Read Online Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs - Free Book Online Page B

I wasn’t sure I’d be able to climb out. So I held my breath and listened for more sounds. There was nothing.
    I glanced down at my slacks and noticed an unsightly stain. It was some sort of grease. It would never come out. I shrugged, got up and ran for the kitchen to see what small disaster had happened.
     
    One day late my mother picked me up from the Finch house. There was no excited knocking on the door, no opening of arms, no smothering with kisses. She simply slid the brown station wagon up alongside the house and sat there waiting. I don’t know how long she’d been sitting there when I finally caught a glimpse of a car parked out front, noticed it was her and ran outside.
    “You’re back!” I cried, running barefoot out of the house, over the dirt path to the street, to her window which was rolled all the way up.
    She continued to stare straight ahead, even as I banged on the glass.
    Exhaust spilled out against the curb, and the car itself seemed weary, the engine sounding ready to fall out onto the street.
    I knocked again on the window, and finally she blinked, turned and saw me. She slowly rolled down her window and leaned her head out. “Are you ready to go to Amherst? Do you have your things?” she asked flatly.
    I turned back to the house, noticed I’d left the door wide open. Then I realized it didn’t matter, somebody would close it. And I had more shoes in Amherst, anyway. I walked around the front of the car to the passenger side and climbed in.
    “Where’d you go? How was it? What happened?” I fired my questions at her as she pulled away from the house and headed for Amherst.
    She answered none of my questions. She simply looked straight ahead, though not quite at the road, never checking her rearview mirror, not lighting a single More.
    She had come back for me, just like she said she would. Only, where was she?

JUST ADD WATER
     
     
     
    A
    S I SPENT MORE AND MORE TIME WITH THE F INCHES DUR ing that year, I could feel myself changing in profound ways, with stunning speed. I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water.
    My double-knit slacks were replaced by an old pair of Vickie’s jeans that Natalie found in a pile next to the clothes dryer. “These will look excellent on you.” When I expressed apprehension at wearing the virtually crotchless Levi’s, she said, “Oh, get over it. It’s just a little ventilation.” I stopped trying to force my hair into a smooth, glossy sheet and instead let it run its unruly, curly course. “You look so much better,” Natalie said. “Like you could be a drummer with Blondie.” Inside, I felt I’d aged two years in the space of a few months. I loved it. And there was so much freedom in the house, everyone was so easy-going. They didn’t treat me like a little kid.
    But as free and accepting as the Finches were, I worried about their reaction to my deep, dark secret. The fact that I was gay had never been a big deal to me—I’d known all my life. And because I seldom interacted with other kids, I hadn’t really been programmed to believe it was wrong. Anita Bryant on TV talked about how sick and evil gay people were. But I thought she was tacky and classless and this made me have no respect for her. But I wasn’t sure what the Finches would think, partly because they were Catholic and to me Catholic people seemed very white-knuckled and tight-fisted about life in general. I was worried my being gay would push the Finches’ acceptance of me past the breaking point.
    “Big deal,” Hope said when I told her.
    We were taking a walk around the neighborhood at night and it had taken me twenty minutes to confess. “I figured it out on my own anyway,” she said, glancing at me sideways and smiling.
    “You did?” I asked, alarmed. Did I emit a certain gay odor? Or maybe it was my unnatural obsession with cleanliness that clued her in. It was one thing to be gay. But it was something else altogether to seem