the Solitude Of Prime Numbers (2010) Read Online Free PDF Page A

that her eyes seemed to form one single, terrifying Cyclops eye. Her hot breath formed a halo on the glass, covering part of her face.
    She just couldn't figure out where Viola and her friends got those looks they went around with, breaking boys' hearts. Those merciless, captivating looks that could make or break you with a single, imperceptible flicker of the eyebrow.
    Alice tried to be provocative with the mirror, but saw only an embarrassed girl clumsily shaking her shoulders and looking as if she were anesthetized. The real problem was her cheeks: too puffy and blotchy. They suffocated her eyes, when all the while she wanted her gaze to land like a dagger in the stomachs of the boys whose eyes it met. She wanted her gaze to spare no one, to leave an indelible mark.
    Instead only her belly, bum, and tits got slimmer, while her cheeks were still like two round pillows, baby cheeks.
    Someone knocked at the bathroom door.
    "Alice, it's ready," her father's hateful voice rang out through the frosted glass.
    Alice didn't reply and sucked in her cheeks to see how much better she would be like that.
    "Alice, are you in there?" her father called.
    Alice puckered her lips and kissed her reflection. She brushed her tongue against its image in the cold glass. Then she closed her eyes and, as in a real kiss, swayed her head back and forth, but too regularly to be believable. She still hadn't found the kiss she really wanted on anyone's mouth.
    Davide Poirino had been the first to use his tongue, in the third year of secondary school. He'd lost a bet. He had rolled it mechanically around Alice's tongue three times, clockwise, and then turned to his friends and said okay? They had burst out laughing and someone had said you kissed the cripple, but Alice was happy just the same, she had given her first kiss and Davide wasn't bad at all.
    There had been others after that. Her cousin Walter at their grandmother's party, and a friend of Davide's whose name she didn't even know, and who had asked her in secret if he could please have a turn too. In a hidden corner of the school playground they had pressed their lips together for a few minutes, neither of them daring to move a muscle. When they had drawn apart, he had said thank you and walked off with his head held high and the springy step of a real man.
    But now she was lagging behind. Her classmates talked about positions, love bites, and how to use your fingers, and whether it was better with or without a condom, while Alice's lips still bore the insipid memory of a mechanical kiss in third year.
    "Alice? Can you hear me?" her father called again, louder this time.
    "Ugh. Of course I hear you," Alice replied irritably, her voice barely audible on the other side of the door.
    "Dinner's ready," her father repeated.
    "I heard you, damn it," Alice said. Then, under her breath, she added, "Pain in the ass."

    Soledad knew that Alice threw away her food. At first, when Alice started leaving her dinner on her plate, she said mi amorcito, eat it all up, in my country children are dying of hunger.
    One evening Alice, furious, looked her straight in the eyes.
    "Even if I stuff myself till I burst, the children in your country aren't going to stop dying of hunger," she said.
    So now Soledad said nothing, but put less and less food on her plate. But it didn't make any difference. Alice was quite capable of weighing up her food with her eyes and choosing her three hundred calories for dinner. The rest she got rid of, somehow or other.
    She ate with her right hand resting on her napkin. In front of the plate she put her wineglass, which she asked to be filled but never drank, and her water glass in such a way as to form a glass barricade. Then, during dinner, she strategically positioned the saltshaker and the oil cruet too. She waited for her family to be distracted, each absorbed in the laborious task of mastication. At that point she very carefully pushed her food, cut into small pieces, off the