Augustus’s house

Augustus's house
First appearance	Ten Seconds to Midnight, page 1 December 3, 2012
Related characters	Augustus, Lucy, Augustus’s mom, Augustus’s dad

Augustus’s house is the run-down home of Augustus and his alcoholic, neglectful parents, in a desolate part of the city well past the end of the school bus route. The comic visits it just three times, and each visit finds the same picture: the parents drunk or fighting, and Augustus fending for himself.

Description

The house sits in a rough urban neighborhood of cracked pavement, trash-strewn lots, and boarded-up storefronts. It is a long way from everything, and Augustus tells Lucy’s parents that the last bus out his way leaves around six in the evening. Augustus says the family used to live closer before moving, but the comic never establishes whether the earlier interiors show this building or their previous home. The house is seen from outside only once, in Escape Route, as a small, sagging place with clapboard siding behind a chain-link fence. Some of the windows are boarded up, the yard is overgrown, and a full trash bag leans against the side wall.

The front door opens straight into the living room, where an old television plays static on a stand between a dirty ashtray and a crumpled rag. A small cloth-covered table and the coffee table are both crowded with alcohol bottles, and piles of clothes and more empties cover the floor. The room is dark in every appearance; on New Year’s Eve, television static and a floor lamp provide the light. In every one of the house’s appearances, one of Augustus’s parents is passed out on or beside the couch.

Augustus’s bedroom is nearly empty. A bare mattress with a single blanket and pillow sits on the floor in the corner, the walls are cracked, and the floor is scattered with crumbs. There is no desk, shelf, or decoration of any kind. The walls are thin enough that his parents’ fights carry through clearly. Veronica’s commentary offers a gentler read on the emptiness, noting that “Augustus prefers a minimalist style. He Marie Kondo’s the environment he can control.”

History

The living room laid bare, with a static-filled television, a cluttered couch, and bottles scattered across every surface.

The house makes its debut in Ten Seconds to Midnight, and the whole appearance is one page of Augustus leaving it. On New Year’s Eve, he rights a dripping liquor bottle, crosses the dark living room past both of his unconscious parents, and walks out into the snow. The only send-off he gets is a groggy “Who opened the damn door..” from his father, to which he replies, “Happy new year to you too.”

A grayscale flashback in Trapped goes further back, to Augustus’s childhood. He finds his mother passed out drunk and choking on her own vomit, rolls her onto her stomach so she won’t asphyxiate, and sits hugging his knees beside the mess. His own summary of those years is short: “There wasn’t much back home.” The same chapter shows how that neglect drew the wrong kind of attention, as Alejandro recruited Augustus for his gang because his parents don’t care where he goes and he has no curfew.

In a later flashback at Augustus’s home, Melanie pierces his eyebrow on a bathroom floor already littered with blood, loose needles, and cotton balls, and cleaning him up afterward turns into their first kiss. Afterward the two lie together in the frameless bed, where Augustus worries aloud that Alejandro will kill them both and Melanie answers, “That’s why we won’t tell him,” before begging him to run away with her.

The house finally gets a full chapter in Escape Route, in a flashback to Lucy’s junior year. She follows Augustus all the way home, walking past his mother snoring upside down on the couch on her way in. That visit makes her the only member of the main cast ever to see the place. He soon leaves her alone in his bedroom to run errands for the gang, warning her that the person he’s meeting would be “more than excited” to know she came out this way. While he is gone, she listens to his parents’ screaming fight through the wall until something smashes.

He returns after dark and lends her his phone so Daisy can cover for her at home. When Lucy asks whether he is really okay living like this, he tells her, “You get used to it,” and calls all of it pretty ordinary. She thanks him for keeping her out of his trouble before lights out, and later that night wakes sobbing from a nightmare while he fumbles at comforting her.

That visit comes near the end of Augustus’s time in the house. Lucy’s parents later offer him their guest room until graduation, and by the present day of Escape Route he is waking up at Lucy’s house instead.

Residents

Augustus’s bedroom has a bare mattress on the floor, cracked walls, and crumbs scattered about.

Three people live here, and only one of them is ever seen awake.

• Augustus has the bare-mattress bedroom, and he leaves the house whenever he can. He eventually moves out for good, into the guest room at Lucy’s house.
• Augustus’s mom appears only unconscious, whether asleep on the living room floor, choking on vomit on the couch, or snoring upside down when Lucy visits.
• Augustus’s dad is passed out on the couch in the house’s debut, and otherwise only heard, screaming “SHUT UP!!” at his wife through the bedroom wall.

Trivia

A young Augustus waits on the living room floor beside his passed-out mother, bottles and glasses scattered around the couch.

• The house sequence in Escape Route is a canonized redraw of “Another Trip”, a members-only comic that offered an alternate path into On Our Own. Veronica’s commentary says the original was “too good to leave there” and that she “had to find a way to make that comic canon”.
• Veronica’s commentary on the debut page jokes about the bottle collection: “you’re not even gonna try to recycle all that, Augustus? .. I guess it would be too noisy, to be fair.”

See also

• Escape Route
• Augustus
• Lucy’s house
• Alejandro’s apartment