Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [88]
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