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

was that Emma would outgrow it before she made the same mistakes she had. But Emma was cursed with a disposition similar to Oliver’s. She hoped the repugnance of Oliver’s hair floating in oil in the garage was enough of a warning, but she felt compelled to say, “You might think it’s great to hitch a ride on a magic carpet, Emma, but those things don’t come equipped with brakes,” as if Emma were privy to her thoughts.
    â€œ
What
are you talking about?” Emma asked, rolling her eyes.
    Emma spent the rest of the night writing angry rants about school and mothers and men and everything else she could think of that she hated at fourteen. Snow was drifting through the open window as Emma smoked a cigarette. She smoked Camel Lights because they were Max’s brand, just as she carried a jackknife in the pocket of her long black skirt now, and slathered her lips obsessively with Carmex. She was a girl who wanted to be just like a girl who wanted to be a boy. It was all very confusing.
    Blue was certainly confused. His sister looked a little weird these days. All blood-red lipstick and long black clothes and a permanent sneer on her face. She was even bitchy with him on occasion, but whenever she snapped at him she sobered quickly, and melted back into the girl Blue remembered, wrapping her arms around him so that he was buried like a baby animal in the arms of a black-robed witch.
    â€œFuckin’ lezzies,” Emma’s sort of ex-boyfriend Fraser and his posse of pimpled pinheads shouted as they passed her sharing a cigarette with Max in the alley beside the school.
    â€œFuckwit,” Max shouted back. “I’m not a lezzy. I’m a guy.”
    â€œYeah, right. Good one. Like you gotta dick, right?”
    â€œBigger than yours, pencil prick,” she snickered under her breath.
    â€œWhad’ya say, bitch?” Marco said out of his dirty, pubescent, peach-fuzzy mouth. “You’re fucked, man.”
    â€œA lot more often than you,” jibed Max. “Had more girls than the whole lotta you,” she boasted.
    â€œIt’s true,” Emma said in her defence. “No one’s gonna put out for a limp dick like you, Marco. Max is a regular Don Juan.”
    â€œYeah, well, no one else would fuck a retard like you, anyway,” he said, wandering off in pathetic defeat.
    This took Emma aback. If Max did have a dick, then he really was a boy, wasn’t he? Or she? But if Max was a girl with a dick, what the hell was she? Or he? Emma did and didn’t want to know.
    She rapped her knuckles on the bedroom wall that night, asking Blue to meet her in the basement in five minutes.
    â€œBlue, this is gonna sound strange, right,” she began, flushing with embarrassment, “but I need you to tell me what makes a boy a boy.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?”
    â€œI don’t really know.”
    He looked exasperated. “Sounds like you’ve been smoking too much pot.”
    â€œMe? No way. What do you know about pot, anyway?”
    â€œOh, you know, I toke here and there,” he said in a boyish macho way.
    â€œYou do? But, Blue, you’re only thirteen years old.”
    â€œI’m almost fourteen,” he defended.
    â€œBut where do you get pot?”
    â€œGuys from your high school.”
    â€œThey come to your school?”
    â€œThey trade it for hockey cards and stuff.”
    â€œWhat kind of stuff?”
    â€œAh, forget it.”
    â€œNo, I’m serious, Blue. I wanna know.”
    â€œThey give it to us if we watch them jerk off,” he shrugged.
    â€œYou’re kidding.”
    â€œYou wanted to know.”
    â€œFucking pigs,” Emma said with disgust.
    â€œDon’t you dare tell Mum.”
    â€œBut, Blue, that’s really warped.”
    â€œI don’t care,” he muttered. “At least I don’t hang out with hermaphrodites.”
    â€œIs that what they say