Get in Trouble: Stories (32 page)

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.

She thinks, They aren’t supposed to do that! She’s so angry she isn’t even scared.

Immy’s fingers are under that wriggling tongue and in that compartment and she’s got hold of the hair ring. She yanks it out of Mint’s mouth and like that, the girl ghost is gone and the Ghost Boyfriend is just a
thing
standing there, its hands loose at her neck, its mouth slightly open.

Immy sticks the hair ring in her pocket. Her fingers are really throbbing, but she can bend them, so not broken. They’re just a little mangled.

She’s alone with the Ghost Boyfriend looming there, like he’s just waiting for her to turn him on again. And those two lovebirds? Those ghosts? Are they still around? She gets out of there as fast as she can.

She rides her bike down dark streets, crying the whole time. Snot all over her face. What an idiot. Worst of all, she’ll never be able to tell anyone any of this. Not even
Ainslie.

She washes her hands thoroughly once she gets home. Takes the nail scissors and a pair of tweezers out of the cabinet in her bathroom. She holds the hair ring under the magnifying glass and uses the tweezers to tease out the blond length of hair.
Are they here?
She hopes so. Cuts through the blond hair with the scissors, and tweezes out every last strand. Now she has a ring of black hair, and a very small pile of blond. The black hair goes back into the locket on the choker she got for Ainslie. Next she
goes through her jewelry box, looking for the necklace she used to wear all the time last year. A kind of medicine bag thing on a leather strand. The blond hair goes in it. Every bit.

After that, she gets in bed. Leaves the light on. When she falls asleep, she’s in that car again on the moonlit road. Mint is in the passenger seat. Someone else in the backseat. She won’t look at either of them. Just keeps on driving. Wonders where she’ll be when she gets there.

In the morning, she explains things to her dad. Not everything. Just the part about the Ghost Boyfriend and the storage locker. She tells him it’s all part of a joke she and Elin and Sky were going to play on Ainslie, but now she’s realized what a bad idea it was. Ainslie would have really freaked out. She explains that Ainslie is really fragile right now. Going through a bad breakup.

He’s proud of her. They drive to the You-Store-It and retrieve the Ghost Boyfriend. When he’s back in his coffin in the closet in the basement in Ainslie’s house, her father takes her out for frozen yogurt.

Ainslie comes back from her ski trip with a tan because Ainslie is a multitasker.

At lunch they all sit out in the sunshine in their coats and scarves, because it’s hard to be back inside, back in school again.

“Here,” Immy says. “Happy birthday, Ainslie. Finally found it.”

It’s a little tiny box, hardly worth it, but Ainslie does what she always does. Unwraps it so carefully you’d think what she really likes about presents is the wrapping paper. She takes out the
choker and everyone oohs and aahs. When she opens the locket, Immy says, “It’s probably not true, but supposedly the hair is Bam Muller’s hair.” Bam Muller is the lead singer of O Hell, Kitty! She checked. He has black hair.

“Kind of gross,” Ainslie says. “But also kind of awesome. Thanks, Immy.”

She puts on the choker and everyone admires how it looks against Ainslie’s long white neck. Nobody has noticed the little bruises on Immy’s neck. You can hardly see them.

“You’re welcome,” Immy says and gives Ainslie a big hug. “I’m so glad you’re back.”

“Be more lesbian,” Elin says. Sky has spilled the beans on Elin and Justin. The weird thing is that Elin doesn’t seem that much happier. Probably the whole kissing thing. Although the way it turns out, Elin and Justin are still together when school gets out. They’re together all summer long. And when Halloween rolls around and Ainslie has a party at her house, Elin comes as a sexy Red Riding Hood and Justin is a big bad wolf.

Oliver and Alan and Mint are all at the party. Ainslie brings them out for the first time in a long time. Immy dances with all of them. She dances with Mint twice. They don’t really have anything to say to each other.

It’s a great party.

Sky has made another batch of absinthe. She’s a cowgirl. Ainslie’s mother is a sexy witch, and Ainslie isn’t in costume at all. Or if she is, nobody knows who she’s supposed to be. At some point, Immy realizes that Elin is wearing the choker, the one Immy gave Ainslie. So maybe she borrowed it. Or maybe Ainslie got tired of it and gave it to Elin. Whatever. It’s not a big deal.

Immy’s wearing her medicine bag. She wears it a lot. Take
that, ghost girl. Immy is looking pretty good. She’s a succubus. She has to keep explaining what that is, but that’s okay. The main thing is she looks amazing.

