Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [45]
After she left and after Kevin had put on a hospital gown, he leaned in and said, “The nurses and doctors? They’re all crazy here.”
He caught me staring at the green party hat that was still on top of his head. He laughed, taking it off. “They had a little birthday party for one of the old wenches here. Something like her million-and-first birthday. Nurse whatever. Who cares.”
I was able to sit up though my head was pounding. “What is this place?”
“It’s the loony bin,” he said making a crazy face.
I wanted to go for a walk to clear my head. I needed fresh air. “How do you get out? Is there anywhere to walk?”
He laughed. “You don’t get out. It’s a locked ward, kiddo.”
At least, I thought, it’s not homeroom.
Kevin told me he was “in” because he’d tried to kill himself, too.
When I said, “Really?” he nodded.
“Why?”
“Because my life sucks,” he said. “My parents are pressuring me to go to a school I don’t want to go to, to marry someone I don’t want to marry. It’s like my whole life is already mapped out for me, at nineteen. I’m just so fucking sick of it. Of everything. You know? Fuck it.”
“Do you wish you’d died?” I said.
He thought about this. “Not right this minute.”
When he said, “What about you?” I felt a pang of guilt because he seemed so open and I couldn’t tell him the truth. Even though I wanted to. I said, “School. I hate school.”
“What are you, like eighth grade or something?”
“Seventh. I stayed back in third.”
“Christ, that’s not so bad. That’s junior high. It can’t be all that bad.”
I wanted to tell him about the perfect Cosby girl but suddenly, this didn’t seem like enough of a reason to be locked in a mental hospital. I wanted to tell him about Neil Bookman, about how much I love him and want to be with him and school is only in the way. And I wanted to tell him about how my mother is always going crazy and I have to worry about her all the time. I wanted to say, “Well, I’m only here for a sort of vacation.” But I couldn’t tell him how I got there. It had to be a secret.
For the next few days, I continued to live my lie, protecting my secret. In group therapy when I had to confront my suicidal feelings, I did my best to ad-lib. “I hate my life,” I would say. Or, “I just wanted it all to end.” I tried to recall lines from every TV movie I’d seen. I tried to picture Martin Hewitt in Endless Love after he burned down Brooke Shields’s house out of love. Instead of becoming depressed that I was in the locked ward of a mental hospital, I pretended I was playing a role in a movie, possibly on my way to an Emmy.
I missed Bookman. I wasn’t allowed to call and this whole thing had happened so suddenly, I was sure he was worried about me.
I imagined him coming to the hospital and standing outside, screaming my name up at the windows.
I missed him so much that I had physical sensations of loss, all over my body. Like one minute I was missing an arm, the next my spleen. It was making me feel sick, like throwing up.
He wasn’t rough to me anymore, like he was the first time we “did it.” He was nice now, slow. He told me he was falling in love with me. That I was godlike and that he hadn’t known that at first. He said I was becoming everything to him, his reason.
I’d never mattered to anyone so much before.
When I finally broke down and confessed about my relationship with Bookman to my mother, she couldn’t have been happier. “I am very, very fond of that young man,” she told me, gazing off into a space beyond my left shoulder. “He’s always been very supportive of me and my writing.”
“So you’re not pissed?’ I said, wondering if the fact that I was involved with a man twice my age would be yet another thing she had to worry about.
“Look, Augusten,” she began. “I don’t want you to suffer from the same sort of oppression that I suffered from as a girl. Because I know”—she lit a More—“how