The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life

by Camilla Gibb

  Boys and Girls

  On her first day of high school, Emma showed up with her formerly auburn hair dyed black, and wore a corset that suffocated her under her baggy, patchwork overalls. When they did roll call in homeroom that morning, Emma didn’t answer. She had decided that life would be different from now on. In high school she would be an altogether different person with an unpronounceable name and a mysterious past. Tabatha had been a secret: Oksana, she would share with the world. Tabatha had had parents, but Oksana would be simply singular—without attachments to the past.

  “Taylor, Emma,” her grade nine English teacher called out. “Taylor, Emma?” he repeated.

  “She’s there,” Charlene said, pointing spitefully at Emma.

  “Are you Emma Taylor?” Mr. Flick asked.

  “Well, actually, I’ve changed my name.”

  “Officially?”

  “Yes,” she lied. Imagine that I have. Imagine that I am actually Oksana Vladivostok—the only surviving member of Russia’s royal family, the great granddaughter of Czar What’s-his-name, a revolutionary girl who narrowly escaped execution by hiding in the womb of an unsuspecting woman in Montreal called Mrs. Taylor. Or a mole who had been programmed to attend Eton and Cambridge and get a top-secret job with MI5, working for a certain Mr. Philby, but everything had gone so horribly wrong that she ended up at McArthur High in Niagara Falls rather than Eton.

  Whatever it was, the whole plan had gone so awry that revealing herself as Oksana at fourteen wasn’t going to put her in any danger. In fact, in the best-case scenario, it actually might spare her the fate of Emma.

  “What will we call you then?” Mr. Flick asked with annoyance.

  “Oksana Vladivostok,” she stated. Mr. Flick smiled and the entire class burst out laughing, Charlene’s high-pitched squeaking audible over all the others.

  “Perhaps you could spell that for me,” Mr. Flick said sarcastically.

  “Sure. O-X—no. O-K—”

  “Well, which is it then?”

  “O-K—”

  “Okay, Commie girl,” Wayne shouted from the back of the room.

  “O-K … go on,” Mr. Flick prodded.

  Emma Taylor was inconsequential. She was a fly on the wall of a house in Niagara Falls—the eldest child of two non-existent parents, one missing in body, the other in soul. Oksana was different. Perhaps she would even be removed from McArthur High and sent to some boarding school for Russian defectors, where she would study Latin alongside other reformed moles, anorexic gymnasts, and closeted ballet dancers.

  Emma spent most of that fall behind her locked bedroom door, writing poetry in front of a window propped open with a carrot. Her hands were stiff with cold and tired as she wrote painful poems about dead cats and other roadkill. She spent hours in the bath on Saturday mornings, reading biographies of famous women writers who had tied stones into their long skirts and thrown themselves into rivers, or given their children glasses of milk before they stuck their heads in ovens.

  It was two years now since Oliver had disappeared from the garage and puberty seemed to be making her hallucinate. She was sure she saw him sometimes, although Blue was the one he talked to. Oliver would turn up every couple of months at his school and wave to him through the fence. It changed Blue. He didn’t play hacky sack or throw a tennis ball at the school wall like other boys did during recess, at lunch, and after school. He stood alone and simply stared at the fence, his eyes running back and forth like they were punching keys on a typewriter.

  “What are you waiting for?” the other guys would taunt. “The second fucking coming?”

  It was sort of like looking for God. His thoughts were like prayers and he would tune out the sounds of the schoolyard and concentrate hard and wonder if he could will his father into appearing. Oliver’s visits did become more and more frequent during Blue’s grade eight year and Blue thought it must be because his concentration was getting better.

  But he never approached his father. Blue stood rooted in place like a river too fast and deep ran between them. It was as if they saw each other through water: a swift current distorted their features; Oliver looked like waves of sand had run 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.

  “No 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.

  “Suck 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.

  “Why 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.”

  “ ’Cause they’re a bunch of fucking mutants,” Emma said.

  “High school sucks.”

  “You said it.”

  “Life sucks.”

  “Sure 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?”

  “That’s Max. Maxine.”

  “Well, you’ve changed since you started hanging out with her—and not for the better.”

  “What do you mean?” Emma mumbled as if she had a mouth full of mashed potatoes.

  “You’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.

  “I don’t care, Mum. She’s my friend, okay? At least I have a friend.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Emma?”

  “Nothing,” Emma muttered into her paper plate.

  Elaine let it go. She remembered fourteen all too well. All she could hope was that Emma would outgrow it before she made the same mistakes she had. But Emma was cursed with a dispositio
n 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.

  “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.

  “Fuckin’ 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.

  “Fuckwit,” Max shouted back. “I’m not a lezzy. I’m a guy.”

  “Yeah, right. Good one. Like you gotta dick, right?”

  “Bigger than yours, pencil prick,” she snickered under her breath.

  “Whad’ya say, bitch?” Marco said out of his dirty, pubescent, peach-fuzzy mouth. “You’re fucked, man.”

  “A lot more often than you,” jibed Max. “Had more girls than the whole lotta you,” she boasted.

  “It’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.”

  “Yeah, 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.

  “Blue, this is gonna sound strange, right,” she began, flushing with embarrassment, “but I need you to tell me what makes a boy a boy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  He looked exasperated. “Sounds like you’ve been smoking too much pot.”

  “Me? No way. What do you know about pot, anyway?”

  “Oh, you know, I toke here and there,” he said in a boyish macho way.

  “You do? But, Blue, you’re only thirteen years old.”

  “I’m almost fourteen,” he defended.

  “But where do you get pot?”

  “Guys from your high school.”

  “They come to your school?”

  “They trade it for hockey cards and stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Ah, forget it.”

  “No, I’m serious, Blue. I wanna know.”

