Alejandro’s apartment
| Alejandro's apartment | |
|---|---|
 | |
| First appearance | Trapped, page 2 December 3, 2014 |
| Related characters | Alejandro, Toby, Melanie, Augustus |
Alejandro’s apartment is a small upstairs apartment in a multi-storey building on a residential Roseville street, home to Alejandro and the meeting place of his crew. It appears only in Trapped, where several key events in Augustus’s backstory take place, from the day he was recruited as a child to the night Melanie was nearly killed on its floor.
Description
From the street, the building looks like a perfectly respectable older place, with pale cream walls, tall barred windows, and a dark wrought-iron railing above the bushes.[1] The apartment itself sits up a flight of stairs, behind a door secured with both a chain and a sliding bolt, and that door opens straight into the main room.[1]
The inside is another story. The main room is small, with the kitchen stove alongside a couch, a coffee table, a folding camp chair, and a TV on a stand.[2] The walls are covered in scuffs and stains, and the carpet is burned and littered with cigarette butts. In the flashback, the coffee table is piled with magazines, an empty bottle, and an overflowing ashtray.[2]
History
The apartment first appears in flashback, roughly six years before the chapter’s present day. After catching a young Augustus shoplifting, Alejandro invites him home rather than turning him in: “So fuck ’em! Come to my place. Yer cool.”[4] To a neglected kid, even this filthy room looks like a dream. As Augustus puts it, “Just the thought of having a place to myself.. was fantastic.”[2] He repays the welcome with stolen food hauls, and Alejandro crowns him “our li’l mathematician.”[5] The arrangement carries on for years, with the coffee table regularly buried under stolen goods.[6]
It is also where Alejandro’s abuse plays out day to day. In one flashback scene he yanks Melanie’s hair right on the couch, screaming at her not to wear it like his ex, while Augustus looks away.[7]
The flashback ends on the apartment’s worst night. Augustus arrives to find Alejandro, bleeding from one eye, strangling Melanie on the floor while Toby watches.[8] When Augustus tries to intervene, Melanie claws his eyebrow open to keep Alejandro from learning that Augustus was the one she cheated with, and he blacks out.[9] He wakes on the couch, and buys his own safety by echoing Alejandro’s assessment of her: “Dumb bitch.” Toby takes Melanie to the hospital, and she is never seen at the apartment again.[10]
Six years later, the present-day pages show the same room and the same routine. Augustus still delivers snacks on short notice, and gets a “Took ya long enough” through the chained door for his trouble.[1] During the visit, Alejandro rages at a blue-eyed newscaster on TV and cracks the screen with a thrown remote.[11] He slams Augustus into the wall, then sends him off with orders to track down “these brats.”[11][12]
Trivia
- The newscaster who earned the remote through the TV screen bears a noticeable resemblance to Lucy.[11]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 2
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 14
- ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 2
- ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 12
- ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 15
- ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 20
- ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 26
- ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 29
- ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 30
- ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 31
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Chapter 86: Trapped, page 5
- ↑ Chapter 86: Trapped, page 6