Trapped

Trapped
Chapter	86 of 129 (list of chapters)
Published	December 1, 2014 (2014-12-01)
Page count	37
Major characters	Augustus, Alejandro, Melanie, Toby, Lucy
Minor characters	Augustus’s mom, Daisy
Locations	Old furniture place, Alejandro’s apartment, Augustus’s house, Hospital, Roseville High School
Collected in	Volume Five
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The Augustus backstory chapter. A long grayscale flashback finally explains how a neglected kid ended up under Alejandro’s thumb: the gang that took him in, the girl he loved in secret, and the blackmail that gives the chapter its name.

Synopsis

In the present day, Augustus delivers a bag of snacks to Alejandro’s apartment. A white-furred, blue-eyed woman on the TV news sends Alejandro into a shaking rage, and he demands progress on “those fuckin’ kids.” All Augustus can offer is that the blue-eyed girl moved away. When Augustus points out it has been two years, Alejandro slams him into the wall and issues his orders: “You go figure somethin’ out. You find them. I’ll do the rest.” On the walk home, Augustus wonders why he ever got involved. A long grayscale flashback follows.

A very young Augustus shoplifts milk from a convenience store. A younger, not-yet-scarred Alejandro catches him and is charmed rather than angry. On learning the kid has no curfew and parents who don’t care, he invites him home over Melanie’s objections. Melanie, Alejandro’s girlfriend, befriends Augustus on the walk over, waving off his worry with “he’s just.. he’s got a temper.” Home for Augustus is a dark room where he rolls his passed-out mother over so she won’t choke on her own vomit.

Melanie becomes the someone he looks forward to. He brings her favorite soda to the campus fountain, where she sometimes turns up with a black eye and a plan to graduate, win a scholarship, and get out of town for good. Years later, she drags the teenaged Augustus off for an eyebrow piercing, and cleaning the blood off him afterward turns into a kiss. In bed together afterward, Augustus lies rigid with dread. “He’s going to kill us,” he says, and Melanie answers, “That’s why we won’t tell him.”

The secret holds for three years, right up until Toby overhears Melanie telling Augustus she loves him. Augustus walks into the apartment to find Alejandro, blood streaming from one eye, strangling her. Melanie claws Augustus’s face open at the eyebrow to keep suspicion off him, and he blacks out amid her screams. He wakes on the couch to learn Toby took her to the hospital, and saves his own skin by echoing Alejandro with a cold grin: “Dumb bitch.”

At the hospital, a badly beaten Melanie laughs off the idea of going to the police. Her grandmother has finally found out and wants her to come live with her. “I’m free,” she tells Augustus, guessing they will never see each other again.

Melanie was the only one who got away. Toby kept Augustus trapped by telling Alejandro he couldn’t identify the “other man,” despite hearing everything, then holding it over Augustus ever since. In a more recent memory, Augustus lays the whole story out for Lucy on the school lawn. She wants him to go to the cops. When he deflects with a jab about her “little boyfriend,” she slaps him, then softens enough to call him a survivor. Back in the present, Augustus sits alone on the rooftop. Whoever it’s meant for, his closing thought is “I’m glad you made it.”

Character dynamics

Cleaning up the new piercing ends with a kiss.

• Augustus and Melanie: Melanie takes the neglected kid under her wing from the night they meet, and he adores her for years before the kiss turns it into something they have to hide. Their secret nearly gets her killed when it surfaces. Her escape to her grandmother’s is the one happy ending here, though it takes her out of his life entirely. Her advice from his childhood, “Don’t let ’em ruin you,” hangs over everything he has become since.
• Augustus and Alejandro: Their present-day arrangement grew out of Alejandro grooming a lonely Augustus in childhood. He won the kid over with flattery and a place to belong, calling him “a keeper,” and has spent the years since turning him into an errand boy he can beat at will.
• Augustus and Toby: The quiet one turns out to hold the leash, and that reveal is what the title means. Toby covered for Augustus after the Melanie incident, then made sure he knew the secret could reach Alejandro whenever he liked. Every class Augustus can’t skip and every job he can’t refuse traces back to that.
• Augustus and Lucy: By the recent-past scene, Lucy already knows Augustus’s whole situation with the gang, and their confidant bond is well established. Her sympathy arrives in her usual packaging, a slap and a lecture, but the soft part is sincere, and he looks away with a fond smile once she’s done. Whether the closing “I’m glad you made it” is meant for her, for Melanie, or for both is left open.

Trivia & observations

Lucy’s brand of sympathy comes with a slap attached.

• The flashback, which is nearly the whole chapter, is drawn in grayscale, and Veronica admits the lack of color confused readers. She had to clarify that a bun-haired background student is not Jasmine but “a black cat with tan hair.”
• Veronica’s commentary notes this backstory was “kinda implied in a BCI that takes place in an alternate timeline,” and that a chapter about it “was always planned.”
• Per Veronica’s commentary, Melanie’s fluffy hair unintentionally resembles Abbey’s mother’s. She points out the difference herself, writing that “Alej hits anyone out of anger whereas Abbey’s father never even touched his children.”
• This is Melanie’s first appearance in the comic. Names are in short supply around the gang in general. Veronica remarks that an offline reader would only know Augustus and Alejandro as “unnamed creeps.”
• Augustus’s evened-out hair actually debuted months earlier in Total Recall. Here, Lucy gives him the reason to change it with a parting shot that he looks “like a freaken idiot.” Veronica has said she designed the lopsided cut “THINKING it was a cool look,” cringes at it as an adult, but would keep it in any remake because “it says a lot about him.”
• The rooftop that opens and closes the chapter is the same abandoned factory ledge where Augustus pulled Lucy back from the edge in Ten Seconds to Midnight, which gives the final line its double reading.

Related chapters

• Confrontation: The fight where Mike and Lucy made a fool of Alejandro, and the source of his present-day grudge. Alejandro tells Lucy there that the “last girl who hurt me” gave him his scar and chipped tooth, and Lucy’s retort, “That one’s for your ex,” lands very differently once you’ve seen the Melanie incident.
• Moving On: Augustus hands Alejandro the group’s class schedules there, and Toby needles him over his soft spot for Daisy. Two years later, in this chapter’s opening pages, Augustus is still working under the same arrangement.
• Love Again: After Lucy’s return, she finds Augustus still at the school. The worry she voices here about his final year has come true — he has been held back over his absences, and Toby is now pressuring him to drop out.