her sentence by sentence and insists on her talent, while a class exchange with Derek reveals Mark’s fixation on artifice and authorship.
After a rainy campus walk, Mark asks to kiss Margo under a eucalyptus tree, initiating the affair. He later visits her messy apartment incognito, awkwardly encounters her roommate Suzie, and has passionate, impractical sex with Margo. His boundary violations—rummaging through her desk, prying off a bottle cap on her furniture—mirror deeper moral lapses as he confesses to sleeping with his wife’s sister on his wedding night. Margo, who withholds details about her pro-wrestler father, recognizes the power imbalance and Mark’s immaturity even as she benefits from his guidance.
The chapter closes with Mark’s poem, “The Hungry Ghost,” encapsulating their attempt to fill emotional voids through each other, and framing Margo’s present-tense exhaustion and isolation as consequences of choices shaped by desire, power, and the lure of unreality.
Who Appears
- MargoNineteen-year-old narrator; gives birth to Bodhi, brings him home alone, and recalls her affair with Mark.
- MarkMarried English professor; mentors Margo, initiates an affair, kisses her in the rain, confesses past infidelity.
- ShyanneMargo’s mother; urged abortion, arrives late with a teddy bear, slaps a nurse defending Bodhi’s name.
- BodhiMargo’s newborn son; small and fragile, his arrival overwhelms Margo with love and fear.
- TessaMargo’s boss; hosts crude but affectionate baby shower with an outrageous penis cake.
- SuzieMargo’s roommate; LARPer who banters with Mark and witnesses his awkward arrival.
- DerekClassmate; spars with Mark about literary interpretation, highlighting Mark’s views on artifice.
- NurseHospital nurse who mocks Bodhi’s name and is slapped by Shyanne.
- OBDelivering physician; coaches Margo through labor with brisk, practiced authority.
- Kat the SmallerRoommate heard puking during Mark’s first visit; background presence in the apartment.