Get in Trouble: Stories

by Kelly Link

When you do for other people (Fran’s daddy said once upon a time when he was drunk, before he got religion) things that they could do for themselves, but they pay you to do it instead, you both will get used to it.

“You could pick them a bunch of wildflowers,” Fran said. “But they’d be just as happy with a bit of kyarn.” “Yarn?” Ophelia said. “Roadkill,” Fran said. “But yarn’s okay.”

Florida is California on a Troma budget.

The remains of the nudist colony at Lake Apopka promise reasonable value for ghost hunters.

There’s a knock on the door, some girl. “Sun’s out again, Meggie.” She gives the demon lover a particularly melting smile. Was probably twelve when she first saw him on-screen. Baby ducks, these girls. Imprint on the first vampire they ever see.

Down at the lake people are playing volleyball in a pit with no net. Barbecuing. Someone talks to a camera, gestures at someone else. Someone somewhere smoking a joint. At this distance, not too close, not too near, twilight coming down, the demon lover takes in all of the breasts, asses, comical cocks, knobby knees, everything hidden now made plain. He notes with an experienced eye which breasts are real, which aren’t. Only a few of the women sport pubic hair. He’s never understood what that’s about. Some of the men are bare, too. O tempora, o mores.

He prepares himself for whatever this strange kid is going to say next and then suddenly Meggie is there. As if things weren’t awkward enough without Meggie, naked, suddenly standing there. Everybody naked, nobody happy. It’s Scandinavian art porn.

He’d be good-looking if he weren’t so good-looking, Billie thinks, and then wonders what she meant by that.

It’s a far way down to the street, so far down that the window in Paul Zell’s hotel room doesn’t open, probably because people like Billie can’t help imagining what it would be like to fall.

“There’s a comic book about you,” Billie says. “Although, uh, she doesn’t look like you. Not really.” “The artist likes to draw boobs life-sized. Just the boobs.”

We get a few years to make our own mistakes, out in the open, and then we settle down, and we come into our millions or billions or whatever. We inherit the earth, like that proverb says. The rich shall inherit the earth.

Yes, she was sitting on an anthill. It was definitely an anthill. Tiny superheroic ants were swarming out to defend their hill, chase off the enormous and evil although infinitely desirable doom of Bunnatine’s ass.

Fleur was always in charge of parties. Always threw the best parties, the ones that people who have long since moved out to the wealthier suburbs—Newton, Sudbury, Lincoln—still talk about, the parties that took days in darkened rooms to recover from.

Fleur spent her twenties as a bartender in various Boston bars. She and Thanh met at ManRay. ManRay has been closed for a long time now. Thousands of years.

What’s up? she says. Everything okay? We’re fine, Thanh says. Really. Fine. Okay, Fleur says. Come help me mix drinks and tell me stuff. I need a quick crash course in marriage. What’s sex like? Well, to start with, Thanh says, you need good lube and a lot of preparation. I also recommend two or three trapeze artists. And a marching band. The marching band is essential. They make drinks. People gather on the porch. Someone plays Leonard Cohen songs on a guitar. There are oysters and hot dogs and cold tomato halves filled with spinach and cheese.

They stumble down the rough beach to the dock. The lumpy yurts silent and black. The sky full of so many stars. God has an inordinate fondness for stars and also for beetles. The small and the very far away.

Ainslie loves Elin and Immy and Sky equally, even if Immy and Ainslie have been friends longest. Immy’s heart isn’t as big as Ainslie’s heart. Immy loves Ainslie best. She also hates her best. She’s had a lot of practice at both.

If you can’t be honest with your best friend’s Vampire Boyfriend, who can you be honest with?

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.

One of the benefits of a long-standing friendship: it makes breaking and entering so much easier.

None of this is okay. But it’s not real. So it’s okay.

He has the most beautiful eyes Immy’s ever seen. And, okay, so they’re molded out of silicone or they’re bags full of colored gel and microelectronic components, but so what? How is that really any different from vitreous humors and lenses and rods and cone cells?

that’s not the kind of love I mean. I mean, you know, boys. I mean love, like the way love is in books or movies. The kind of love that makes you want to die. That makes you stay up all night, that makes you feel sick to your stomach, the kind of love that makes everything else not matter.” “Oh, Immy,” her dad says. “That’s not real love. That’s a trick the body plays on the mind. It’s not a bad trick—it’s how we get poetry and songs on the radio and babies—and sometimes it’s even good poetry, or good music. Babies are good, too, of course, but, please, Immy, not yet. Stick to music and poems for now.”

Sometimes Immy isn’t sure about Sky. Are you supposed to take everything she says at face value? Or is she actually the most sarcastic person Immy knows? Unclear.

Lindsey’s job was not a particularly complicated one. There was an office, and behind the office was a warehouse full of sleeping people. There was an agency in D.C. that paid her company to take responsibility for the sleepers. Every year, hikers and cavers and construction workers found a few dozen more. No one knew how to wake them up. No one knew what they meant, what they did, where they came from. No one really even knew if they were people.

There were support groups for people whose shadow grew into a twin. There were support groups for women whose husbands left them. There were support groups for alcoholics. Probably there were support groups for people who hated support groups, but Lindsey didn’t believe in support groups.

She rode her bike down to The Splinter. Got soaked. Didn’t care. Had a couple of whiskey sours, and then decided she was too excited about the hurricane to get properly drunk. She didn’t want to be drunk. And there wasn’t a man in the bar she wanted to bring home. The best part of hurricane sex was the hurricane, not the sex, so why bother?