Excerpt from Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In the beginning, this made me feel like the power dynamic was in my favor. His professor-ness didn't blind me to his foibles: I registered fully the ridiculousness of his pants (green! corduroy!), his shoes (Birkenstocks!), the thumbed-through copy of Beowulf peeking out of his messenger bag (messenger bag!).

But it was almost like I was a character in a book to him. He couldn't get over it, the Kermit tattooed on my hip.

"Why Kermit?" he asked, the first time we slept together, rubbing Kermit's little green body with his fingertip.

I shrugged. "I wanted to get a tattoo. Everything else was, like, knives or snakes or serious things, and I'm just not a serious person."

"What kind of person are you?"

I thought about it. "A cheesy person."

"Cheesy!" he barked.

"Yes, cheesy," I said. "What, like, I believed in Santa until I was twelve. I don't know, I'm cheesy!"

"You are the most singular person I have ever met," he said wonderingly.

It was part of why I avoided ever telling him about my father. There are people who venerate professional wrestling and people who look down on professional wrestling, and I worried Mark would be the kind to venerate the thing he looked down upon. I knew my carny-ass bloodline would be an instant fetish for him.

The faker things seem the more intrigued we are by them—that was what Mark loved about point of view: the ways it was obviously fake or tried so hard to be real, which was, weirdly, another way of showing how fake it was. "The way you look at something changes what you see," he said.

Excerpted from Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe. Copyright © 2024 by Rufi Thorpe. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.