Kelly Link - Get in Trouble - Stories

“Weirdish,” Elin says. “But okay.”

“Come on,” Ainslie says. So they all go over and stand around the box, and then Ainslie leans down and sticks her fingers into the Ghost Boyfriend’s hair, moving them around until evidently she’s found the right place.

His eyes open. He has really pretty eyes. Long lashes. He looks at them, each in turn. His lips part, just a little, like he is about to say something. But he doesn’t.

Immy is blushing. She knows she’s blushing.

“Hi,” Ainslie says. “I’m your girlfriend. Ainslie. You’re Mint. You’re my Boyfriend.”

The new Boyfriend’s eyelids flutter shut. Eyelashes like black fans. Skin just like skin. Even his fingernails are perfect and so real, as real as anything Immy has ever seen.

When his eyes open again, he only looks at Ainslie.

“Okay, so, we’ll see you later,” Ainslie says.

She straightens up and says to Immy and Elin and Sky, “You guys want to put on some music and dance or something?”

“Wait,” Elin says. “What about him? I mean it. Are you just going to leave it in there?”

“It takes them a while to wake up the first time,” Sky says. Sky has a Biblical Handmaiden. Esther. Sky’s parents were kind of religious for a while.

“Oh, yeah,” Ainslie says. “There’s one other thing. We have to choose a mode. Embodied or Spectral. What do you think?”

“Embodied,” Elin says.

“Embodied,” Sky says.

“Spectral,” Immy says.

“Okay,” Ainslie says. “Spectral. Might as well.” She reaches back down, runs her fingers through her Boyfriend’s hair again. “There. Now let’s go out on the deck and dance in the moonlight. Come on, Oliver. Alan. You, too.”

Ainslie and Elin DJ. The moon is perfectly round and bright. The night is warm. Ainslie tells Oliver and Alan to dance with Immy and Sky.

Which is the kind of thing Ainslie does. She isn’t ever selfish. You have to have things in order to be generous with them. Right?

Immy and Oliver dance. She’s in his arms, really, his hand on the small of her back. It’s sort of a waltz that they’re doing, which doesn’t really suit whatever song this is, but Oliver can do either the waltz or the tango — or a kind of sway-y standing-there dance. Sky bounces around with Alan, who still has his wolf head on. Alan is actually more fun to dance with than Oliver is, although the bouncing gets tiring after a while.

“Are you happy, darling?” Oliver the Vampire Boyfriend says, so softly Immy has to ask him to repeat himself. Not that this is, strictly speaking, necessary. Oliver always asks the same questions.

“Sure,” she says. Then, “Well, I don’t know. Not really. I could be happier. I’d like to be happier.” Why not? If you can’t be honest with your best friend’s Vampire Boyfriend, who can you be honest with? Vampires are all about secrets and unhappiness. Secret unhappinesses. You can see it in their black and fathomless eyes.

“I wish you were happy, my love,” Oliver says. He presses her more firmly against his body, nuzzles her hair. “How can I be happy if you are not?”

“Ainslie’s your love. Not me,” Immy says. She really isn’t in the mood. Besides, sometimes it’s just really too weird, playing pretend eternal love with a borrowed Boyfriend when what you really want is your own Boyfriend. It would be so, so much nicer to have your own. “So, I mean, don’t be unhappy on my account.”

“As you wish,” Oliver says. “I shall be unhappy on my own account. How happy it makes me, oh delicious one, to be unhappy together with you.” He clasps her even tighter in his arms, until she has to ask him to ease up just a little. It’s a fine line between being cuddled and being squeezed like a juice box, and Vampire Boyfriends sometimes cross right over that line, maybe without even noticing.

There is also the endless hovering and the endless brooding and all the endless talk about how delicious you are and eternity and they like you to read poetry at them, the old-fashioned rhyming kind, even. It’s supposed to be educational, okay? Like the way Werewolf Boyfriends go on and on about the environment, and also are always trying to get you to go running with them.

Immy doesn’t get music. She doesn’t want to get it. The way it wants to make you feel something. Just because it’s a minor chord, you’re supposed to feel sad? Just because it goes faster, your pulse is supposed to speed up? Why should you have to do what the music wants you to do? Why shouldn’t it do what you want? She doesn’t want a soundtrack for her life. And she doesn’t want somebody’s pretty lyrics getting in the way of what she’s really thinking. Whatever it is that she’s thinking.

Immy doesn’t want a Vampire Boyfriend. Or a Werewolf Boyfriend. Not anymore.

“I want more absinthe,” Ainslie says. “Somebody go fetch the absinthe.”

“I’ll get it, darling,” Oliver says.

“No,” Immy says. “I’ll go get it.” If you send a Boyfriend off for a bottle of homemade absinthe, likely as not he’ll come back with a bottle of conditioner. Or a lamp.

“Thanks, Immy,” Ainslie says.

“No problem,” Immy says. But maybe you can’t trust a friend, either, because instead of going straight back with the absinthe, she finds herself lingering in the sunroom, looking down at the new Boyfriend. His eyes are closed again. She reaches down and touches his face. Just one finger. His skin is very soft. It isn’t actually like skin at all, of course, but it isn’t like anything else, either. His eyes don’t open this time; he’s still not all the way awake. And anyway, Ainslie set him for Spectral Mode. His body will just lie here. His ghost will do whatever it is that ghosts do.

He could already be here, she supposes. He could be watching her.

She doesn’t feel as if she’s being watched. She feels all alone.

So it’s an impulse, maybe, that makes her reach inside her purse and take out Ainslie’s present. She rips off the wrapping paper and the ribbon, not carefully.

Inside the locket is a braided ring of human hair. Victorian, according to the online seller. Probably their own kids’ hair, but never mind.

Two pieces of the braid of hair are jet black; one is ash blond. Black for Ainslie, blond for Immy.

The ring doesn’t fit over any of Immy’s fingers. Maybe she has fat fingers. She goes back to the coffin, crouches down beside it. “Hey,” she says softly. “I’m Ainslie’s friend. Immy.”

She puts two fingers on his lips. She takes a breath and holds it, like she’s about to jump off a bridge into very deep water. Well, she is. Then she sticks her fingers inside Ainslie’s Ghost Boyfriend’s mouth. There are the teeth, and, okay, here’s the tongue. How weird is this? It’s very weird. Immy’s not saying that this isn’t weird, but she keeps on doing it anyway. Her fingers are where they really shouldn’t be.

It’s not wet like a real mouth and a real tongue would be. The teeth feel pretty real. The tongue is weird. She keeps thinking how weird this is. She slides a finger under the not-a-real-tongue, and there, underneath, is a place where, when she presses down, a kind of lid thing opens up. She fumbles the hair ring into the compartment there, and then presses the lid back down. Then she takes her fingers out of the Ghost Boyfriend’s mouth, studies that face carefully.

Nothing about it seems different to her.

When she stands up and turns around, Elin is there in the doorway. Elin says nothing, just waits.

“I thought I saw him move,” Immy says. “But he didn’t.”

Elin gives her a long look. Immy says, “What?”

“Nothing,” Elin says. She looks like she wants to say something else, and then she shrugs. “Just, come on. Oliver keeps on asking me to dance with him, and I don’t want to. You know how I feel about Ainslie’s Boyfriends.” What she is really saying is that she knows how Immy feels about them.