Kelly Link - Get in Trouble - Stories

Immy grabs the absinthe. “Okay.”

Elin says, “Immy? Can I ask you something?”

Immy waits.

Elin says, “I don’t get it. This Boyfriend thing. They’re creepy. They’re fake. They’re not real. I know how much you want one. And I know it sucks. How Ainslie gets everything she wants.”

Immy blurts out, “Justin has no sense of humor. And he uses way too much body spray. He kisses like it’s arm wrestling, except with lips. Lip wrestling.”

“Maybe he just needs more practice?” Elin says. “I mean, Ainslie’s Boyfriends don’t kiss at all. They’re just really big dolls. They’re not real. ”

“Maybe I don’t want real,” Immy says.

“Whatever it is you don’t want, I hope you get it. I guess.” Elin takes the absinthe bottle from Immy, takes a long slug from the mouth. A real one. Apparently Elin wants real, even if real isn’t all that great. Immy suddenly feels very fond of her. Elin isn’t always a good friend, but okay, she’s a real friend and Immy appreciates that just as much as the way she really, really didn’t appreciate it when Justin wanted to lip wrestle.

They go back to the dance party and the real friends and the fake Boyfriends. They leave Ainslie’s Mint all alone with the ring of hair in his mouth. Immy doesn’t feel guilty about that at all. It was a present for Ainslie and Immy is giving it to her. More or less.

There’s only a sludgy oily residue left in the absinthe bottle by the time they go to bed. Oliver and Alan are back in their coffins in the closet downstairs in the rec room, and Ainslie has blown out all of the candles in the sunroom. They’ve eaten the rest of the cake. Sky is already passed out on a couch in the living room.

Is Mint around? Ainslie says he probably is. “The Ghost Boyfriends are supposed to be kind of shy at first when you put them in Spectral Mode. They don’t manifest much right at the beginning. You’re just supposed to see them out of the corner of your eye, once in a while. When you aren’t expecting them.”

“Is that supposed to be fun?” Elin says. “Because it doesn’t sound like fun.”

“It’s supposed to be real,” Ainslie says. “Like a real ghost. Like a real ghost is falling in love with you. Like, he could be here right now. Watching us. Watching me. ”

There is something about the way she says this. Ainslie is so sure of being loved.

“On that note,” Elin says, “I’m going to go crash on your mom’s bed. Your new boyfriend better stay the hell out of there.” Elin doesn’t like to sleep in the same room as everyone else. She says it’s because she snores. “When is your mom getting back, Ainslie?”

“Not until two or three tomorrow. I made her promise to call before she shows up.” Ainslie is swaying on her feet. She keeps putting her hand out to balance on things: the side table, the back of a settee, the lid of the coffin. She stumbles and almost falls in, catches herself. “Good night, Mint. God, you’re cute. Even cuter than Oliver. Don’t you think so?”

The question is for Immy. “I guess,” she says, her heart burning for just one beat, with that hatred, that old poison. She watches Ainslie lean over, precariously, and plant a noisy kiss on Mint’s forehead.

“I slept in Oliver’s coffin once,” Ainslie says to Elin and Immy. Immy isn’t sure what to say to that, and apparently Elin doesn’t know, either.

Immy feels lit up and inside out, her hands and feet heavy and slow as lead, her skull and her rib cage emptied and clean. All that poison dried up. A powder.

Or maybe this is just the way she thinks getting drunk on absinthe should feel. She should probably go drink some water, take some Tylenol.

Immy always sleeps in Ainslie’s bed when she stays over. She has her own toothbrush in Ainslie’s bathroom, borrows Ainslie’s T-shirts to wear to bed. Immy even has a favorite pillow, and Ainslie always remembers which one it is. In the morning, she’ll wear Ainslie’s clothes home if she wants to. Ainslie never minds.

They brush their teeth and they get dressed for bed, and they turn out the lights and get into bed, and all of that time Immy can hardly breathe, she doesn’t even want to blink, because maybe Mint is in the room with them. Maybe he is coming. Perhaps she will look up and Mint will be there. He will be there and then he’ll be gone again. She knows Ainslie is thinking the same thing. Ainslie is watching for Mint, too.

“This has been a really, really good birthday,” Ainslie says in the dark. “It’s everything I wanted it to be. I got everything I wanted.”

“I’m glad,” Immy says. She means it, too. “You deserve everything you’re getting.”

Immy doesn’t think she’ll be able to go to sleep. She doesn’t want to sleep, she wants to stay awake. She could wait until Ainslie is asleep and go back to the sunroom. Maybe Mint will go there first. After all, his body is there. She tries to think of what she would say to him, what he might say to her. And soon enough Ainslie’s asleep and then Immy’s asleep, too.

When she wakes up — she is in the middle of a nightmare, something about a garden — someone is standing beside the bed. A boy. Mint. He’s looking down at Ainslie. Ainslie asleep, Ainslie’s mouth open, and Mint is touching Ainslie’s mouth with his thumb.

Immy sits up in bed.

Mint looks right at her. He looks at her and he smiles. He touches his fingers to his own mouth. Then he disappears.

Immy doesn’t see the Ghost Boyfriend again for two weeks. Ainslie says he’s around. She thinks he’s exploring the house. She sees him, just for seconds at a time, in different rooms, then he’s gone. He shows up almost every time Ainslie watches TV. Usually during the commercial breaks.

“He likes to watch commercials?” Immy says. They’re at the yogurt place, loading toppings on their frozen yogurt. Blueberries, raspberries, mochi.

“I think he’s being considerate,” Ainslie says. “He doesn’t want to interrupt what I’m doing, so he waits for the commercial breaks. Like, I never see him in the bathroom or when I’m getting dressed for school. So I think it’s the same thing with the TV.”

Over in the corner of the yogurt shop a middle-aged woman sits and moves a stroller back and forth with one hand while she eats with the other. Immy keeps looking over. She can’t tell if it’s a real baby in the stroller or a Baby.

“So he’s there for a few seconds and he does what, exactly?” she says.

“He watches TV with me. The commercials. He seems to like the commercials where a man and a woman are driving somewhere in a car. You know, those ones where there’s a road going alongside the ocean? Or a hill. He looks at the commercials on TV and he looks at me,” Ainslie says. “He just looks at me. Like no one has ever looked at me before. And then he goes away.”

There’s something about the way Ainslie says this, about her face, and so Immy does what the Ghost Boyfriend does. She looks at Ainslie as carefully and as closely as she can. Ainslie looks like she had a very bad night’s sleep. Her lips are chapped and there’s lots of concealer, poorly applied, under her eyes. As if she’s keeping secrets there, under the skin. “Do you ever see him at night? In your bedroom?”

Ainslie blinks. “No,” she says. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Good,” Immy says. “Because that would be creepy, if he was there looking at you while you were asleep.”

Ainslie’s face crumples, just a little. “Yeah. That would be creepy.”

School is school. Why can’t it ever be something else? Immy can’t believe she has two more years of this. Two more years of equations and sad books where bad things happen to boring people and Justin giving her wounded looks. Okay, so maybe he’ll get over it faster than that. If she ignores him. Two more years of unflattering gym shorts and Spanish that she’s never going to use and having to be the person that she’s always been, because that’s the person that everyone thinks she is. That everyone assumes she’s always going to be. Everyone thinks this is the real Immy. And what if the Immy they see is the real Immy, and the one on the inside is just hormones and chemicals and too many little secrets and weird jumbled thoughts that don’t mean anything, after all?