Free A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White

role with the Emerald City Players and I could now say cucumber sandwich with scarcely a vowel after the initial fluty u. As an English blond I'd evade not only my family but also myself and emerge as the energetic and lovable boy I longed to be. Not exactly a boy, more a girl, or rather a sturdy, canny, lavishly devout tomboy like Joan of Arc, tough in battle but yielding before her visionary Father. I wouldn't pack winter clothes; surely by October I'd be able to buy something warm.
    A new spurt of hot water as I retraced my steps to the kitchen, clipped the order to the cook's wire or flew out the swinging doors, smiling, acted courteously and won the miraculously large tip. And there, seated at a corner table by himself, is the English lord, silver-haired, recently bereaved; my hand trembles as I give him the frosted glass. In my mind I'd already betrayed the hillbilly with the sideburns who sobbed with dignity as I delivered my long farewell speech. He wasn't intelligent or rich enough to suit me.
    When I met him on Monday at six beside the fountain and presented him with the four ten-dollar bills, he struck me as ominously indifferent to the details of tomorrow's adventure which I'd elaborated with such fanaticism. He reassured me about the waiter's job and my ability to do it, told me again where he'd pick me up in the morning—but, smiling, dissuaded me from peroxiding my hair tonight. "Just pack it—we'll bleach you white whin we git whar we goan."
    We had a hamburger together at the Grasshopper, a restaurant of two rooms, one brightly lit and filled with booths and families and waitresses wearing German peasant costumes and white lace hats, the other murky and smelling of beer and smoke—a man's world, the bar. I went through the bar to the toilet. When I came out I saw Alice, the woman I'd worked with, in a low-cut dress, skirt hiked high to expose her knee, hand over her pearl necklace. Her hair had been restyled. She pushed one lock back and let it fall again over her eye, the veronica a cape might pass before an outraged bull: the man beside her, who now placed a grimy hand on her knee. She let out a shriek—a coquette's shriek, I suppose, but edged with terror. (I was glad she didn't see me, since I felt ashamed of the way our family had treated her.)
    I'd planned not to sleep at all but had set the alarm should I doze off. For hours I lay in the dark and listened to the dogs barking down in the valley. Now that I was leaving this house forever, I was tiptoeing through it mentally and prizing its luxuries—the shelves lined with blocks of identical cans (my father ordered everything by the gross); the linen cupboard stacked high with ironed if snuff-specked sheets; my own bathroom with its cupboard full of soap, tissue, towels, hand towels, washclothes; the elegant helix of the front staircase descending to the living room with its deep carpets, shaded lamps and the pretty mirror bordered by tiles on which someone with a nervous touch had painted the various breeds of lapdog. This house where I'd never felt I belonged no longer belonged to me, and the future so clearly charted for me—college, career, wife and white house wavering behind green trees—was being exchanged for that eternal circulating through the restaurant, my path as clear to me as chalk marks on the floor, instructions for each foot in the tango, lines that flowed together, branched and joined, branched and joined... In my dream my father had died but I refused to kiss him though next he was pulling me up onto his lap, an ungainly teen smeared with Vicks VapoRub whom everyone inexplicably treated as a sick child.
    When I silenced the alarm, fear overtook me. I'd go hungry! The boardinghouse room with the toilet down the hall, blood on the linoleum, Christ in a chromo, crepe-paper flowers—I dressed and packed my gym bag with the bottle of peroxide and two changes of clothes. Had my father gone to bed yet? Would the dog bark when I tried