Kelly Link - Get in Trouble - Stories

And then there’s the Face. Who is a nobody, a real person, who comes and takes your place at the table. They get an education, the best health care, a salary, all the nice clothes and all the same toys that you get. They get your parents whenever the Olds’ team decides there’s a need or an opportunity. If you go online, or turn on the TV, there they are, being you. Being better than you will ever be at being you. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you have to be careful, or you’ll start to feel very strange. Is that really you?

Most politicians have Faces, too. For safety. Because it shouldn’t matter what someone looks like, or how good they are at making a speech, but of course it does. The difference is that politicians choose to have their Faces. They choose.

The Olds like to say it’s because we’re children. We’ll understand when we’re older, when we start our adult lives without blemish, without online evidence of our mistakes, our indiscretions. No sexytime videos. No embarrassing photos of ourselves in Nazi regalia or topless in Nice. No footage before the nose job, before the boob job, before the acne clears up.

The Olds get us into good colleges, and then the world tilts just for a moment. Our Faces retire. We get a few years to make our own mistakes, out in the open, and then we settle down, and we come into our millions or billions or whatever. We inherit the earth, like that proverb says. The rich shall inherit the earth.

We get married, merge our money with other money, im prove our Q ratings, become Olds, acquire kids, and you bet your ass those kids are going to have Faces, just like we did.

I never got into the Egyptian thing the way the girls did. I always liked the Norse gods better. You know. Loki. The slaying of Baldur. Ragnarok.

None of the other guys showed up for ’s party. It’s just their Faces. The guys all left for the moon about a week ago. They’ve been partying up there all week. I’ve never been into the space travel thing. Plenty of ways to have fun without leaving the planet.

It wasn’t hard to get hold of the thing I was looking for. Darius couldn’t help me, but he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew exactly what I was talking about. We met in Las Vegas, because why not? We saw a show together, and then we went online and watched a video that had been filmed in his lab. Somewhere in Moldova, he said. He said his name was Nikolay.

I showed him my video. The one I’d made for the party for ’s pyramid dedication thingy.

We were both very drunk. I’d taken Darius’s blocker, and Nikolay was interested in that. I explained about the Entourage, how you had to work around it if you wanted to have fun. He was sympathetic.

He liked the video a lot.

“That’s me,” I told him. “That’s .”

“Not you,” he said. “You’re making joke at me. You have Entourage device. But, girl, she’s very nice. Very sexy.”

“That’s my sister,” I said. “She’s seventeen.”

“Another joke,” Nikolay said. “But, if my sister, I would go ahead, fuck her anyway.”

“How could you do this to me?” wants to know.

“It had nothing to do with you.” I pat her back when she starts to cry. I don’t know whether she’s talking about the sexy video or the other thing.

“It was bad enough when you slept with her,” she says, weeping. “That was practically incest. But I saw the video.” So: the video, then. “The one you gave . The one she’s going to put online. Don’t you understand? She’s me. He’s you. That’s us, on that video, that’s us having sex.”

“It was good enough for the Egyptians,” I say, trying to console her. “Besides, it isn’t us. Remember? They aren’t us.”

I try to remember what it was like when it was just us. The Olds say we slept in the same crib. I was a baby, she climbed in. cried when I fell down. has always been the one who cries.

“How did you know what I was planning?”

“Oh, please, ,” says. “I always know when you’re about to go off the deep end. You go around with this smile on your face, like the whole world is sucking you off. Besides, Darius told me you’d been asking about really bad shit. He likes me, you know. He likes me much better than you.”

“He’s the only one,” I say.

“Fuck you,” says. “Anyway, it’s not like you were the only one with plans for tonight. I’m sick of this place. Sick of these people.”

There is a martial line of shabti on a stone shelf. Our friends. People who would like to be our friends. Rock stars that the Olds used to hang out with, movie stars. Saudi princes who like fat, gloomy girls with money. She picks up a prince, throws it against the wall.

“Fuck and all her unicorns,” says.

She picks up another shabti. “Fuck .”

I take from her. “I did,” I say. “I give her a three out of five. For enthusiasm.” I drop the shabti on the floor.

“You are so vile, ,” says. “Have you ever been in love? Even once?”

She’s fishing. She knows. Of course she knows.

Why did you sleep with him? Are you in love with him? He’s me. Why aren’t I him? Fuck both of you.

“Fuck our parents,” I say. I pick up an oil lamp and throw it at the shabti on the shelf.

The room gets brighter for a moment, then darker.

“It’s funny,” says. “We used to do everything together. And then we didn’t. And right now, it’s weird. You planning on doing what you were going to do. And me, what I was planning. It’s like we were in each other’s brains again.”

“You went out and bought a biological agent? We should have gone in on it together. Buy two, get one free.”