I opened the door. “What?” I was angry with him for being distant recently. Everybody had noticed it—my mother, Dorothy, Natalie, Hope. Everybody was mad at him for withdrawing.
“I’m going out for some film,” he said.
I thought it was odd that he would tell me this. And why did he need film at two in the morning? “Okay,” I said. “See you later then.”
For a beat, he looked at me with an expression of sadness so complete, I mistook it for calm.
He turned and walked down the hall and I went back to my bed and continued writing. I wrote about how I imagined Brooke and I would be excellent friends because I truly thought she was a gifted actor, though I didn’t believe she’d yet had the right role, with the exception of Pretty Baby.
A few hours later I went upstairs to his room looking for him. He wasn’t there.
I don’t know how I knew, but I knew.
I immediately went into the kitchen, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number for Amtrak. It only took a five-minute call to discover that a one-way ticket to New York City from Springfield, Massachusetts, had been purchased in the name of Neil Bookman.
I ran straight to Hope’s room and pounded on the door. “Bookman ran away,” I shouted. “Hope, wake up, Bookman’s gone.”
The door flew open. “What? What’s going on?”
I told her what had happened, then about my hunch and how I called Amtrak and it turned out he was on that train.
If there was one thing I could count on from Hope it was that she never minimized.
“This is not good,” she said. “I’ll go wake Dad.”
I ran back into the kitchen and paced frantically around the table. I grabbed a dried, raw hot dog off the counter and drummed it against my chest. “What should I do? What should I do? What should I do?” I was like an autistic sitting against a wall.
A moment later, Hope reappeared. “Dad said to call Amtrak and see if they can stop the train.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve got the number right here.”
“Wait,” Hope said, pausing my arm. “How do we get them to stop the train, what do we say?”
“Okay, lemme think, lemme think,” I said. “Let’s tell them that—here.” I handed her the phone. “Say you’re his psychiatrist’s daughter, that he’s run away from treatment and that he has a bomb.”
“That’s smart,” she said and dialed the number.
But it was too late. The train had already arrived in Manhattan.
An hour later, Hope and I were in the Buick, on our way to New York. We’d thrown a change of clothes into a paper bag, taken all the money out of her father’s wallet and filled the car with gas. “Jesus, Hope, why is he doing this?”
“Because, Augusten,” she said, “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s been very angry with Dad lately. Dad’s been worried about him.” She glanced at me. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but it’s true. Dad’s been worried.”
I thought back to one night last week. Bookman and I were lying upstairs on the floor in his room, side by side. He was telling me that it had all become too much. “What?” I had asked.
“You, your mother, Hope, and especially Doctor.” He spoke slowly, his teeth clenched, eyes focused straight up at the ceiling. When I pressed him for more he said, “I’m afraid I’ll end up killing myself or Finch or you or all of us.” At the time it had given me shivers, a clammy feeling that ran throughout my body. But then I talked myself out of it, saying he was only being dramatic because he wanted attention. I thought it was another ploy to make me admit that I was still madly in love with him.
“What if we can’t find him?” I said to Hope.
“We’ll find him, Augusten. Don’t you worry.”
I had reason to believe her. When I was eleven and still living in Leverett my dog ran away from home. It was Hope who showed up at my house with five hundred fliers that read LOST DOG. And it was Hope who drove me around Leverett all night long sticking the fliers in mailboxes. My father had called it a “tremendous waste of time and energy” but the next day I got a phone call and my dog was returned.
“We’ve got to find him, Hope,” I said.
We arrived in New York City five hours later and Hope drove straight to Greenwich Village. “It’s the gay section of the city. It’s where he’d most likely go.” We parked in a twenty-four-hour garage and set about on foot.
The problem was, there were too many bars. We’d never be able to hit them all. My eyes burned from exhaustion; it was as if I could feel the blood vessels in them vibrating. I didn’t know what to do.
But Hope did. “We’ll take his picture and show it to the bartenders, see if any of them have seen him.”
One by one, we hit the gay bars of New York. And one by one, the bartenders shook their heads. “Are you sure?” Hope asked every time.
When it became clear to us that we would never find him by going door-to-door, we decided our best bet was to go back to Northampton and wait by the phone. Eventually, he’d call. And if we were there, we’d have a better chance of talking him home than anyone else who answered the phone.
We drove straight back to Northampton, stopping once for gas but not for food.
And for the next three nights, I did not sleep. I stayed awake, sitting in a chair beneath the phone in the kitchen.
Hope called his parents, who hadn’t heard from him in years. She called his former roommate, who said she hadn’t heard from him since he moved out. And that, as far as Bookman’s social life was concerned, was the end of the line.
I waited by the phone for a week. Then a month. Then two months. Then a year.
At night, I dreamed he returned and I would ask him, “Where did you go?” and “Why?”
After a year, the few belongings in his room were packed into boxes and placed in the upstairs hall closet.
At night, I imagined him sneaking around outside the house, coming over to my window and tapping it gently with his finger to wake me. But he wouldn’t need to wake me because I would already be awake, waiting.
