#augustus bcb

An observation I'm going to blatantly steal from an excellent Reddit comment:

Look at the coloring on the sfx of the phone buzzing for this scene:

It's gray before Augustus realizes who's calling

The lettering grows red as dread sets in

It stays red through the next page, but dims back to gray as his fear fades

Alejandro and/or Toby have been calling him regularly for months now (Escape Route was Augustus's birthday, October 1) and it's at least January now), long enough that Augustus knows the cadence of their calls:

This whole time, just offscreen, Augustus has been fearing the return of his former friends. He's out of his parents' home but he's still in Roseville, and he can study for the SAT and he can apply for college but he doesn't have the money to leave and he feels (correctly) that he can't burden Lucy by telling her that the people still out for revenge on her are trying to find him. With remarkable stubbornness. (If also remarkable stupidity. They know where he goes to school, surely, so why hasn't Toby stalked him home yet?)

But now...

He's been accepted into a college, probably somewhere out-of-town. With a scholarship and eligible for financial aid. It's no longer a "maybe" or an "eventually" or a "hopefully": he finally has his ticket out. He's made it, or he's as close to making it out to as he can be while still physically being in Roseville.