Leaving Home

Leaving Home
Chapter	76 of 129 (list of chapters)
Published	June 25, 2013 (2013-06-25)
Page count	11
Major characters	Mike, Paulo, Rachel
Minor characters	Sandy, Blur, Daisy, Abbey, Sue, David, David’s mom, Sam, Jordan, Augustus
Locations	Mike’s house, Rachel’s house, Roseville neighborhood
Collected in	Volume Four
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In the wake of Breaking Up, everyone in Roseville copes in their own way. Paulo tracks down Mike for a punch that turns into a breakdown, Blur flies away, and Rachel catches Paulo at his very lowest, which sets up a rather awkward morning after.

Synopsis

Mike keeps a lonely vigil under a bare tree on a snowy hill until Paulo walks up without a word and punches him hard in the face. Mike doesn’t fight back. Pinned against the tree, he only mutters that Paulo can yell at him if it’ll make him feel better. Paulo never gets around to yelling. He’s crying, and he crumples to his hands and knees in the snow, sobbing that he “was.. gonna.. tell her..” and now he can’t. Mike kneels down beside him and gently strokes his head.

Afterward, they walk home in an uneasy truce. Paulo demands that Mike tell no one what he saw, and when Mike asks whether he’ll be alright, he flatly admits he won’t be. Mike puts a hand on his shoulder and promises he’s there for him anyway, which earns him a curt “Hands off, fruitcake.” They part ways, and Paulo holds his composure for exactly as long as Mike can see him. Rachel finds him weeping on the sidewalk. He tries his usual flirty patter on her, but the grin crumbles almost immediately, and he ends up sobbing into his hand while she holds his arm.

Back home, Mike brushes off his worried mom and heads upstairs, where he finds blue feathers on his bed and windowsill and the window hanging open. Blur has flown away. Lying in bed, Mike figures that everyone seems to have their own way of coping. A montage bears him out. Sue weeps at her desk beside a script, David stares down a consolation cake, Lucy’s family huddles together in tears, and Augustus watches the sunrise alone from a snowy ledge. On the phone that night, Sandy presses Mike about what’s wrong. He’ll only say that a friend’s family moved away. A flashback shows a distraught Blur screaming that Mike might be able to deal without them, “BUT I CAN’T!!” Sandy’s cheerful suggestion that the move might be good for them doesn’t land.

The next morning, Paulo wakes up in an unfamiliar bed with green sheets. He sits up, stretches, and freezes. Rachel is asleep right beside him. The chapter closes on a single word, floating alone at the bottom of the page: “Shit.”

Character dynamics

Mike ends up comforting the boy who came to punch him.

• Paulo and Mike: Years of open rivalry get bent into something closer to a truce. Paulo comes looking for someone to blame, and Mike is so guilt-ridden he’s prepared to take whatever’s coming, but once the grief spills out, Mike is the one holding Paulo together. Both of them retreat behind the old hostility as fast as they can. Paulo swears Mike to secrecy and, the moment the sympathy gets too sincere, revives “fruitcake”, his oldest insult for him. Still, Mike has now seen Paulo at his absolute lowest, and neither of them can take that back.
• Paulo and Rachel: Exes from a brief fling back in Back and Forth, and on friendly but distant terms since. Rachel is the one person Paulo can’t keep the mask up for. His cheerful front falls apart in seconds, and she comforts him without a word of judgment. What happens after that stays off panel, but Paulo waking up in her bed the next morning starts something new and entirely undefined between them.
• Mike and Blur: Mike has been Blur’s owner ever since he took the amnesiac bird in during Blurry Memories, but Blur couldn’t cope with the departures the way Mike could. He flew off after an argument Mike wrote off as blowing off steam, and Mike quietly folds the loss into the vague “friend” he tells Sandy about.

Trivia & observations

• Veronica used the commentary under the Sandy phone call page to announce that the pets were being written out of the comic. She created them as a kid for BCB’s older version, felt they had “become obsolete in this reincarnation”, and signed off with “They’re with Lucy now.”
• Years later, Veronica reflected on the goodbye in a Tumblr ask. Yashy “sorta represented Lucy’s mean intrusive thoughts” but “would advocate for Lucy when she couldn’t”. In some ways, Paulo ended up filling that loudmouth-advocate role once story changes cut the scenes she’d planned.
• Veronica’s commentary calls Paulo’s arm-pinning pose on the hill overdramatic in hindsight, but deliberate. Holding Mike in place to yell at him “is just about the meanest thing you can do, dem poor Korat ears.” The aside also confirms Mike’s breed as a Korat.
• The montage page’s commentary explains David’s coping cake. His mother “bakes cakes for every occasion. Birthdays, holidays, funerals, you name ’em!”
• Lucy is never once named in the chapter, and Paulo only manages “her” and “She”. Mike’s “friend” to Sandy is deliberately slippery. The immediate flashback is to Blur, who has just flown away, while the friend’s family moving away describes Lucy.
• Mike’s “Seems like everyone has their own way of coping” repeats, almost word for word, a line Daisy said to Abbey in At Loose Ends. Both times, it’s said about someone who isn’t coming back.
• The hill and its bare tree are a well-worn spot in the comic. Young Mike and Sandy used to eat lunch there, and it’s also where little Mike and Lucy once talked about getting married.

Related chapters

• Breaking Up: Everything here is fallout from the previous chapter, where Lucy ends up in the hospital and Mike hears from Lily that she isn’t coming back.
• Study Buddy: The next chapter opens moments after Paulo’s rude awakening, with Rachel confirming that yes, they spent the night together.
• Ten Seconds to Midnight: The snowy ledge Augustus watches the sunrise from in the montage is at the same abandoned building where he talked Lucy down on New Year’s Eve. His pose there mirrors hers from that chapter’s last page.