The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

about butterflies drawn from a colourful pamphlet. Blue would never ceaseto be amazed that monarchs know each other and the world without a map. He imagined them congregating in late summer for a family picnic in a favourite tree—drinking themselves stupid on nectar before making their way en masse to their villa in the Mexican forest. Is that where we go when we die? he wondered. To Mexico? He imagined old people in their beds falling asleep at night and waking up wearing cocoons instead of pyjamas. Leaving their beds as butterflies bound for the heavens of Mexico.
    Oliver did take him for a hamburger, fries, and a chocolate milkshake, but on one of these occasions, Blue received a brutal blow. Oliver was delivering a sermon over a bottle of ketchup when Blue excused himself to go to the bathroom. Blue stared at the big man standing at the urinal beside him. The man stopped peeing, but continued to stand there, running his hand up and down his ridiculously long cock. Blue had never seen anything like it—he’d only seen his father’s penis once and it was nothing like this man’s, which was more like a baseball bat.
    â€œPretty big, eh?” the man said, pumping the thing up and down. It frightened Blue into wide-eyed silence. The man’s breathing made him uneasy. He wanted to shout for his dad, but instead he just said a meek “I guess so.”
    Oliver walked in then. “What’s taking you so long?” he said, coming around the corner.
    The large man stopped his pumping, stuffed the baseball bat back into his jeans and walked out of the room. Blue, standing there with his own little penis in his hand, didn’t know what to say. He’d been too scared to let go.
    â€œWhat are you doing, Blue?” Oliver shouted. “Playing with yourself? What are you—a faggot or something?”
    Blue had heard the word once before. He had only grown just past Oliver’s kneecaps when Oliver refused to take his searching hand any more on the way to the liquor store. “Men don’t touch other men unless they are ho-mo-sex-uals,” he had said, pronouncing each and every syllable like a sneering British broadcaster. “Don’t want people thinking we’re a couple of faggots now, do we, Llewellyn?” Oliver had said, slapping him on the back.
    â€œNo, sir,” Blue had coughed, just about choking on a caramel.
    Blue didn’t know what he’d done wrong in the washroom that day but he knew he’d done a bad bad thing. He sat in terrified silence beside his father all the way home. “What were you staring at that man’s prick for, Blue?” Oliver began, after an interminable silence.
    â€œNothing,” Blue mumbled through his tears.
    â€œDo you know what faggots do to each other?” his father asked him. “They bugger each other. They stick their pricks into dirty bums, Blue. Like dogs.”
    Blue was so mortified that the hamburger in his stomach began to moo and the milkshake started to sour, and he would never again eat at McDonald’s. Never again in his whole life. He had a secret so shameful and dirty that he couldn’t even tell Emma. “He hates me,” he told her in the basement. “He just does.”
    In their basement bubble, Emma and Blue learned how to hold each other’s breath, becoming indistinguishable on the same oxygen. They began to take frequent refuge in the dank and musty grey space where they inhaled deeply, and got so dizzy that all they could hear were hearts pounding in their ears. When they could hold their breath no longer they grabbed each other’s hands and pulled each other up, their heads spinning so wildly that they lost their balance and collapsedagainst each other, more often than not, crashing back down onto the cement floor. They called this “the hugging game.”
    When Emma crashed down on top of Blue she would rub her torso against him and press her