Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link Page B

Paul Zell’s room key to get into the business center. There’s a superhero at one of the PCs. The superhero is at least eight feet tall, and she’s got frizzy red hair. You can tell she’s a superhero and not just a tall dentist because a little electric sizzle runs along her outline every once in a while as if maybe she’s being projected into her too-small seat from some other dimension. She glances over at Billie, who nods hello. The superhero sighs and looks at her fingernails. Which is fine with Billie. She doesn’t need rescuing, and she isn’t auditioning for anything, either. No matter what anybody thinks.
    For some reason, Billie chooses to be Constant Bliss when she signs into FarAway. She’s double incognito. Paul Zell isn’t online and there’s no one in King Nermal’s Chamber, except for the living chess pieces who are always there, and who aren’t really alive, either. Not the ones who are still standing or sitting, patiently, upon their squares, waiting to be deployed, knitting or picking their noses or flirting or whatever their particular programshave been programmed to do when they aren’t in combat. Billie’s favorite is the King’s Rook, because he always laughs when he moves into battle, even when he must know he’s going to be defeated.
    Do you ever feel as if they’re watching you, Paul Zell? Sometimes I wonder if they know that they’re just a game inside a game. When I first found King Nermal’s Chamber, I walked all around the board and checked out what everyone was doing. The White Queen and her pawn were playing chess, like they always do. I sat and watched them play. After a while the White Queen asked me if I wanted a match, and when I said yes, her little board got bigger and bigger until I was standing on a single square of it, inside another chamber exactly the same as the chamber I’d just been standing in, and there was another White Queen playing chess with her pawn, and I guess I could have kept on going down and down and down, but instead I got freaked out and quit FarAway without saving.
    Bearhand isn’t in FarAway right now. No Enchantress Magic EightBall, either, of course.
    Constant Bliss is low on healing herbs, and she’s quite near the Bloody Meadows, so I put on her cloak of invisibility and go out onto the battlefield. Rare and strange plants have sprung up where the blood of men and beasts is still soaking into the ground. I’m wearing a Shielding Hand, too, because some of the plants don’t like being yanked out of the ground. When my collecting box is full, Constant Bliss leaves the Bloody Meadows. I leave the Bloody Meadows. Billie leaves the Bloody Meadows. Billie hasn’t quite decided what she should do next, or whereshe should go, and besides it’s nearly six o’clock. So she saves and quits.
    The superhero is watching something on YouTube, two Korean guys break-dancing to Pachelbel’s
Canon in D.
Billie stands up to leave.
    “Girl,” the superhero says.
    “Who, me?” Billie says.
    “You, girl,” the superhero says. “Are you here with Miracle?”
    Billie realizes a mistake has been made. “I’m not a sidekick,” she says.
    “Then who are you?” the superhero says.
    “Nobody,” Billie says. And then, because she remembers that there’s a superhero named Nobody, she says, “I mean, I’m not anybody.” She escapes before the superhero can say anything else.
    Billie checks her hair in the women’s bathroom in the lobby. Melinda is always trying to get Billie to wear something besides T-shirts and jeans, and, sure, she looks different right now but Billie, looking in the bathroom mirror, suddenly wishes she looked more like herself, forgetting that what she needs is to look less like herself. To look less like a fifteen-year-old crazy liar.
    Although apparently what she looks like is a sidekick.
    The maître d’ at the Golden Lotus asks if she has a reservation. It’s now five minutes to six. “For six o’clock,” Billie