Back Get in Trouble Save as PDF
Chapters (17)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Epigraph
  5. The Summer People
  6. I Can See Right Through You
  7. Secret Identity
  8. Valley of the Girls
  9. Origin Story
  10. The Lesson
  11. The New Boyfriend
  12. Two Houses
  13. Light
  14. Dedication
  15. Acknowledgments
  16. Other Books by This Author
  17. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

said she’d already had the conversation with her Face. (We talk to our Faces as little as possible, although sometimes we sleep with each other’s. Forbidden fruit is always freakier. Is that why I did what I did? I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?) said her Face agreed to sign a new contract when turns eighteen. She doesn’t see any reason to give up having a Face.

is ’s younger sister. They only broke ground on ’s pyramid last summer. Upper management teams from her father’s company came out to lay the first course of stones. A team-building exercise. Usually it’s lifers from the supermax prison out in Pelican Bay. Once they get to work, they mostly look the same, lifers and upper management. It’s hard work. We like to go out and watch.

Every once in a while a consulting archaeologist or an architect will come over and try to make conversation. They think we want context.

They talk about grave goods, about how one day future archaeologists will know what life was like because some rich girls decided they wanted to build their own pyramids.

We think that’s funny.

They like to complain about the climate. Apparently it isn’t ideal. “Of course, they may not be standing give or take a couple of hundred years. Once you factor in geological events. Earthquakes. There’s the geopolitical dimension. There’s grave robbers.”

They go on and on about the cunning of grave robbers.

We get them drunk. We ask them about the curse of the mummies just to see them get worked up. We ask them if they aren’t worried about the Olds. We ask what used to happen to the men who built the pyramids in Egypt. Didn’t they used to disappear? we ask. Just to make sure nobody knew where the good stuff was buried? We say there are one or two members of the consulting team who worked on ’s pyramid that we were friendly with. We mention we haven’t been able to get hold of them in a while, not since the pyramid was finished.

They were up on the unfinished outer wall of ’s pyramid. I guess they’d been up there all night. Talking. Making love. Making plans.

They didn’t see me. Invisible, that’s what I am. I had my phone. I filmed them until my phone ran out of memory. There was a unicorn down in the meadow by a pyramid. ’s pyramid. Two impossible things. Three things that shouldn’t exist. Four.

That was when I gave up on becoming someone new, the running, the kale, the whole thing. That was when I gave up on becoming the new me. Somebody already had that job. Somebody already had the only thing I wanted.