Kelly Link - Get in Trouble - Stories

“I can stay for a while,” she says. “Then I have to go home.”

He looks at her as if he never wants her to leave.

“What will you do when I go home?” Immy says.

“I’ll wait,” he says. “I’ll wait for you to come back to me.”

She says, “I promise I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

“Stay,” he says. “Stay with me.”

“Okay,” Immy says. “I’ll stay as long as I can.”

She says, finally, when he only looks at her, “What do you want to do? You’ve been stuck in Ainslie’s closet for what, a month now? Where were you before that? Before Ainslie turned you on and I put the ring in your mouth? Is it weird, talking about this?”

“I’m yours,” Mint says. “You’re mine. Nothing else matters. Only you and I.”

So Immy tells him everything. Everything she’s been feeling this year. About Justin. About Ainslie. About how she’s not sure, sometimes, who she is. They hold hands the whole time. And then, before she leaves, she turns Mint back to Spectral Mode. That way he can investigate the You-Store-It if he wants to while she’s gone. Spectral Mode has a range of three thousand square feet, which is one of the cool features of the Ghost Boyfriend. Immy has been reading everything she can find online about Ghost Boyfriends. She’s read it all before, but now it’s different.

There’s a lot of discussion online about the uncanny valley, dolls, how characters are drawn in video games. Things that look too much like real people: that awful gap between the real and the almost real. Vampire Boyfriends and Werewolf Boyfriends and Ghost Boyfriends, supposedly, don’t fall in the uncanny valley. People have an average of forty-three facial muscles. Boyfriends have the equivalent of fifty. They’re supposed to be more realistic than real people. Or something. Their heads are slightly bigger; their eyes are bigger, too. To make you feel good things when you look at them. Like how you’re supposed to feel when you see a baby.

Immy has joined two separate listservs for people with Boyfriends. She imagines what it will be like, posting to the listservs about the cute things Mint says, the fun things they do.

It’s the best week of Immy’s life. She hangs out with Elin and Sky. Ainslie texts them to tell them all the horrible things her mother is doing. And Immy spends as much time as she can in the storage space with her Boyfriend. Her boyfriend.

The storage space is dark and awful, but Mint doesn’t seem to care. Well, he was living in a coffin in a closet before this. He doesn’t have much to compare it to. He tells her about the things that other renters have in their lockers. A lot of pianos, apparently. And textbooks. Mint is perfectly happy to list everything he’s discovered. And Immy is perfectly happy to sit and listen to him go on and on about empty aquariums and old dentist chairs and boxes of Beanie Babies.

When she and Justin were hanging out he kept talking about video games he liked. She’d played some of them, too, is pretty good at some kinds of games, but it wasn’t like they were having a conversation. Justin didn’t leave any room for her to say anything.

Immy manages to find that song from the yogurt place and downloads it onto her phone. She plays it for Mint and they slow dance in the extremely small space not taken up by all of Ainslie’s mother’s crap.

“I really like this song,” she says.

“It’s a good song,” Mint says. “You’re a good dancer. I’ve been wanting to dance with you for so long.”

His hand is on the small of Immy’s back. He’s a good dancer, too, maybe even better than Oliver, and she leans her head against his shoulder.

“Which hair was yours?” she says.

Mint says, “I’m yours. Only yours.”

“No,” Immy says. “The ring. Which hair was yours? The blond hair or the black hair?”

“The blond hair,” Mint says. “The black.”

“Never mind,” Immy says. She kisses his shoulder, hugs him a little tighter. It’s a little weird, how Mint doesn’t smell like anything. It’s a good thing, probably. If you kept a real boy in a storage locker, you’d need to figure out how he could take showers. Plus you’d have to feed him. Although maybe Mint is starting to smell a little like the storage space, a little bit like mildew. Maybe Immy should buy him some cologne.

He’s still wearing the black funeral suit he came in. Maybe she could buy him some T-shirts and jeans at the thrift store. She can’t picture Mint in a T-shirt.

Ainslie comes home in two days, and Immy isn’t sure what happens after that. It’s not as if Ainslie is going to think Immy took Mint, why would she think that? But it’s still going to be complicated. And then there’s the storage space, which isn’t going to work forever. And anyway, when spring break is over, it’s not like Immy can just come over and hang out in the storage space all day.

When she tells Mint all of this, he says nothing. He trusts her to figure something out.

He says, “Stay with me. Never leave me.”

He says, “I’ll never leave you.”

That night she decides she might as well go and see Mint. They’ve never spent the night together. Anyway she can’t fall asleep. Maybe the time is right. They can lie on the couch together, and then she can fall asleep with her head on his shoulder. She can wake up in his arms.

It’s bitterly cold. Immy, on her bike, coasts down empty streets. No one sees her go by. She could sneak into a house. Cut off a lock of someone’s hair while they’re asleep. Pour drain cleaner in a fish tank or put salt in a sugar jar. What couldn’t she do? She could go places. Have adventures. Cause all kinds of trouble.

The You-Store-It after midnight is a palace. A mausoleum. Gothic, satiny black, full of other people’s secrets. But her secret is the best.

When she gets to the storage locker, she hears voices. A voice. Someone is talking. Mint is talking. Mint is talking to someone. She recognizes everything that he’s saying.

“I love you. Only you.”

“I love only you.”

“Stay with me. Don’t ever leave me.”

“We’re together now. I’ll never leave you.”

“I love you.”

It’s peculiar, because Immy set Mint to Spectral Mode. And who is he talking to, anyway? Everything that he’s saying, it’s everything he says to Immy. All of this is wrong. Something is wrong.

She unlocks the door, lifts it up. And something is definitely wrong, because there is her Ghost Boyfriend, standing in the dark, in Embodied Mode, and there is her Ghost Boyfriend in Spectral Mode. Except the ghost isn’t her Ghost Boyfriend. It’s a girl. Barely there, less there than Mint ever is. The beam of Immy’s flashlight pins the ghost girl there in the air. Holes for eyes. Light hair.

The ghost’s hand is reaching out to Mint. Her fingers on his mouth.

Immy may be an idiot, but she’s not an idiot. She knows, instantly, the mistake she has made. The mistake she has been allowed to make. Those three lengths of hair, the two black pieces and the yellow. Apparently Immy isn’t the one who gave Ainslie’s Ghost Boyfriend a real ghost — she’s the one who gave Ainslie’s Ghost Boyfriend two ghosts.

No one is in love with her. She isn’t anyone’s girlfriend.

This isn’t her love story.

She goes right up to the Ghost Boyfriend, Mint, whoever he is. And that other girl. That dead girl. Who cares who she is, either. It’s not like she can do anything to Immy. But Immy can do something to her. Body or no body.

“Immy,” Mint says.

“Shut up,” she tells him. And she sticks her fingers right into his traitor’s mouth.

He bites down. And then his hands are up and someone’s fingers are around her throat. Mint’s fingers.