This Is How You Lose Her Read Online Free PDF

and even though my moms was heartbroken and trying to guilt him into it five times a day, this was all he talked about. School had never been his gig, and after my pops left us for his twenty-five-year-old Rafa didn’t feel he needed to pretend any longer. I’d like to take a long fucking trip, he told us. See California before it slides into the ocean. California, I said. California, he said. A nigger could make a showing out there. I’d like to go there, too, Nilda said, but Rafa didn’t answer her. He had closed his eyes and you could see he was in pain.
    We rarely talked about our father. Me, I was just happy not to be getting my ass kicked in anymore but once right at the beginning of the Last Great Absence I asked my brother where he thought he was, and Rafa said, Like I fucking care.
    End of conversation. World without end.
    On days niggers were really out of their minds with boredom we trooped down to the pool and got in for free because Rafa was boys with one of the lifeguards. I swam, Nilda went on missions around the pool just so she could show off how tight she looked in her bikini, and Rafa sprawled under the awning and took it all in. Sometimes he called me over and we’d sit together for a while and he’d close his eyes and I’d watch the water dry on my ashy legs and then he’d tell me to go back to the pool. When Nilda finished promenading and came back to where Rafa was chilling she kneeled at his side and he would kiss her real long, his hands playing up and down the length of her back. Ain’t nothing like a fifteen-year-old with a banging body, those hands seemed to be saying, at least to me.
    Joe Black was always watching them. Man, he muttered, she’s so fine I’d lick her asshole
and
tell you niggers about it.
    Maybe I would have thought they were cute if I hadn’t known Rafa. He might have seemed enamorao with Nilda but he also had mad girls in orbit. Like this one piece of white trash from Sayreville, and this morena from Nieuw Amsterdam Village who also slept over and sounded like a freight train when they did it. I don’t remember her name, but I do remember how her perm shone in the glow of our night-light.
    In August Rafa quit his job at the carpet factory—I’m too fucking tired, he complained, and some mornings his leg bones hurt so much he couldn’t get out of bed right away. The Romans used to shatter these with iron clubs, I told him while I massaged his shins. The pain would kill you instantly. Great, he said. Cheer me up some more, you fucking bastard. One day Mami took him to the hospital for a checkup and afterward I found them sitting on the couch, both of them dressed up, watching TV like nothing had happened. They were holding hands and Mami appeared tiny next to him.
    Well?
    Rafa shrugged. The doc thinks I’m anemic.
    Anemic ain’t bad.
    Yeah, Rafa said, laughing bitterly. God bless Medicaid.
    In the light of the TV, he looked terrible.
    —
    T HAT WAS THE SUMMER when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads. Girls were starting to take notice of me; I wasn’t good-looking but I listened and had boxing muscles in my arms. In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.
    One night, a couple of weeks before school started—they must have thought I was asleep—Nilda started telling Rafa about her plans for the future. I think even she knew what was about to happen. Listening to her imagining herself was about the saddest thing you ever heard. How she wanted to get away from her moms and open up a group home for runaway kids. But this one would be real cool, she said. It would be for normal kids who just got problems. She must have loved him because she went on and on. Plenty of people talk about having a flow, but that night I really heard one,