This didn’t happen. He didn’t come back.
Leaving the most awful and curious itch inside me that I couldn’t scratch.
ALL-STAR RUNNING BACK
B
RENDA DANCED ON THE PINK PORCH IN THE TWILIGHT wearing skin-tight Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. Deborah Harry threatened at full volume through the speaker propped in the open window, I’m gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha.
Brenda ran her hands across her burgundy Danskin and down her thighs. She licked her lips and tossed her head back. At eleven, she was stunningly beautiful. There was a grace about her that made me think she would grow up to be a famous dancer in New York City.
Years later, she would move to Memphis and become an unlicensed massage therapist who gave hand jobs, but this evening, with the pale orange sunlight glancing off her jetblack hair, Brenda looked poised for Lincoln Center.
“That’s great, B,” Natalie said. She was leaning back against the railing on the porch, smoking.
Brenda expertly fingered the swan that was stitched into her hip pocket. “You’re so good with your hands,” I told her. Of course, this comment would prove to be prophetic.
Brenda’s mother, Kate, had finally given in to her constant whining and woven Brenda’s hair into dozens of slim braids. Once her hair was dry, Brenda unbraided it and pranced around the house with her new kinky hair.
In the fading light, her kinky mane created a sort of dark halo around her head. When she tossed her head to the side and swung out her hip, it was easy to picture her on stage.
“She reminds me of me when I was her age,” Natalie said of her niece. I thought I caught a melancholy look in her eyes as she glanced away into the street. “Hey, I could really go for a beer.”
“Mmmm,” Brenda said, “me too.”
Natalie laughed. “You bad girl. You’re too young to drink.” Brenda stopped dancing. “I am not.” Her lips plumpe
d out in a frown.
“You are too,” Natalie said. “No beer for you.”
“Then how ’bout a joint?”
Natalie rolled her eyes and smiled. “No, bad girl. How about some milk?”
“Whatever,” Brenda said. Then she opened the door and stomped inside. A moment later, the record came to an abrupt, scratchy stop.
Natalie leaned over to crush her cigarette on the porch. “I really was just like her. She’s such a free spirit.”
*
Freedom was what we had. Nobody told us when to go to bed. Nobody told us to do our homework. Nobody told us we couldn’t drink two six-packs of Budweiser and then throw up in the Maytag.
So why did we feel so trapped? Why did I feel like I had no options in my life when it seemed that options were the only thing I did have?
I could paint my room black. I could bleach my hair blond. Or use Krazy Kolor to dye it blue. When Natalie pierced my ear one night with a hypodermic needle nobody complained. My mother didn’t gasp and say, “What have you done to your ear?” She didn’t even notice.
Nobody ever told me what to do. When I was living with my mother and father, I could raise my mother’s blood pressure just by moving one of the cork coasters on the side table an inch. “Please,” she would say, “I have everything arranged the way I like it.” But at the Finch house, I could hack a hole through the ceiling in my closet to connect to Hope’s room upstairs and nobody cared. “You’re a free person with a free will,” Finch would say.
So why did I always feel so trapped?
I worried that my feeling of being belted into an electric chair was due to some sort of mental illness.
More than anything, I wanted to break free. But free from what? That was the problem. Because I didn’t know what I wanted to break free from, I was stuck.
So I figured if I didn’t have the answer, maybe somebody else did. And I decided that what I needed was a boyfriend. A boyfriend, I decided, would be my key to freedom. My ticket out. Of whatever it was I was in.
It had been over a year since Bookman vanished. I had to move on. I was sixteen years old and single. It was pitiful.
As I sat on the midnight PVTA bus to Amherst, I scanned the male faces, looking for a potential boyfriend. My standards were high: anyone who looked back at me. Nobody did.
As I got off at Converse Hall, I walked along the Amherst Common and then made a right. This would take me past the All-Star market where I could get cigarettes. As I opened the door I knew immediately that the course of my life was about to be changed forever. He was the cutest guy I’d seen on public transportation or in any convenience store in weeks. Maybe even months.
Nonchalantly, I walked into the store and headed to the back for a Diet Coke. I felt this would give him a chance to see me in my Calvin Klein jeans. I was glad I’d worn the red sweatshirt with them. The sweatshirt made me look not quite so pale.
I grabbed a can and walked to the counter, casually pretending to be scanning the shelves. My heart was completely freaking out in my chest. It was pounding so loud, I worried he’d be able to hear it and think I had a heart condition and not consider me real long-term relationship material, but just a casual-sex fling. And that was one thing I didn’t want: NO CASUAL SEX. I thought it was disgusting, the idea of just screwing around and then that’s it.
I set the can on the counter and said, “And a pack of Marlboro Lights.”
He gave me a friendly, sort of cocky smile out of the corner of his mouth and reached above his head for the cigarettes. There were large wet stains under his arms and this excited me. I never sweated and this made me feel like a girl. I hated that I didn’t sweat. Sometimes when Natalie and I went out for a walk in town, I would use her spray bottle to saturate the front of my shirt and under my arms.
“Nice out there tonight, huh?” he said, punching the keys on the register.