  “They give it to us if we watch them jerk off,” he shrugged.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “You wanted to know.”

  “Fucking pigs,” Emma said with disgust.

  “Don’t you dare tell Mum.”

  “But, Blue, that’s really warped.”

  “I don’t care,” he muttered. “At least I don’t hang out with hermaphrodites.”

  “Is that what they say about me?”

  “Kinda,” Blue winced a little guiltily.

  “But what the hell is a hermaphrodite?”

  “Fuck if I know. Some kind of lezzy fag or something.”

  “Seriously?” she moaned, her eyes welling up with tears.

  “Oh, don’t let it upset you,” Blue said. “You know they’re just idiots.”

  “I know, but still …”

  “Don’t worry, I don’t believe them.”

  “But do you stick up for me?”

  “If I was bigger, I’d punch their fuckin’ heads in. But seeing as I’m not, I’ve just gotta ignore them.” Wimp, he could hear his father saying. Sissy. Mama’s boy. Afraid to get a little blood on your shirt?

  My tough little man, Emma thought, and burst into tears.

  Blue pressed his forehead against hers. When they’d been at the same school he’d held her hand and followed her around so she wouldn’t feel like she was alone. They used to tease her, tell her she had hairy legs and was a loser. He wanted her to feel like she had a best friend. Later they called her a lezzy and she thought boys didn’t like her because she was fat. But he liked her and he was a boy. They kissed under the front porch so that she’d know boys did want to kiss her even though she knew kissing your brother didn’t count. Now she was looking skinny and strange and hanging out with a lezzy faggot. He didn’t know what else he could do. He didn’t know how else to protect her.

  For the last dance of their grade nine year, Max dyed her hair black and wore a white polo shirt reeking of Stetson. She and Emma got modestly drunk beforehand on the tequila they drank out of a Mason jar marked “Black Currant 1975,” while crammed into a phone booth at the intersection down the road from the school.

  “Look, the lezzies are here in drag,” mocked a pack of puke-skinned boys as they walked up the stairs to the gym.

  Mrs. Salerno, the gym teacher, stood there like a soldier, saying, “Spot check for alcohol, drugs, and weapons.”

  Emma was alarmed. “When did this become a prison?” she asked Max.

  “When Mrs. Salerno decided she didn’t like me,” Max groaned, standing with her legs apart and putting her arms in the air so Mrs. Salerno could do her customs-official number.

  “Forget it, Helen,” Emma heard Max mutter to Mrs. Salerno under her breath.

  “I think we’ve got one here,” Mrs. Salerno said, gesturing to her colleagues. “Feels like she’s packing a pistol.”

  Emma watched in horror as Mrs. Salerno started unzipping Max’s pants. “Hey! You can’t do that!” Emma shouted, but then her jaw dropped as something blue and rubbery fell to the floor.

  “Oh my God,” Mr. Mackenzie, the chemistry teacher, said, stepping back from the object on the floor.

  Emma inched forward and stared at it, thinking, What the hell is that? “Don’t worry, it’s not loaded,” Max said, rolling her eyes.

  “I don’t know what that is exactly,” said Mr. Mackenzie, remembering he was supposed to be an authority, “but I’m sure it’s against regulations.”

  “I don’t know if you actually have school rules about this,” said Max.

  “That’s enough, young lady—person—whatever you are,” he shouted. “I think you and the Russian girl should just leave.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’m outta here,” Max said, jumping down the stairs three at a time. “Like forever!” she shouted. She only turned around when she’d reached the bottom of the stairs to ask Emma if she was coming. Emma hesitated, and then bolted down the stairs after her, although she knew the era of Oksana and Max was all downhill from there. There were just too many things she didn’t understand. Being a Russian princess wasn’t all rubles and romance—it clearly had its dangerous side.

  Max wouldn’t be allowed back to McArthur for grade ten and she’d have to take Oksana with her wherever she was going. Emma dreamt that the two of them had gone backpacking through Europe and Asia in search of ancestral roots, sharing a toothbrush, a pack of Camel Lights, and a couple of trashy novels, wandering deep into the heart of Communism. Being Emma again was infinitely lonelier, but it was safer, English-speaking, more familiar.

  Bald

  Blue turned fourteen that summer. On his birthday he locke
d himself in the bathroom and took Elaine’s electric, pink lady razor to his head. He cringed at the sight of his mutating face in the mirror and decided to rid himself of all hair. He was going to hide: be like Casper the Ghost, friendly, but invisible.

  The razor’s vibration tickled above his upper lip. He contemplated getting rid of his eyebrows next but moved straight up to his hairline and peeled a highway through the centre of his head. His scalp was some shade of grey, almost green in fact, ghoulish. As his hair floated down into the sink he wondered if he should keep it. Preserve it in oil for some unknown purpose. Be a man, like his father.

  Shaving his head was the culmination of the worst week in a lifetime of bad weeks. On Monday, he’d felt an ache for the ages in his stomach. On Tuesday, his intestines were on fire. On Wednesday, the toilet was full of blood; he stared at the rectal red in horror, wondering if words were sharper than razor blades, deadlier than bullets. He thought he must be dying.

  “Don’t you fucking tell Mum,” he said, as he and Emma took a taxi to the emergency room paid for with money stolen from Elaine’s purse.

  I’d never, Emma thought. She’d be useless in a crisis, she was disastrous enough in the day-to-day.

  After an interminable wait, he was finally seen by a doctor. Emma remained in the waiting room, peeling off most of her fingernails and then part of the rubber sole of her shoe.

  In the examining room, the doctor, whose name Blue blanked out, asked him to describe his symptoms. He depressed Blue’s tongue, poked cold metal in his ears, pulled syringes full of blood out of his arm, made him crap in a cup, and finally, told him to take off his underwear and roll over.