Kelly Link - Get in Trouble - Stories

Immy sees Mint twice before spring break. It makes the waiting easier. The first time is when Ainslie asks her over to help with her hair. Ainslie’s mother has decided that Ainslie can put in a streak of color, just one streak, for spring break. Ainslie can’t decide between green and red.

“Stop or go,” Immy says, looking at the squeeze tubes of Manic Panic.

“What?” Ainslie says.

“What do you want to say with your hair?” Immy asks her. “Go is green, stop is red.”

Ainslie says, “I’m not trying to make a statement here. I just want to know which one looks better, okay? Is green too weird?”

“I like the green,” Immy says. “Goes with your eyes.”

“I think I like the red,” Ainslie says.

While they’re waiting for the bleach to work, Ainslie takes Immy down to the rec room. The whole time Immy has been trying not to think about Mint. And now that’s where Ainslie is taking her.

“I just need to check,” Ainslie says. “I check every single day now. Sometimes I check a couple of times. He’s never on. But I still have to check. Last night I woke up at three a.m. and I had to come down here and check.”

She jerks back the coffin lid, as if she thinks she’ll catch Mint up to no good. His eyes are closed, of course, because how can he turn himself on?

Where is he when he isn’t here? It hurts Immy to see him like this, turned off like he’s just some dumb toy.

The bleachy part of Ainslie’s hair, wrapped in foil, sticks practically straight up. Immy imagines yanking it. Hearing Ainslie shriek. And Mint still wouldn’t wake up. So what’s the point?

Ainslie stabs at Mint’s head like she’s killing a spider. Turns and shrugs at Immy. “I know I’m being an idiot. He’s just a semi-defective Boyfriend or something. He’s not even that cute, right? Oliver is much cuter. I don’t know why I wanted him so much.”

Maybe if Immy said something Ainslie would just give her Mint.

Ainslie says, “I asked my mom if we could sell him on eBay and she had a fit. Acted like I was the worst person in the world. Kept telling me how much she paid for him, how hard it was to get him, that I didn’t appreciate everything she did to make me happy. So I had to pretend I was just kidding.”

Well, then.

Immy says, “Come on. I think it’s time for the bleach to come out.”

She gets one last look at Mint before Ainslie shuts the lid again. And Ainslie changes her mind, chooses the green, then the red, the green, and then the red again. They both like the way it looks when it’s finished, like a long streak of blood.

At school two days later Ainslie tells them about how her mother went and put a streak of red in her own hair. She’s so angry she cries. They all hug her, and then Immy helps her cut all the red right out with a pair of scissors in the art room. All Immy wants, at that moment, is for Ainslie to be as happy as Immy is.

The next time she sees Mint it’s two days after that. Four in the morning. She’s done a stupid thing, biked all the way over to Ainslie’s, six miles in the dark. But she did it for love. Call it a trial run. She lets herself into the house. She’s a ghost. She almost goes to Ainslie’s bedroom, to stand beside Ainslie’s bed and watch her while she’s sleeping. Ainslie’s almost pretty when she’s asleep. Immy’s always thought so. But she’s seen Ainslie asleep before.

She goes down the stairs to the rec room and she turns Mint on in Spectral Mode. He’s there immediately, watching her from over by the couch. “Hi,” she says. “I had to come. Everything is fine. I just had to come see you. That’s all. I miss you. Today is Friday. I’m coming back on Monday and everything is going to be fine. We’ll be together. Okay?”

Her Ghost Boyfriend nods. Smiles at her.

“I love you,” she says. He says it back silently.

She really ought to turn him off, but Immy can’t do it. Instead she goes back to the closet and she opens the lids of Oliver’s and Alan’s coffins. She finds their buttons, one with each hand, and she turns them both on, shutting the closet door as quickly as she can so they won’t see her, know who’s done this. She’s back up the stairs and out the door, the key is under the rock again, and she pedals madly away. When she gets home the sun is just coming up.

She thinks with satisfaction, That’s going to surprise Ainslie.

But Ainslie doesn’t mention it. Ainslie is kind of a wreck since the thing with her mom and the hair. Or maybe it’s all the Boyfriend stuff. Either way, what Ainslie really needs are her friends. Immy and Sky and Elin take her out for yogurt after school. Tomorrow Ainslie and her mom go to Utah. Immy wants to get up and dance on tables. There’s a song on in the yogurt place and it’s kind of a good song. Immy really ought to find out who sings it, except if she asks, Elin, or maybe everybody, will look at her like, you like that song? Really? But she does. She actually likes it. Really.

She hardly sleeps at all Sunday night. Goes over and over the plan in her head. Tries to work out all the things that might go wrong so she can fix them before they happen. A horrible idea lodges itself in her head: what if after Immy turned on all of the Boyfriends, Ainslie did something crazy? Like, finally get her mom to take them all to Goodwill? Or worse? But all the coffins are right where they should be. Alan and Oliver and Mint are all off. The taxi drops her off at the You-Store-It and she puts Mint in his duffel bag on a pallet mover and the key works just fine and so what if the storage space smells like dust and mold and there are random things everywhere? She unzips Mint and pushes the button for Embodied.

And it’s just like it was in the rec room. The first time they were alone together. It’s just so easy to be with him. Immy has already cleared off the couch, plugged in one of the nice lamps, put in one of the bulbs she brought from home. She even has a blanket for them in case the storage space is cold. Well, for her. Mint probably doesn’t get cold.

That’s one of the things she wants to ask him, now that they can finally talk. Not about getting cold. About his name. She doesn’t have to be home for hours.

They’re facing each other on the couch. Holding hands just like boyfriends and girlfriends do. It isn’t really like holding hands, exactly, because he’s made out of silicone and plastics and tubes of gel, metal rods, wiring, whatever, and his hand feels weird if she tries to think of it as a real hand, but that doesn’t matter.

And of course he can’t really feel her hand, she knows, but it must mean something to him, her hand in his. The way it means something to her. Because he’s just as real as he isn’t real.

It’s good enough. Better than anything she ever imagined.

She’s asked him about his name. His real name.

“I don’t remember,” he says. “I don’t remember many things. I remember you. Only you.”

She’s a little disappointed, but doesn’t want him to know it. “Is it okay if I keep calling you Mint?” It’s just a stupid name that Ainslie came up with, but when she thinks about it, Immy realizes that Mint is how she thinks of him. It would be weird to try calling him by another name.

“Do you remember anything about when you were alive?”

He says, “It was cold. I was alone. And then you were there. We were together.”

“Do you remember how you died?”

“I remember love.”

Immy doesn’t want to know about other girls. Girls he knew when he was alive. Not even if they’re dead and gone. She says, “I’ve never been in love before. I’ve never felt like this before.”

That awful hand flexes, those fingers curl around her own. She wonders how he knows how much pressure to exert. Is it Mint who does that or is it some kind of Boyfriend basic subroutine? It isn’t really important which one it is.