Contents

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14
15. Chapter 15
16. Chapter 16
17. Chapter 17
18. Chapter 18
19. Chapter 19
20. Author Interview
21. Acknowledgements
22. Follow Penguin

About the Author

Savannah Brown is an American author and poet currently residing in London, England. In 2016, she self-published her bestselling collection of poetry titled Graffiti (and Other Poems), which won a Goodreads Choice Award.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Seeing the body was supposed to be cathartic, but the man in the lipstick wasn’t my dad.

I mean, he was. But he wasn’t. There was so little Dad left in him that the emotional experience wasn’t too dissimilar from gazing upon a giant steak in a suit: there was discomfort, and a sick sort of a fascination, but mainly a desire for the moment to end. That sounds callous. Maybe it was. Maybe it was a symptom of over-researching; the night before I had spent hours reading about embalming to prepare myself for what this would be like, and now all I could focus on were his glued-together eyelids, his sewn-shut mouth, and his bloated limbs stuffed into clothes tailored well enough to distract everyone from the fact that he looked like a Jim Henson fever dream.

Benjamin Whitaker, the artist formerly known as Dad, had hugged a telephone pole while travelling at approximately sixty miles an hour. Swerve, smash, gone. Well, not really, but ‘swerve, smash, unconscious’ doesn’t have quite the same punch. The lungs were the problem. The lack thereof. They’d popped like a balloon, which isn’t super-conducive to living; even so, he’d managed to survive long enough to get to the hospital, but not much longer. And when there was no one left to keep alive, they tried to figure out why. Town officials. Police officers. Launched an investigation that only led to more uncertainty. The front of the car had practically melted and there was no way to tell if it’d been faulty brakes or steering or whatever, so the best they could come up with was that maybe he had fallen asleep, or been texting, or suicidal, or maybe there was a deer or a person, or maybe he just wasn’t paying attention.

And I’m sure, to the outside observer, any of those possibilities might have seemed realistic. But the outside observer didn’t know Dad.

I’m exaggerating about how he looked, by the way. He looked fine. Enough to be recognizable, and underneath the pale foundation and pink lip tint, there was still the time-locked stubble and the square jaw and the taffy-pulled limbs. But the sight of his chest was jarring. A mountain range, all slopes and concavities where the newspaper balled up underneath his shirt had deflated. Then something occurred to me.

‘Why the hell is he wearing his glasses?’