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

the hall. The old Victorian had many rooms and many hallways; two stairways and so many doors that it was easy to get lost. But the kitchen was easy—just straight back at the end of the house.
    My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, which was piled high with dirty dishes caked with food. She was smoking a cigarette.
    “Mom?”
    She turned to me, opening her arms. “Augusten.”
    I hugged her. I loved her smell, Chanel No. 5 and nicotine. “How much longer are we gonna stay? I wanna go home.”
    She hugged me closer and stroked the back of my head with her hand.
    I pulled away. “Are we gonna go soon?”
    She picked her cigarette from the rim of a plate on the table and sucked the smoke into her lungs. When she spoke, her words came out smoking. “Dr. Finch is saving our lives, Augusten. It’s important that we be here now.”
    In the distance, I heard Poo Bear laugh.
    She took another drag from her cigarette, then plopped it into what was left of a glass of milk. “I know this is all new for you and it’s very confusing. But this is a safe place. This is where we need to be. Right here in the doctor’s own home, with his family.”
    Her eyes looked different. Wider, somehow. Not her own. They scared me. So did the roaches scrambling across the table, over the dishes, up the arm of a spatula.
    “Have you been playing with the doctor’s daughters? With Natalie and Vickie?”
    “I guess.”
    “And have you been having a good time?”
    “No, I wanna leave.” The doctor’s house was not at all what I had expected. It was weird and awful and fascinating and confusing and I wanted to go home to the country and play with a tree.
    A toilet flushed down the narrow hallway that led from the kitchen. There was a deep clearing of a throat, a rumble. Followed by the unlocking of a door.
    “Augusten, Dr. Finch and I are talking now. You go back and play with the girls.”
    My heart pounded. I was seized with panic. I desperately needed to check my hair in a mirror. “Please, can we go? I don’t want to be here anymore. It’s too weird here.”
    I looked up and there he was. “Well, well, well,” he boomed, approaching me with his hand extended.
    I grabbed it, wondering if he’d hidden something in it. A joy buzzer, maybe, or more balloons.
    His eyes widened along with his smile. “What a firm handshake. That is an excellent handshake. A ten-plus on the Great Scale of Handshake Ratings.”
    He was short, but seemed much larger. He occupied a lot of space in the room.
    “How are you doing, young man?” He smacked me on the shoulder, like a father on TV; like Mike Brady or Ward Cleaver.
    “Okay.” I could feel the bottoms of my feet sweat. I couldn’t tell him that his own freaky kids and his own filthy house were the source of my distress.
    “Take a seat here,” he said, gesturing at a chair.
    I moved the roasting pan to the table and sat. He took the chair between my mother and me. I looked back and forth between them and for awhile nobody said anything. My mother lit another cigarette and Dr. Finch scratched the back of his head.
    “Your mother is in a state of crisis,” he said finally.
    She blew a plume of smoke into the air. “That’s an understatement,” she said under her breath.
    “Do you know what that means?” he asked me.
    In the distance, somebody began to pound on the piano keys. “I don’t know,” I said.
    “What that means is that your mother is in trouble with your father. Your father is very angry with your mother right now.” He elbowed a plate out of the way and placed his hands on the table, clasping his fingers. “Your father may want to hurt your mother.”
    I swallowed. Hurt her ?
    “Your father is a very sick man, Augusten. And I believe he is homicidal. Do you know what homicidal means?”
    I looked at my mother and she turned away. “It means he wants to kill her?”
    “Yes. That’s what it means. Some people, when they get angry, become depressed. That’s what