Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link Read Free Book Online

coming.
    He doesn’t get out of his car. He rolls the window down and watches the storm come in. Let’s look at him looking at it. Apretty thing admiring a pretty thing. Abandoned site of a mass disappearance, muddy violet clouds, silver veils of rain driving down the lake, the tabloid prince of darkness, Meggie’s demon lover arriving in all his splendor. The only thing to spoil it are the bugs. And the sex tape.
    (2012) You have been famous for more than half of your life. Both of you. You only made the one movie together, but women still stop you on the street to ask about Meggie. Is she happy? Which one? you want to ask them. The one who kissed me in a movie when we were just kids, the one who wasn’t real? The one who likes to smoke a bit of weed and text me about her neighbor’s pet goat? The Meggie in the tabloids who drinks fucks gets fat pregnant too skinny slaps a maître d’ talks to Elvis’s ghost ghost of a missing three-year-old boy ghost of JFK? Sometimes they don’t ask about Meggie. Instead they ask if you will bite them.
    Happiness! Misery! If you were one, bet on it the other was on the way. That was what everyone liked to see. It was what the whole thing was about. The demon lover has a pair of gold cuff links, those faces. Meggie gave them to him. You know the ones I mean.
    (2010) Meggie and the demon lover throw a Halloween party for everyone they know. They do this every Halloween. They’re famous for it.
    “Year after year, on a monkey’s face a monkey’s face,” Meggie says.
    She’s King Kong. The year before? Half a pantomime horse. He’s the demon lover. Who else? Year after year.
    Meggie says, “I’ve decided to give up acting. I’m going to be a poet. Nobody cares when poets get old.”
    Fawn says, appraisingly, “I hope I look half as good as you when I’m your age.” Fawn, twenty-three. A makeup artist. This year she and the demon lover are married. Last year they met on set.
    He says, “I’m thinking I could get some work done on my jawline.”
    You’d think they were mother and daughter. Same Viking profile, same quizzical tilt to the head as they turn to look at him. Both taller than him. Both smarter, too, no doubt about it.
    Maybe Meggie wonders sometimes about the women he sleeps with. Marries. Maybe he has a type. But so does she. There’s a guy at the Halloween party. A boy, really.
    Meggie always has a boy and the demon lover can always pick him out. Easy enough, even if Meggie’s sly. She never introduces the lover of the moment, never brings them into conversations or even acknowledges their presence. They hang out on the edge of whatever is happening, and drink or smoke or watch Meggie at the center. Sometimes they drift closer, stand near enough to Meggie that it’s plain what’s going on. When she leaves, they follow after.
    Meggie’s type? The funny thing is, Meggie’s lovers all look like the demon lover. More like the demon lover, he admits it, than he does. He and Meggie are both older now, but the world is full of beautiful black-haired boys and golden girls. Really, that’s the problem.
    The role of the demon lover comes with certain obligations. Your hairline will not recede. Your waistline will not expand. You are not to be photographed threatening paparazzi, or in sweatpants. No sex tapes.
    Your fans will: Offer their necks at premieres. (Also at restaurants and at the bank. More than once when he is standing in front of a urinal.) Ask if you will bite their wives. Their daughters. They will cut themselves with a razor in front of you.
    The appropriate reaction is—
    There is no appropriate reaction.
    The demon lover does not always live up to his obligations. There is a sex tape. There is a girl with a piercing. There is, in the middle of some athletic sex, a comical incident involving his foreskin. There is blood all over the sheets. There is a lot of blood. There is a 911 call. There is him, fainting. Falling and hitting his head on a