“Yeah, it’s really warm.”
“Too bad I’m stuck in here. And it’s my birthday.”
I was sure he winked when he said that. I was sure that he was thinking the same thing about me that I was thinking about him. I started to feel a small—but developing—feeling of love for him. I needed to think of how to prolong the conversation so he could ask me my name and then give me his telephone number or invite me to a movie at the Pleasant Street Theater. I hadn’t seen Truffaut’s last film and I wanted to. But I had too many thoughts in my head to think of anything to say and I was feeling weird standing there with my change in my hand so I said, “Okay, take care,” and then I walked out the door.
I walked about twenty feet down the street and then I crossed to the other, darker, side and looked back. I could see him perfectly through the window.
And he was on the phone!
I was sure he was calling his version of Natalie, telling her that he’d just met this great guy but that he got away and now what was he going to do?
Well, I would solve that.
I raced the six blocks home and was heaving by the time I made it to the front door. I slid my key into the lock and quietly closed the door behind me.
My mother and Dorothy would be upstairs asleep. They didn’t mind if I came over and spent the night without calling. But they didn’t like it if I woke them up. Or if the light was on in their bedroom and the door was closed, I had to leave them alone.
I didn’t turn on any lights until I made it into the kitchen. The first thing I did was open the pack and light a cigarette. I leaned with my lower back against the sink and plotted. I had an idea in my head, but I needed to polish the details. I needed to make it foolproof.
Then, as I was staring at the pilot light of the stove, I had the perfect solution. Immediately, I went into the dining room and opened the glass-front bookcase where my mother kept her pens and paper. I grabbed a pen and a small notepad, then I sat down at the kitchen table.
I wrote one draft of the note but my handwriting was awful so I wrote another. The next one was okay, except I signed my name weird, so I did it again. In the end, I wrote the note fifteen or sixteen times before I was completely satisfied.
Carefully, I folded the note in half and slipped it into the rear pocket of my jeans. Then I swiped my keys off the table and left the house again.
But now he had company. There were two girls and a guy, both around his age, in the store with him. He was throwing his head back laughing. I took a deep breath, made a face that I hoped looked casual and friendly and then I walked into the store.
At first, they all just went on talking. But because I just stood there waiting, he finally noticed me and said, “Oh, hey. You again. You forget something?”
I confidently walked up to the counter and his friends moved to the side to let me through. I handed him the note. “Happy Birthday,” I said. Then I smiled and walked out of the store.
I did my crossing-the-street trick again, lurking in the shadows and watching.
I could see him turn the note over in his hand, open it and read it, then turn it over again. He passed it to his friends, who passed it between them.
Then I watched him make a shrugging gesture with his hands.
And then they were all laughing again.
My mortification was total and overpowering. I was suddenly having a very difficult time standing. I experienced a perfect note of utter and true clarity.
He was straight.
This was followed with the sound of my letter being read out loud inside my head, by my own voice:
Hi.
I know this seems pretty weird but . . . when I saw you tonight, I just got a really good vibe. I wanted to say something to you in the store, but I freaked out. I guess I’m kind of shy. But what I wanted to say is, that it was really nice to meet you and I wouldn’t mind seeing you again sometime. The number at the bottom of this note is my mother’s apartment. I live there part of the time and the other part in Northampton. She’s cool, so don’t worry about calling. I really would like to get to know you, but
this is NOT a casual sex thing. I’m not into that AT ALL. I guess I’ve been hurt before and don’t want to get involved with that stuff again. I’m 16, but pretty mature for my age. Oh, and my name is Augusten but I probably should have put that first. Anyway, that’s all. Take care.
Augusten.
On the front of the card, I had written the words Happy Birthday! in what I now realized was a dreadfully girly script.
And then at the bottom, I had scrawled my mother’s phone number. Now, as I walked back to her house, I worried that he or his friends would make crank calls. That they would call constantly and my mother would have to have her number changed. Dorothy would be furious and I would have to explain what I’d done. Once Dorothy knew that I did this, that I actually passed this creepy note to a perfect stranger, she would tell everybody and then Natalie would know and if Natalie knew, all of the rest of the Finches would know, including Brenda. Brenda would tease me constantly and I would never hear the end of this.
It was a disaster.
I reached in my back pocket for my cigarettes but had forgotten to take them.
Fuck.
Well, one thing was for sure. I would never, ever go to the All-Star market again for any reason no matter what. And if I was staying over at my mother and Dorothy’s place and they needed me to run out and get something, I’d just have to walk farther, to the Cumberland Farms. Hopefully, they wouldn’t need anything after midnight because All-Star was the only twenty-four-hour place in town.
But what if they did need something? What if I had to go in there?
Well, maybe he wouldn’t be there that night. He probably wouldn’t be. He was probably a student and had a lot of classes. He couldn’t work there every night because he had to study.
But what if he was working the night I had to go there?
By the time I reached the front door, I was a wired mess. I half-expected to see my mother and Dorothy waiting for me with their arms folded across their large chests. But when I walked in, the house was quiet.