Kelly Link - Get in Trouble - Stories

Maybe she should shave her head. Maybe she should take her classes more seriously. Maybe she should give Justin another chance. Maybe not.

She has a dream that night. She’s driving a fast car along a curving road. The ocean is far below. The Ghost Boyfriend sits in the passenger seat. They don’t say anything to each other. The moon is high overhead.

She texts Ainslie in the morning. I dreamed about your Boyfi. Weird right?

Ainslie doesn’t text back.

That afternoon Immy and Sky go over to Ainslie’s house to study for a Spanish quiz. Elin takes AP Latin because, Elin.

They mostly don’t study, though. They ransack the cupboards for the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Little Debbie Spinwheels and bags of Oreos that Ainslie’s mother hides away in soup tureens and behind boxes of rice and cereal. Once they found a little baggie with weed in it and they flushed it down the toilet.

Ainslie says they’re doing her mother a favor eating the Oreos and Reese’s. They’re teenagers. They have higher metabolisms.

Sky says, “ Dónde está Mint?”

Ainslie says, “He’s downstairs. In the rec room with Oliver and Alan.” She’s decapitating a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Ainslie only eats the insides. Like a spider. Spiders only eat the insides. “I turned him off, actually.”

“You did what?” Immy says.

“I turned him off,” Ainslie says. “He was kind of freaking my mom out. I can see why they did the recall. It’s not romantic, having a Boyfriend pop in and out of existence all the time. And it’s not like Mint ever said anything romantic. He just stared. And, you know, after a week it felt like if I was looking in one direction, maybe he was right there behind me. I got a sore neck because I kept jerking my head back to look up at the ceiling because once I looked up and he was there. And once I found him under the kitchen table. So I kept having to look under things, too.”

“Just like a real ghost in a movie,” Sky says. Sky loves scary movies. No one will go see them with her.

“What about Embodied? Did you try him out in Embodied Mode?” Immy says.

“Yeah,” Ainslie says. “And that was also no fun. He said all the right stuff, the stuff Oliver and Alan say, but you know what? I didn’t buy it. I don’t know. Maybe we’re getting too old for Boyfriends.”

“Let’s go turn him on,” Sky says. “I want to see. I want to see him float up on the ceiling.”

“No,” Ainslie says. Ainslie never says no. They both stare at her. The little pile of emptied Reese’s Cups. She says, “Here. You want the chocolate?”

Ainslie wants to show them something online. It’s an actor they all like. He’s naked and you can totally see his penis. They’ve all seen penises online before, but this one belongs to someone famous. Sky and Ainslie go looking for other famous penises, and Immy goes back to the kitchen to study. But first she goes down to the rec room.

The rec room is full of Ainslie’s mother’s abandoned projects. An easel with a smock still draped across it. A sewing machine, a rowing machine, bins of fabric and half-finished scrapbooks with pictures of Ainslie and Immy when they could still run around the yard naked, Ainslie and Immy and Sky when they had their first ballet recital, Ainslie and Immy and Sky and Elin graduating from middle school. Back before Ainslie’s parents divorced, and Immy got boobs and Ainslie got Boyfriends. All those Ainslies and Immys, with their dolls and their princess dresses and Halloween costumes and Valentines. Immy’s always been the prettier one. Ainslie isn’t a dog, isn’t hideous, but Immy’s much prettier. If Boyfriends worked the usual way, Immy could get one like that.

But maybe then she wouldn’t want one.

There are three coffins standing up inside the closet of the rec room. No room for a fourth, is Immy’s first thought. They used to spend hours playing with Oliver and Alan. Now they hardly ever do. That’s her second. And it’s not like Immy can just suggest bringing them out. They belong to Ainslie. It’s not like playing dolls. It’s more like telling your friend you want to hang out with some fake people she keeps in her closet, and anyway they’re only nice to you because Ainslie wants them to be nice to you. If Immy had a Boyfriend she wouldn’t keep him in a closet in her basement.

The first coffin she opens is Oliver. The second one is Mint. It’s a ridiculous name. No wonder he’s been acting weird.

“Hi, Mint,” she says. “It’s Immy again. Wake up.”

Then she holds her breath, and turns around to look for him, but he’s not there, of course. He’s just a fake boy in a fake coffin, right? That’s what Ainslie thinks, anyway. What Immy thinks is you shouldn’t be able to just turn your Boyfriend off, just because he’s not the way you want him to be.

She sticks her fingers into his hair. It’s incredibly soft. Real hair, which should be creepy, but it’s not. If he were Ainslie’s real boyfriend, she couldn’t do this.

She finds the little soft place behind the ear and presses down. Once for Embodied, twice for Spectral Mode. She presses down again. She wakes him up.

When she closes the lid of the coffin and turns around, this time the Ghost Boyfriend is perched on an exercise bike. He’s staring at her like she’s really there. Like he knows her, knows something about her.

Like he sees the real Immy, the one she isn’t sure is really there. Right now, though, she’s real. Immy is real. They both are. They’re making each other realer the longer they look at each other, and isn’t that what love should be? Isn’t that what love should do?

“I’m Immy,” she says. “Imogen.”

She says, “I wish you could tell me your real name. Ainslie doesn’t know I did this. So be careful. Don’t let her see you.”

He smiles at her. She puts out her hand, moves it to where she would be touching his face, if she could touch his face. “If you belonged to me,” Immy says, “I wouldn’t keep you in a box in a closet in the dark. If you were my Boyfriend.”

The rest of the night is penis GIFs and Oreos and Spanish vocabulary. When Ainslie’s mother gives Immy and Sky a ride home, Immy looks back and she thinks maybe she can see a boy looking out of the window of Ainslie’s bedroom. It’s kind of a gas to think about Ainslie being home all alone with her Ghost Boyfriend. Immy falls asleep that night thinking about Ainslie, and ceilings, and kitchen tables, and Mint’s soft, baby-fine hair. She wonders whose hair it was.

Immy doesn’t know if Ainslie knows she’s being haunted. She seems out of sorts, but that could just be Ainslie-and-her-mother stuff. Meanwhile, Sky and Elin are having a fight about some boots that Elin borrowed and wore in the rain. All Immy can think about is Mint. She keeps having that dream about the car and the highway and the ocean. Mint there in the dark with her, the moon above them. Maybe it means something? It ought to mean something.

Friday night is Elin’s birthday present to Ainslie, tickets to see O Hell, Kitty! play at the Coliseum. Sky and Immy are going to have a movie night without them, except then Elin gets Sky a ticket, too, an apology for ruining her boots.

Whatever, Immy doesn’t want to go anyway.

The idea comes to her when she hears about Ainslie’s mom, who was going to be the ride to the concert, and who, it turns out, has gotten a ticket for herself after watching some videos on O Hell, Kitty!’s YouTube channel. Embarrassing for Ainslie, sure, but this is Immy’s chance to see Mint.

Immy knows where Ainslie’s mom keeps a spare house key. She knows the alarm code, too. One of the benefits of a long-standing friendship: it makes breaking and entering so much easier.