The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

especially he could not watch to the end without crying, the Japanese hero arriving at the South Pole base, having walked from Washington, D.C., down the whole spine of the Andes, for the woman of his dreams. I’ve been working on my fifth novel, he told the boys when they asked about his absences. It’s amazing .
    See? What did I tell you? Mr. Collegeboy.
    In the old days when his so-called friends would hurt him or drag his trust through the mud he always crawled voluntarily back into the abuse, out of fear and loneliness, something he’d always hated himself for, but not this time. If there existed in his high school years any one moment he took pride in it was clearly this one. Even told his sister about it during her next visit. She said, Way to go, O! He’d finally showed some backbone, hence some pride, and although it hurt, it also felt motherfucking good .

OSCAR COMES CLOSE
     
    I n October, after all his college applications were in (Fairleigh Dickinson, Montclair, Rutgers, Drew, Glassboro State, William Paterson; he also sent an app to NYU, a one-in-a-million shot, and they rejected him so fast he was amazed the shit hadn’t come back Pony Express) and winter was settling its pale miserable ass across northern New Jersey, Oscar fell in love with a girl in his SAT prep class. The class was being conducted in one of those “Learning Centers” not far from where he lived, less than a mile, so he’d been walking, a healthy way to lose weight, he thought. He hadn’t been expecting to meet anyone, but then he’d seen the beauty in the back row and felt his senses fly out of him. Her name was Ana Obregón, a pretty, loudmouthed gordita who read Henry Miller while she should have been learning to wrestle logic problems. On about their fifth class he noticed her reading Sexus and she noticed him noticing, and, leaning over, she showed him a passage and he got an erection like a motherfucker.
    You must think I’m weird, right? she said during the break.
    You ain’t weird, he said. Believe me—I’m the top expert in the state.
    Ana was a talker, had beautiful Caribbean-girl eyes, pure anthracite, and was the sort of heavy that almost every Island nigger dug, a body that you just knew would look good in and out of clothes; wasn’t shy about her weight, either; she wore tight black stirrup pants like every other girl in the neighborhood and the sexiest underwear she could afford and was a meticulous putter-on of makeup, an intricate bit of multitasking for which Oscar never lost his fascination. She was this peculiar combination of badmash and little girl—even before he’d visited her house he knew she’d have a whole collection of stuffed animals avalanched on her bed—and there was something in the seamlessness with which she switched between these aspects that convinced him that both were masks, that there existed a third Ana, a hidden Ana who determined what mask to throw up for what occasion but who was otherwise obscure and impossible to know. 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