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

Oliver had managed to lock the door from the inside and escape would remain a mystery.
    â€œDad’s a real Houdini!” Blue said in delight.
    â€œYour father,” Elaine said, “seems to have more than just one screw loose.”
    The inside of the garage smelled rank with dirty human. “Pee-yu,” Emma said, pinching her nose.
    â€œPee-yu, it stinks. What a bunch of lousy Chinks,” Blue chanted.
    Elaine slapped him on the back of the head then. “Blue, that’s a nasty little rhyme.” He had absolutely no idea why what he’d said was nasty and Elaine, having already downed a glass of Scotch that morning, and underestimating her strength, had slapped Blue so hard that he fell to the floor. It was Emma who helped him up and held his sobbing face against her chest. Elaine, although she apologized profusely, said it was all Oliver’s fault for creating such a mess in the first place.
    Emma looked around the garage in silence. Her father had obviously spent months engaged in some strange tasks. The entire ceiling was covered in pennies glued in methodical order. He’d arranged all the tools on the wall into circles: hammers and saws and screwdrivers forming the spokes of wheels going nowhere. Emma looked in a bucket on the floor then and screamed. There was a mass of grey hair floating in oil in the bucket. It seemed Oliver had cut off his hair, and had been trying to preserve it somehow.
    â€œThat is
just
disgusting,” Elaine said, gagging. “Don’t go near it, Llewellyn!” she shrieked.
    â€œBut it’s just his hair,” Blue shrugged.

    The police weren’t willing to do a missing person’s report, but because Elaine managed to imply murder when she mentioned there were body parts in buckets in the garage, they said they’d be right over.
    â€œHair,” an officer noted. “His own, I imagine, but we’ll take it in for testing.”
    â€œI’d just be grateful if you could take it away,” she shuddered.
    We found bits of my dad in the garage,” Blue whispered to his best friend Stewart in the playground the next day.
    â€œGross,” said Stewart. “Like his legs and stuff?”
    â€œHis hair.”
    â€œBut my mum has a piece of my hair from when I was a baby.”
    â€œWell, my dad’s hair was grey.”
    â€œOh,” Stewart nodded like he understood, and then said, “But I don’t get it.”
    â€œNeither do I,” Blue had to agree. “I guess that’s why my mum called the police.”
    â€œHoly drama, Batman,” said Stewart.

Kiss
    It was under the front porch that Emma and Blue had their first kiss. She and Blue were coughing on a stale cigarette stolen from Elaine’s purse a month before, when Emma suddenly mashed her mouth into Blue’s. Then she snapped back and shrugged her shoulders, saying, “Huh. I don’t see what the big deal is about.”
    â€œMe neither,” said Blue, although he was more than a little bewildered by the abrupt smack on the lips. They’d been rubbing bodies in the basement since he was little, but this was different somehow. It had a guilt-free air of purpose and finality. She was thin now, and in the grand scheme of the mad, mad world that meant that kisses were just around the corner.
    In fact, it actually took Emma more than a year to work up the nerve to kiss anyone again, and when she finally did, it was only under duress. In grade seven, Fraser O’Donnell, who she thought was a geek, but a cute geek, asked her to slow dance with him at the end of the first in a series of awkward junior high school parties. She’d never danced to a slow song before and there she was with a boy’s head on her shoulder, looking over at her almost-best friend Charlene Boysenberry who wasmoving around in slow circles with bad-boy Dillon and mouthing: “Do this,” as she rubbed her hands up and down