Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [42]
“Well, how . . .” I was confused. “How does this happen? I mean, what do I have to do? You don’t mean, like, I have to slit my wrists or something?”
“No, no, no, that’s not what I mean. It would be a staged suicide attempt. A ruse.”
“Oh,” I said.
“But you would have to be committed to a psychiatric hospital. Basically what would have to happen is that your poor mother would have to find you—” He chuckled under his breath, amused by the scenario. “—and drive you to the hospital. You’d have to remain there for, oh, probably two weeks for observation.”
I confessed that I did not find the idea of staying at a psychiatric hospital that much more appealing than school. Only slightly.
“It’ll be like a mini vacation,” he said. Then, “Where’s your spirit for adventure?”
Now that sounded better. Even if I wasn’t exactly free to go to movies and see Bookman, I wasn’t in school. And that was the main thing. He was right, it would be an adventure.
“Okay, let’s do it.”
“Now let me speak to your mother,” he said.
When she hung up she said, “The doctor is on his way over.” She looked pleased. And I realized immediately the reason for this was because I would be out of her hair for awhile. She would have nobody in the house to tell her, “Stop listening to that fucking Auntie Mame. It’s been fifty times already.” She would no longer have to defend her need to compulsively sketch the Virgin of Guadeloupe in lip liner over and over for days at a time until she got the eyes right. She would be able to gorge herself on mustard sandwiches with the crusts cut off.
It was the ideal arrangement for both of us, it seemed.
I was upstairs in my rarely occupied room, staring out the window at the street thinking about that little Cosby bitch. She certainly didn’t have to choose between a mental hospital or the seventh grade. Why couldn’t I be like that? I told myself, All I want is a normal life. But was that true? I wasn’t so sure. Because there was a part of me that enjoyed hating school, and the drama of not going, the potential consequences whatever they were. I was intrigued by the unknown. I was even slightly thrilled that my mother was such a mess. Had I become addicted to crisis? I traced my finger along the windowsill. Want something normal, want something normal, want something normal, I told myself.
But there were things in my life so much more interesting than school. So much more consuming. Bookman didn’t have a regular job. He filled in for Hope at the doctor’s office as receptionist when she needed to run an errand. Together, they were his secretarial pool. So most of his days were open. Once I was free from school we could be together constantly. The thought made me ache with want.
That whole thing at his apartment really brought us closer together. “I realize that was wrong of me. It was almost abusive; I’m sorry,” he had cried.
“It’s okay,” I told him. Secretly I wanted revenge, but I also wanted his companionship, and that won out.
Bookman gave me attention. We would go for long walks and talk about all sorts of things. Like how awful the nuns were in his Catholic school when he was a kid and how you have to roll your lips over your teeth when you give a blowjob. Then we’d go back to the barn behind the house and fool around upstairs on his musty old mattress.
When I was sitting in school, surrounded by all those painfully normal, Cabbage Patch-owning kids, all I could think about was Bookman. Kissing him, touching him, hearing him say to me, “God, you’re becoming my whole world.”
How could I just sit there obediently pinning a butterfly’s wings to a lab tray or memorizing prepositional phrases? When the other boys in the locker room were showering and talking about their weekends playing soccer, what was I supposed to say? “Oh, I had a great time. My thirty-three-year-old boyfriend said he wished they could package my cum like ice cream so he could eat it all day.”
Bookman was the only person