Justin, for one, can’t take his eyes off her. She looks at him once in a while, smiles just a little. All of that practice, she bets Elin has taught him a thing or two about kissing. And he was Immy’s boyfriend first.

Two Houses

 

W
ake up, wake up.

Portia is having a birthday party. The party will start without you. Wake up, Gwenda. Wake up. Hurry, hurry.

Soft music. The smell of warm bread. She could have been back home, how many houses ago? In her childhood bed, her mother downstairs baking bread.

The last sleeper in the spaceship
House of Secrets
opened her eyes, crept from her narrow bed. She rose up, or fell, into the chamber.

The chamber, too, was narrow and small, a honeycombed cell. Soft pink light, invisible drawers, chamber and beds, all of them empty. The astronaut Gwenda stretched out her arms, rubbed at her scalp. Her hair had grown out again. Sometimes she imagined
a berth crammed with masses of hair. Centuries passing beneath the strangling weight.

Now there was the smell of old books. A library. Maureen was in her head with her, looking at books. Monitoring her heart rate, the dilation of her pupils. Maureen was the ship, the House and the keeper of all its Secrets. A spirit of the air; a soothing subliminal hum; an alchemical sequence of smells and emanations.

Gwenda inhaled. Stretched again, slowly somersaulted. Arcane chemical processes began within her blood, her nervous system.

This is how it was aboard the spaceship
House of Secrets.
You slept and you woke up and you slept again. You might sleep for a year, for five years. There were six astronauts. Sometimes others were already awake. Sometimes you spent days, a few weeks alone. Except you were never really alone. Maureen was always there. She was there with you sleeping and waking. She was inside you, too.

Everyone is waiting for you in the Great Room. There’s roasted carp. A chocolate cake.

“A tidal smell,” Gwenda said, trying to place it. “Mangrove trees and the sea caught in a hundred places at their roots. I spent a summer in a place like that.”

You arrived with one boy and you left with another.

“So I did,” Gwenda said. “I’d forgotten. It was such a long time ago.”

A hundred years.

“That long!” Gwenda said.

Not long at all.

“No,” Gwenda said. “Not long at all.” She touched her hair. “I’ve been asleep…”

Seven years this time.

“Seven years,” Gwenda said.

A citrus smell. Lime trees. Other smells, pleasant ones, ones that belonged to Mei and Sullivan and Aune and Portia. Sisi. All of their body chemistries adjusted for harmonious relationships. They were, of necessity, a convivial group.

Gwenda threw off her long sleep. Sank toward the curve of the bulkhead, pressing on a drawer. It swung open and in she went to make her toilet, to be poked and prodded and injected, lathered and sluiced. She rid herself of the new growth of hair, the fine down on her arms and legs.

So slow, so slow, Maureen fretted. Let me get rid of it for you. For good.

“One day,” Gwenda said. She opened up her log, checked the charts on her guinea pigs, her carp.

This is why you are last again. You dawdle, Gwenda. You refuse to be sensible in the matter of personal grooming. Everyone is waiting for you. You’re missing all of the fun.

“Aune has asked for a Finnish disco or a Finnish sauna or the northern lights. Sullivan is playing with dogs. Mei is chatting up movie stars or famous composers, and Portia is being outrageous. There are waterfalls or redwood trees or dolphins,” Gwenda said.

Cherry blossoms. The Westminster dog show. 2009. The Sus
sex Spaniel Ch. Clussexx Three D Grinchy Glee wins. Sisi is hoping you will hurry. She wants to tell you something.

“Well,” Gwenda said. “I’d better hurry, then.”

Maureen went before and after, down Corridor One. Lights flicked on, then off again so that the corridor fell away behind Gwenda in darkness. Was Maureen the golden light ahead or the darkness that followed behind? Carp swam in the glassy walls.

Then she was in the Galley and the Great Room was just above her. Long-limbed Sisi poked her head through the glory hole. “New tattoo?”

It was an old joke.

Head to toes, Gwenda was covered in ink. There was a Dürer and a Doré; two Chinese dragons and a Celtic cross; the Queen of Diamonds torn in eight pieces by wolves; a girl on a playground rocket; the Statue of Liberty and the state flag of Illinois; passages from Lewis Carroll and the Book of Revelations and a hundred other books; a hundred other marvels. There was the spaceship
House of Secrets
on the back of Gwenda’s right hand, and its sister,
House of Mystery
, on her left.

