Margo's Got Money Troubles

by Rufi Thorpe

It’s true that writing in third person helps me. It is so much easier to have sympathy for the Margo who existed back then rather than try to explain how and why I did all the things that I did.

I like getting to be the me now watching the past me. It’s almost a way of loving myself. Stroking the cheek of that girl with my understanding. Smoothing her hair in my mind’s eye.

Mark was always insisting that characters weren’t real, that they had no psychology at all, having no actual body or mind. They were always a pawn of the author. Our job, he insisted, was to try to understand the author, not the character. The character was merely the paint—we needed to try to see the picture the paint was making.

Margo didn’t know what D.C. was like and pictured an entire city of people who had done student government in high school.

But good or evil, every single dollar was power. Power to hire a lawyer, power to control how she spent her time, power to change her appearance, power to command respect. Power to be who she wanted to be.

People are all so lonely. Even when they do horrible things, it often comes down to that, if only you take the time to understand them.

There was no changing Mark. Or Jinx, or Shyanne, or how the world worked. They were like chess pieces: they moved how they moved. If you wanted to win, you couldn’t dwell on how you wished they’d move or how it’d be fairer if they moved a different way. You had to adapt.

Love was not something, I realized, that came to you from outside. I had always thought that love was supposed to come from other people, and somehow, I was failing to catch the crumbs of it, failing to eat them, and I went around belly empty and desperate. I didn’t know the love was supposed to come from within me, and that as long as I loved others, the strength and warmth of that love would fill me, make me strong.