The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Read Online Free PDF Page B

She’d gotten into Miller because her exboyfriend, Manny, had given her the books before he joined the army. He used to read passages to her all the time: That made me so hot. She’d been thirteen when they started dating, he was twenty-four, a recovering coke addict—Ana talking about these things like they weren’t nothing at all.
    You were thirteen and your mother allowed you to date a septuagenarian?
    My parents loved Manny, she said. My mom used to cook dinner for him all the time.
    He said, That seems highly unorthodox, and later at home he asked his sister, back on winter break, For the sake of argument, would you allow your pubescent daughter to have relations with a twenty-four-year-old male?
    I’d kill him first.
    He was amazed how relieved he felt to hear that.
    Let me guess: You know somebody who’s doing this?
    He nodded. She sits next to me in SAT class. I think she’s orchidaceous.
    Lola considered him with her tiger-colored irises. She’d been back a week and it was clear that college-level track was kicking her ass, the sclera in her normally wide manga-eyes were shot through with blood vessels. You know, she said finally, we colored folks talk plenty of shit about loving our children but we really don’t. She exhaled. We don’t, we don’t, we don’t.
    He tried to put a hand on his sister’s shoulder but she shrugged it off. You better go bust out some crunches, Mister.

    That’s what she called him whenever she was feeling tender or wronged. Mister. Later she’d want to put that on his gravestone but no one would let her, not even me.
    Stupid.

AMOR DE PENDEJO
     
    H e and Ana in SAT class, he and Ana in the parking lot afterward, he and Ana at the McDonald’s, he and Ana become friends. Each day Oscar expected her to be adiós, each day she was still there. They got into the habit of talking on the phone a couple times a week, about nothing really, spinning words out of their everyday; the first time she called him , offering him a ride to SAT class; a week later he called her, just to try it. His heart beating so hard he thought he would die but all she did when she picked him up was say, Oscar, listen to the bullshit my sister pulled, and off they’d gone, building another one of their word-scrapers. By the fifth time he called he no longer expected the Big Blow-off. She was the only girl outside his family who admitted to having a period, who actually said to him, I’m bleeding like a hog , an astounding confidence he turned over and over in his head, sure it meant something, and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thudded inside his chest, a lonely rada. Ana Obregón, unlike every other girl in his secret cosmology, he actually fell for as they were getting to know each other. Because her appearance in his life was sudden, because she’d come in under his radar, he didn’t have time to raise his usual wall of nonsense or level some wild-ass expectations her way. Maybe he was plain tired after four years of not getting ass, or maybe he’d finally found his zone. Incredibly enough, instead of making an idiot out of himself as one might have expected, given the hard fact that this was the first girl he’d ever had a conversation with, he actually took it a day at a time. He spoke to her plainly and without effort and discovered that his constant self-deprecation pleased her immensely. It was amazing how it was between them; he would say something obvious and uninspired, and she’d say, Oscar, you’re really fucking smart. When she said, I love men’s hands, he spread both of his across his face and said, faux-casual-like, Oh, really ? It cracked her up.
    She never talked about what they were; she only said, Man, I’m glad I got to know you.
    And he said, I’m glad I’m me knowing you.
    One night while he was listening to New Order and trying to chug through Clay’s Ark , his sister knocked on his door.
    You got a