Sisi had a pair of old cowboy boots, and Aune an ivory cross on a chain. Sullivan had a copy of
Moby-Dick;
Portia had a four-carat diamond in a platinum setting. Mei had her knitting needles.

Gwenda had her tattoos. Astronauts on the Long Trip travel lightly.

Hands pulled Gwenda up and into the Great Room, patted her back, her shoulders, ran over her head. Here, feet had weight. There was a floor, and she stood on it. There was a table and on the table was a cake. Familiar faces grinned at her.

The music was very loud. Silky-coated dogs chased flower petals.

“Surprise!” Sisi said. “Happy birthday, Gwenda!”

“But it isn’t my birthday,” Gwenda said. “It’s Portia’s birthday.”

“The lie was small,” Maureen said.

“It was my idea,” Portia said. “My idea to throw you a surprise party.”

“Well,” Gwenda said. “I’m surprised.”

“Come on,” Maureen said. “Come and blow out your candles.”

The candles were not real, of course. But the cake was.

It was the usual sort of party. They all danced, the way you could only dance in micro gravity. It was all good fun. When dinner was ready, Maureen sent away the Finnish dance music, the dogs, the cherry blossoms. You could hear Shakespeare say to Mei, “I always dreamed of being an astronaut.” And then he vanished.

Once there had been two ships. Standard practice, in the Third Age of Space Travel, to build more than one ship at a time, to send companion ships out on their long voyages. Redundancy enhances resilience. Sister ships
Seeker
and
Messenger
, called
House
of Secrets
and
House of Mystery
by their crews, left Earth on a summer day in the year 2059.

House of Secrets
had seen her twin disappear in a wink, a blink. First there, then nowhere. That had been thirty years ago. Space was full of mysteries. Space was full of secrets.

Dinner was beef Wellington (fake) with asparagus and new potatoes (both real) and sourdough rolls (realish). The experimental chickens were laying again, and so there were poached eggs, too, as well as the chocolate cake. Maureen increased gravity, because even fake beef Wellington requires suitable gravity. Mei threw rolls across the table at Gwenda. “Look at that, will you?” she said. “Every now and then a girl likes to watch something fall.”

Aune supplied bulbs of something alcoholic. No one asked what it was. Aune worked with eukaryotes and archaea. “I made enough to get us lit,” she said. “Just a little lit. Because today is Gwenda’s birthday.”

“It was my birthday just a little while ago,” Portia said. “How old am I, anyway? Never mind, who’s counting.”

“To Portia,” Aune said. “Forever youngish.”

“To Proxima Centauri,” Sullivan said. “Getting closer every day. Not that much closer.”

“Here’s to all us Goldilockses. Here’s to a planet that’s just right.”

“To real gardens,” Aune said. “With real toads.”

“To Maureen,” Sisi said. “And old friends.” She squeezed Gwenda’s hand.

“To our
House of Secrets
,” Mei said.

“To
House of Mystery
,” Sisi said. They all turned and looked at her. Sisi squeezed Gwenda’s hand again. They drank.

“We didn’t get you anything, Gwenda,” Sullivan said.

“I don’t want anything,” Gwenda said.

“I do,” Portia said. “Stories! Ones I haven’t heard before.”

Sisi cleared her throat. “There’s just one thing,” she said. “We ought to tell Gwenda the one thing.”

“You’ll ruin her birthday,” Portia said.

“What?” Gwenda asked Sisi.

“It’s nothing,” Sisi said. “Nothing at all. Only the mind playing tricks. You know how it goes.”

“Maureen?” Gwenda said. “What’s going on?”

Maureen blew through the room, a vinegar breeze. “Approximately thirty-one hours ago Sisi was in the Control Room. She performed several usual tasks and then asked me to bring up our immediate course. Twelve seconds later, I observed her heart rate had increased precipitously. When I asked her if something was wrong, she said, ‘Do you see it, too, Maureen?’ I asked Sisi to tell me what she was seeing. Sisi said, ‘
House of Mystery.
Over to starboard. It was there. Then it was gone.’ I told Sisi I had not seen it. We called back the visuals, but nothing was recorded there. I broadcast on all channels. No one answered. No one has seen
House of Mystery
in the intervening time.”

“Sisi?” Gwenda said.

“It was there,” Sisi said. “Swear to God I saw it. Like looking in a mirror. So near I could almost touch it.”

They all began to talk at once.

“Do you think—”

“Just a trick of the imagination—”

“It disappeared like that. Remember?” Sullivan snapped his fingers. “Why couldn’t they come back again the same way?”

