Get in Trouble: Stories (18 page)

“I felt sorrier for whoever was going to have to clean up the pool,” I say.

“Liar,”
says. “You’ve never felt sorry for anyone in your life. You’re a textbook sociopath. You were going to kill all of our friends. I’m doing the world a huge favor.”

“They aren’t your friends,” I say. “None of them even like you. I don’t know why you’d want to save a single one of them.”

says nothing. Her eyes get pink.

I say, “They’ll find us eventually.” We’ve both got implants, of course. Implants to keep the girls from getting pregnant, to make us puke if we try drugs or take a drink. There are ways to get
around this. Darius is always good for new solutions. The implant—the Entourage—is also a way for our parents’ security teams to monitor us. In case of kidnappers. In case we go places that are off-limits, or run away. Rich people don’t like to lose their stuff.

“This chamber has some pretty interesting muffling qualities,”
says. “I installed the hardware myself. Top-gear spy stuff. You know, just in case.”

“In case of what?” I ask.

She ignores that. “Also, I paid a guy for three hundred thousand microdot trackers. One hundred and fifty have your profile. One hundred and fifty have mine. They’re programmed to go on and off-line in random clusters, at irregular intervals, for the next three months, starting about ten minutes ago. You think you’re the only one in the world who suffers. Who’s unhappy. You don’t even see me. You’ve been so busy obsessing over Tara and Philip, you never notice anything else.”

“Who?” I say.

“Your Face and my Face,”
says. “You freak.” There are tears in her eyes, but her voice stays calm. “Anyway. The trackers are being distributed to partygoers at raves worldwide tonight. They’re glued onto promotional material inside a CD for one of my favorite bands. Nobody you’d know. Oh, and all the guests at
’s
party got one, too, and I left a CD at all of the false doors at all of the pyramids, like offerings. Those are all live right now.”

I’ve always been the good-looking one. The popular one. Sometimes I forget that
is the smart one.

“I love you,
.”

falls in love all the time. But I was curious. I said, “You love me? Why do you love me?”

She thought about it for a minute. “Because you’re insane,” she said. “You don’t care about anything.”

“That’s why you love me?” I said. We were at a gala or something. We’d just come back from the men’s room, where everybody was trying out Darius’s new drug.

My Face was hanging out with my parents in front of all the cameras. The Olds love my Face. The son they wish they had. Somebody with a tray walked by and
’s
Face took a glass of champagne. She was over by the buffet table. The other buffet table, the one for Faces and the Olds and the celebrities and the publicists and all the other tribes and hangers-on.

My darling. My working girl. My sister’s Face. I tried to catch her eye, clowning in my latex leggings, but I was invisible. Every gesture, every word was for them, for him. The cameras. My Face. And me? A speck of nothing. Not even a blot. Negative space.

She’d said we couldn’t see each other anymore. She said she was afraid of getting caught breaking contract. Like that didn’t happen all the time. Like with Mr. Amandit.
and
’s
father. He left his wife. It was
’s
Face he left his wife for. The Face of his daughters’ best friend. I think they’re in Iceland now, Mr. Amandit and the nobody girl who used to be a Face.