Free The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life by Camilla Gibb

over his face and eroded his expression. He began to speak to Blue, his lips parting in slow motion and bubbles of air without sound floating up into the sky.
    Blue mouthed back slow-motion, water-laden words. “I can’t hear you,” he said.
    â€œNo one can,” Oliver mouthed back.
    Blue had always been a boy of few words and ever since being banished to remedial English he’d been called “dumb,” stuck in what other kids charmingly referred to as “the retard class.” “You look like a gaping fucking fish,” one of the guys laughed. “Who the hell are you talking to?” Blue didn’t care: he was learning to speak without sound, finding a way to communicate with his father—the man on the other side of the fence who no one but him could see.
    Emma was a person of few words herself, but unlike Blue she’d adopted a waif-like and distressed posture early on; after
Dr. Nelligan’s Diet Book for Girls
, she’d shed pounds of innocence and adopted an appearance that made people think her mysterious or badly nourished, but not stupid. But, six blocks away from Blue, at McArthur High, her classmates were persecuting her as well.
    â€œSuck my cock, Vladivostok,” boys in the schoolyard taunted. “You fuckin’ Commie.”
    The kinder-whores dressed in tube tops and high-tops preferred calling her “Princess Commie Big Shit” and they still weren’t relenting on “Lezzy.”
    Still, being a Princess Commie Big Shit Lezzy was at least better than being a boring old Emma Taylor in her mind, even if it meant everybody hated her. Everybody, that is, except her brother and her new best friend, Max.
    The first time Emma saw Max she didn’t know whether Max was a boy or a girl. Max had a blonde brush cut and wore army fatigues and looked like her earlobes had been repeatedly punched with a staple gun. She wore steel-toed boots, had an all-purpose jackknife chained to her studded belt, and rarely looked up when she shuffled past people. Maxine was her name, but since she thought she was a boy, she went by the name Max.
    If Emma thought she had it bad, Max had it far worse. The kids at school didn’t know what to call her: it was more often “faggot” than “lezzy,” but most often “freak.” And when Maxine and Oksana became friends, they started to call them both lezzies.
    Oksana would lie with her head on Max’s belly in the park and read aloud from a copy of the
Scum Manifesto
, which Max had given her. Max would listen, staring at the sky and blowing smoke rings over Oksana’s head in the heat of the late afternoon.
    â€œWhy the fuck do they call us lezzies?” Max asked angrily one day. “I mean, I’m a guy and you’re a Russian princess. There’s nothing lezzy about us.”
    â€œÂ â€™Cause they’re a bunch of fucking mutants,” Emma said.
    â€œHigh school sucks.”
    â€œYou said it.”
    â€œLife sucks.”
    â€œSure does.”
    Elaine actually took notice of Emma’s new friendship and asked her, “Who’s that strange girl I see loitering in the front yard?”
    â€œThat’s Max. Maxine.”
    â€œWell, you’ve changed since you started hanging out with her—and not for the better.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” Emma mumbled as if she had a mouth full of mashed potatoes.
    â€œYou’ve become rebellious. That girl looks like she needs a bath. I don’t know if she’s quite right,” Elaine said, as she plopped down a plate of takeout Polish cabbage rolls in front of her alien children one interminable Saturday night.
    â€œI don’t care, Mum. She’s my friend, okay? At least I have a friend.”
    â€œWhat’s that supposed to mean, Emma?”
    â€œNothing,” Emma muttered into her paper plate.
    Elaine let it go. She remembered fourteen all too well. All she could hope