Get in Trouble: Stories (29 page)

Immy doesn’t want a Vampire Boyfriend. Or a Werewolf Boyfriend. Not anymore.

“I want more absinthe,” Ainslie says. “Somebody go fetch the absinthe.”

“I’ll get it, darling,” Oliver says.

“No,” Immy says. “I’ll go get it.” If you send a Boyfriend off for a bottle of homemade absinthe, likely as not he’ll come back with a bottle of conditioner. Or a lamp.

“Thanks, Immy,” Ainslie says.

“No problem,” Immy says. But maybe you can’t trust a friend, either, because instead of going straight back with the absinthe, she finds herself lingering in the sunroom, looking down at the new Boyfriend. His eyes are closed again. She reaches down and touches his face. Just one finger. His skin is very soft. It isn’t actually like skin at all, of course, but it isn’t like anything else, either. His eyes don’t open this time; he’s still not all the way awake. And anyway, Ainslie set him for Spectral Mode. His body will just lie here. His ghost will do whatever it is that ghosts do.

He could already be here, she supposes. He could be watching her.

She doesn’t feel as if she’s being watched. She feels all alone.

So it’s an impulse, maybe, that makes her reach inside her purse and take out Ainslie’s present. She rips off the wrapping paper and the ribbon, not carefully.

Inside the locket is a braided ring of human hair. Victorian, according to the online seller. Probably their own kids’ hair, but never mind.

Two pieces of the braid of hair are jet black; one is ash blond. Black for Ainslie, blond for Immy.

The ring doesn’t fit over any of Immy’s fingers. Maybe she has fat fingers. She goes back to the coffin, crouches down beside it. “Hey,” she says softly. “I’m Ainslie’s friend. Immy.”

She puts two fingers on his lips. She takes a breath and holds it, like she’s about to jump off a bridge into very deep water. Well, she is. Then she sticks her fingers inside Ainslie’s Ghost Boyfriend’s mouth. There are the teeth, and, okay, here’s the tongue. How weird is this? It’s very weird. Immy’s not saying that this isn’t weird, but she keeps on doing it anyway. Her fingers are where they really shouldn’t be.

It’s not wet like a real mouth and a real tongue would be. The teeth feel pretty real. The tongue is weird. She keeps thinking how weird this is. She slides a finger under the not-a-real-tongue, and there, underneath, is a place where, when she presses down, a kind of lid thing opens up. She fumbles the hair ring into the compartment there, and then presses the lid back down. Then she takes her fingers out of the Ghost Boyfriend’s mouth, studies that face carefully.

Nothing about it seems different to her.

When she stands up and turns around, Elin is there in the doorway. Elin says nothing, just waits.

“I thought I saw him move,” Immy says. “But he didn’t.”

Elin gives her a long look. Immy says, “What?”

“Nothing,” Elin says. She looks like she wants to say something else, and then she shrugs. “Just, come on. Oliver keeps on asking me to dance with him, and I don’t want to. You know how I feel about Ainslie’s Boyfriends.” What she is really saying is that she knows how Immy feels about them.

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?

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.