“No!” Portia said. She glared at them all. “I don’t want to talk about this, to rehash all this again. Don’t you remember? We talked and talked and we theorized and we rationalized and what difference did it make?”

“Portia?” Maureen said. “I will formulate something for you, if you are distraught.”

“No,” Portia said. “I don’t want anything. I’m
fine.
”

“It wasn’t really there,” Sisi said. “It wasn’t there and I wish I hadn’t seen it.” There were fat-bodied tears on her lower eyelids. Gwenda reached out, lifted one away on her thumb.

“Had you been drinking?” Sullivan said.

“No,” Sisi said.

“But we haven’t stopped drinking since,” Aune said. She tossed back another bulb. “Maureen sobers us up and we just climb that mountain again. Cheers.”

Mei said, “I’m just glad it wasn’t me who saw it. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We haven’t all been awake like this for so long. Let’s not fight.”

“No fighting,” Gwenda said. “No more gloom. For my birthday present, please.”

Sisi nodded.

“Now that that’s settled,” Portia said, “bring up the lights again, Maureen, please? Take us somewhere new. I want something fancy. Something with history. An old English country house, roaring fireplace, suits of armor, tapestries, bluebells, sheep, moors, detectives in deerstalkers, Cathy scratching at the windows. You know.”

“It isn’t your birthday,” Sullivan said.

“I don’t care,” Gwenda said, and Portia blew her a kiss.

That breeze ran up and down the room again. The table sank back into the floor. The curved walls receded, extruding furnishings, two panting greyhounds. They were in a Great Hall instead of the Great Room. Tapestries hung on plaster walls, threadbare and musty. There were flagstones, blackened beams. A roaring fire. Through the mullioned windows a gardener and his boy were cutting roses.

You could smell the cold rising off stones, a yew log upon the fire, the roses and the dust of centuries.

“Halfmark House,” Maureen said. “Built in 1508. Queen Elizabeth came here on a progress in 1575 that nearly bankrupted the Halfmark family. Churchill spent a weekend in December of 1942. There are many photos. It was once said to be the second-most haunted manor in England. There are three monks and a Grey Lady, a White Lady, a yellow fog, and a stag.”

“Exactly what I wanted,” Portia said. “To float around like a ghost in an old English manor. Turn the gravity off, Maureen.”

“I like you, my girl,” Aune said. “But you are a strange one.”

“Of course I am,” Portia said. “We all are.” She made a wheel of herself and rolled around the room. Hair seethed around her face in the way that Gwenda hated.

“Let’s each pick one of Gwenda’s tattoos,” Sisi said. “And make up a story about it.”

“Dibs on the phoenix,” Sullivan said. “You can never go wrong with a phoenix.”

“No,” Portia said. “Let’s tell ghost stories. Aune, you start. Maureen can provide the special effects.”

“I don’t know any ghost stories,” Aune said slowly. “I know stories about trolls. No. Wait. I have one ghost story. It was a story
that my great-grandmother told about the farm in Pirkanmaa where she grew up.”

The Great Room grew darker until they were all only shadows, floating in shadow. Sisi wrapped an arm around Gwenda’s waist. Outside the great windows, the gardeners and the rosebushes disappeared. Now you saw a neat little farm and rocky fields, sloping up toward the twilight bulk of a coniferous forest.

“Yes,” Aune said. “Exactly like that. I visited once when I was just a girl. The farm was in ruins. Now the world will have changed again. Maybe there is another farm or maybe it is all forest now.

“At the time of this story my great-grandmother was a girl of eight or nine. She went to school for part of the year. The rest of the year she and her brothers and sisters did the work of the farm. My great-grandmother’s work was to take the cows to a meadow where the pasturage was rich in clover and sweet grasses. The cows were very big and she was very small, but they knew to come when she called them. In the evening she brought the herd home again. The path went along a ridge. On the near side she and her cows passed a closer meadow that her family did not use even though the pasturage looked very fine to my great-grandmother. There was a brook down in the meadow, and an old tree, a grand old man. There was a rock under the tree, a great slab that looked something like a table.”

Outside the windows of Halfmark House, a tree formed itself in a grassy, sunken meadow.

“My great-grandmother didn’t like that meadow. Sometimes when she looked down she saw people sitting around the table that the rock made. They were eating and drinking. They wore old-fashioned clothing, the kind her own great-grandmother
would have worn. She knew that they had been dead a very long time.”