Outside Reading: Week 4, Part 2

Summarization:

In the beginning of this section of Running With Scissors, Neil Bookman and Augusten have another sexual episode. The larger part of this section however consists of Natalie and Augusten practicing singing and deciding where to preform their first gig. Hope starts to become jealous of all the time they’re spending together. They finally decide to preform at a mental ward. While they are preforming, an audience member spits at Natalie, and because of the environment that Natalie grew up in, she spits back.
The next part of this section focuses on Hope. She begins to have a serious break down, but is pulled out of it by Dr. Finch. It begins with Hope convincing herself that the family cat is deathly sick with “kitty leukemia” and ends up sleeping next to it in the basement for quite some time. She keeps the cat under a laundry basket and doesn’t feed it. It does eventually die, but Augusten believes it died of starvation and not from the kitty leukemia. She buries the cat under a tree. She later tries to dig it back up, but Natalie called Dr. Finch and he talked her out of it. After talking to the doctor she went upstairs to take a nap and was then finished with her break down.
Towards the ending of this section, Natalie and Neil get in a quick but verbally destructive argument. This isn’t uncommon, cussing and using distasteful words is apart of the Finch’s everyday language. In this argument, Hope tells Neil that the relationship that he and Augusten share is immature and fake, but this is only because Neil was making fun of the fact that Hope hadn’t had sex in a long time. Bookman becomes a little hurt by this because he thinks that Augusten is his one and only love and that it will last forever. This leads to more sexual intercourse between Bookman and Augusten.
Augusten had been preparing quite sometime now for beauty school. He really wants to pass so he can be a manager of some sort of salon. He practices on Bookman, but fails and ends up turning his hair green in the attempt of turning it blonde.
This section ends with Augusten’s mother ending her relationship with Fern and starting a new one with one of Dr. Finch’s new patients. Her name is Dorothy, and she quickly moves into Deidre’s house. Dorothy is much younger, and obeys everything Deidre orders. This does not surprise Augusten, nor does it surprise him that after his mother took a visit to an asylum, she came back with a strange foreigner that to Augusten looks like a lumberjack. It is implied that he is having sex with both Deidre and Dorothy.