Kelly Link - Get in Trouble - Stories

Once, for about a month or two, I decided I was going to be a different kind of guy. Muscley. Not always thinking so much. My body was going to be a temple, not a dive bar. The kitchen made me smoothies, raw eggs blended with kale and wheat germ and bee pollen. That sort of thing. I stopped drinking, flushed all of Darius’s goodies down the toilet. I was civil to my Face. I went running. I read the books, did the homework my tutor assigned. I was a model son, a good brother. The Olds didn’t know what to think.

, of course, knew something was up. always knew. Maybe she saw the way I watched her Face when there was an event and we all had to do the public thing.

Meanwhile I could see the way that ’s Face looked at my Face. There was no way this was going to end well. So I gave up on raw eggs and virtue and love. Fell right back into the old life, the high life, the good, sweet, sour, rotten old life. Was it much of a life? It had its moments.

“Oh, shit,” says. “I think I’ve made a terrible mistake. Help me, . Help me, please?”

She drops the snake. I step hard on its head. Nobody here is having a good night.

“You have to give me the code,” I say. “Give me the code and I’ll go get help.”

She bends over and pukes stale champagne on my shoes. There are two drops of blood on her arm. “It hurts,” she says. “It hurts really bad!”

“Give me the code, .”

She cries for a while, and then she stops. She won’t say anything. She just sits and rocks. I stroke her hair, and ask her for the code. When she doesn’t give it to me, I go over and start trying numbers. I try her birthday, then mine. I try a lot of numbers. None of them work.

I chased the same route every day for that month. Down through the woods at the back of the main guesthouse, into the Valley of the Girls just as the sun was coming up. That’s how you ought to see the pyramids, you know. With the sun coming up. I liked to take a piss at the foot of ’s pyramid. Later on I told I pissed on her pyramid. “Marking your territory, ?” she said. She ran her fingers through my hair.

I don’t love . I don’t hate . Her Face has this plush, red mouth. Once I put a finger up against her lips, just to see how they felt. You’re not supposed to mess with people’s Faces, but everybody I know does it. What’s the Face going to do? Quit?

But has better legs. Longer, rounder, the kind you want to die between. I wish she were here right now. The sun is up, but it isn’t going to shine on me for a long time. We’re down here in the cold, and isn’t speaking to me.

What is it with rich girls and pyramids, anyway?

In hieroglyphs, you put the names of the important people, kings and queens and gods, in a cartouche. Like this.

“Were you really going to do it?” wants to know. This is before the snake, before I know what she’s up to.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Why?”

“Why not?” I say. “Lots of reasons. ‘Why’ is kind of a dumb question, isn’t it? I mean, why did God make me so pretty? Why size four jeans?”

There’s a walk-in closet in the burial chamber. I went through it looking for something useful. Anything useful. Silk shawls, crushed velvet dresses, black jeans in the wrong size. A stereo system loaded with the kind of music rich goth girls listen to. Extra pillows. Sterling silver. Perfumes, makeup. A mummified cat. . I remember when died. We were eight. They were already laying the foundations of ’s pyramid. The Olds called in the embalmers.

We helped with the natron. I had nightmares for a week.

says, “They’re for the afterlife, okay?”

“You’re not going to be fat in the afterlife?” At this point, I still don’t know ’s plan, but I’m starting to worry. has a taste for the epic. I suppose it runs in the family.

“My Ba is skinny,” says. “Unlike yours, . You may be skinny on the outside, but you have a fat-ass heart. Anubis will judge you. Ammit will devour you.”

She sounds so serious. I should laugh. You try laughing when you’re down in the dark, in your sister’s secret burial chamber — not the decoy one where everybody hangs out and drinks, where once — oh, God, how sweet is that memory still — you and your sister’s Face did it on the memorial stone — under three hundred thousand limestone blocks, down at the bottom of a shaft behind a door in an antechamber that maybe somebody, in a couple of hundred years, will stumble into.