"The New Boyfriend" by Kelly Link

“Sometimes a friendship is more like a war.”

The Stanley Mosk Courthouse in Los Angeles is a narrow yet massive building that, from the outside, reminds me of the desert lair of a Marvel villain consortium. At each of the Courthouse’s two separate entrances—on different streets and even altitudes—you must pass through a metal detector, shedding not only your metal but your prejudices. Reader, I was summoned for jury duty.

I’d thought being a writer would be considered a liability, but outweighing that, it seemed, was a profound lack of sports knowledge that qualified me for the task at hand: serving on a jury for a civil case involving a high school soccer injury. A young woman was suing her school district, along with the also-young woman who had kicked the ball, a recent high school graduate turned assistant coach. We were told the dimensions of the field, the distance between players. Many (too many) diagrams were drawn. What I was curious about was everything not pertinent to the case: what each of them gossiped about, which party had more money, their most uncharitable thoughts.

The courthouse interior was no villain’s lair. It would have melted any vampire: long shining benches and bright fluorescent lights that made us all look extra haggard, aged by justice, or maybe the lack of it. It appeared frozen in the fifties: the retro water fountains did not produce any water, forcing us all to purchase bottled water from the snack store, which gave powerful gas-station vibes, except that it also had popcorn and copy machines.

There was so much waiting. Sometimes I sat in the tiny defunct phone booth as though it were a portal to elsewhere. Mostly, I read Get in Trouble by Kelly Link, which actually was that portal.

“The New Boyfriend” gave me the desired details the case lacked. Immy is at her best friend Ainslie’s house for a sleepover celebrating Ainslie’s birthday. Link captures so well the sleepover as a site of drama, and the contours of a friendship in which one party is deeply envious of the other: “Immy loves Ainslie best. She also hates her best. She’s had a lot of practice at both.” The story is about jealousy, longing, and Boyfriends that can be mail-ordered, arriving in coffins full of red rose petals in place of packing peanuts.

Weird particulars become commonplace so immediately. The Boyfriends can be put in “spectral” or “embodied” modes (in spectral mode they float around and haunt you). As a reader, I never wonder, Wait, but how? I accept it all as fact. Obviously they can. Maybe one way Link does this is by casually introducing a thought and revising it: a white lie followed by a realer truth that makes you trust a character—and the story—more: “Immy had no idea why she’s in such a horrible mood. Except, wait, no. Let’s be honest. She knows. She’s in a horrible mood because she’s a horrible friend who wants everything that belongs to Ainslie.”

I’ve been in awe of Kelly Link’s imagination ever since I read Magic for Beginners twenty or so years ago. Back then, I might have felt something akin to Immy’s jealousy, frustrated with my own writing and impatient for it to be better—more specific, more mine. Kaveh Akbar writes, “Envy is the only deadly sin that’s no fun for the sinner.” What’s more fun is appreciating the good luck of getting to read writing like this, to be taken somewhere I wouldn’t otherwise know to go.

There’s a pleasurable horror in being drawn into Immy’s imprudent pursuit of a Boyfriend of her own. My sympathies stay stubbornly with her even as she makes decisions that, in a court of law, I would have no choice but to judge.

Read “The New Boyfriend” in Kelly Link’s 2015 collection, Get in Trouble. (A PDF of the story was sent to subscribers. If you don’t want to miss future stories, be sure to subscribe!)

Also read this month: Jamie Quatro’s vibey, sexy I Want To Show You More (2013) and Ruben Reyes Jr.’s delightful, inspired There is A Rio Grande in Heaven (2024).

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A couple announcements: My friends Meng, Shruti, and Susanna and I are starting a teaching collective called The Dream Side. Together, we’ll be offering writing courses and retreats, both online and off. Our first will take place this summer in San Francisco, on the weekend of August 9 and 10. We’re calling it “Rewilding Craft: A Generative Writing Retreat.” It will be a weekend for fiction writers of all levels. If you’d like to stay in touch about future classes, including a year-long online novel generator, you can sign up for our newsletter, which we’ll send once a season (first one goes out Friday!).

In other teaching news, I’ll be teaching a five-week online course with Off Assignment this fall, featuring brilliant guest authors Shruti Swamy, Ruben Reyes Jr., Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Hilary Leichter. We’ll be studying short stories and talking imagination: how to cultivate it, practice it, evoke it in readers (and more!). Enrollment opens this Friday, with early-bird pricing until July 20; this is your special Short Story Short reader heads up.

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Thank you for being here! What stories did you read this month? Any thoughts on “The New Boyfriend”? As always, I’ll select one commenter to snail-mail a surprise short story to.