On Our Own

On Our Own
Chapter	66 of 129 (list of chapters)
Published	September 4, 2011 (2011-09-04)
Page count	6
Major characters	Augustus, Lucy
Locations	Roseville High School
Collected in	Volume Three, Omnibus 1
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School’s out, and Lucy has nowhere to go and no one to go there with, so she invites herself along on Augustus’s bus ride home. He would rather lie to the driver’s face than let that happen. The look he throws back from the window afterwards suggests he isn’t too proud of himself for it.

Synopsis

The school day is barely over before Lucy turns up at Augustus’s locker, poking fun at how bare it is. She was hoping for a band sticker or a skateboarding poster, but all he’s got is two books, a gym bag, and a small photo of Daisy taped inside the door. After some ribbing over his eyebrow piercing, Augustus decides she must be scraping the bottom of the barrel for company and walks off. Lucy yells after him that she’s “only here because I’ve got nowhere else to go!” When he asks what about home, her face falls.

Whatever the trouble at home is, Lucy won’t talk about it. She insists she just wanted to go somewhere different for once, since everyone else she knows heads straight home to do their homework. So when Augustus lets slip that he takes a different bus, Lucy declares herself game to tag along, never mind that he lives nearly an hour away in what he calls nowheresville. She shoves past him and plants herself in his line. Augustus grabs her shoulder and reaches for the cruelest thing he can find. “Why don’t you just go find whichever boyfriend of the week it is and see if he’ll take you to dinner?”

None of it shakes her loose, so Augustus boards without her. Lucy pleads from the curb that she can find her own way back, but he tells the driver she’s just trying to get on the wrong bus, and the door shuts on her protest. Left standing in the exhaust, Lucy’s hurt hardens into anger soon enough. “Screw it, then!” she yells, and starts the long walk home. On the bus, Augustus stares down at his feet, then looks back at her with real concern on his face. They both head home alone.

Character dynamics

Augustus, having successfully gotten rid of her, does not look pleased about it.

• Lucy and Augustus: The two go into this chapter as declared enemies. Their bleacher standoff in Pillow Talk ended with a simultaneous “I don’t like you.” Frozen out by Mike and adrift from her old circle, Lucy now counts Augustus as the last company on offer, and she’ll chase it as far as forcing her way into his bus line. Augustus pushes her away as harshly as he knows how, but the worried look he throws back from the bus window gives him away. The scorn masks something much closer to guilt.

Trivia & observations

• Oliver wrote this chapter rather than Veronica, per the commentary under page 1. Veronica has since confirmed on Tumblr that To the Top was his work too.
• The page 1 commentary also announces that the chapter tries a deliberately different art style, which Oliver sums up as “Experimentation!!!”
• This is the first chapter built around Augustus. Every prior appearance of his had him in ensemble scenes.
• The taped-up photo of Daisy isn’t Augustus’s only memento of her. In On the Sidelines, three chapters earlier, he kept a daisy flower pressed between the pages of his book.
• Per Oliver’s commentary under page 3, Veronica heavily revised that page’s dialogue. Left unchecked, he warns, a script lapses all too easily into “WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS”.
• The eyebrow piercing Lucy ribs Augustus over gets its origin story later in Trapped, where Melanie is the one who gives it to him.
• Escape Route grew out of this chapter. Veronica has said the idea began as a simple what-if about Lucy actually following Augustus home, and that she felt Lucy’s actions here “can’t just end there.”

Related chapters

• Escape Route: Lucy eventually pulls the same stunt again, and that time she makes it aboard. She follows Augustus all the way out to his run-down neighborhood, where he ditches her once more with a pointed “Well, I warned you the first time.”
• December: Two chapters on, the pestering has become routine, with Augustus grousing that Lucy bugs him “every recess.” He also gives her his own hard-won advice on coping with rejection, and admits that watching Daisy be happy from a distance is enough for him.
• Another Shoulder: Augustus’s jab about Lucy’s “next shoulder to cry on” points at a real habit of hers. In that chapter she showed up sobbing at Paulo’s door after Mike rejected her, begging him for help.