The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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 visitor.
    I do?
    Yup. Lola leaned against his door frame. She’d shaved her head down to the bone, Sinéad-style, and now everybody, including their mother, was convinced she’d turned into a lesbiana.
    You might want to clean up a little. She touched his face gently. Shave those pussy hairs.
    It was Ana. Standing in his foyer, wearing a full-length leather, her trigueña skin blood-charged from the cold, her face gorgeous with eyeliner, mascara, foundation, lipstick, and blush.
    Freezing out, she said. She had her gloves in one hand like a crumpled bouquet.

    Hey, was all he managed to say. He could hear his sister upstairs, listening.
    What you doing? Ana asked.
    Like nothing.
    Like let’s go to a movie, then.
    Like OK, he said.
    Upstairs his sister was jumping up and down on his bed, low-screaming, It’s a date, it’s a date, and then she jumped on his back and nearly toppled them clean through the bedroom window.
    So is this some kind of date? he said as he slipped into her car.
    She smiled wanly. You could call it that.
    Ana drove a Cressida, and instead of taking them to the local theater she headed down to the Amboy Multiplex.
    I love this place, she said as she was wrangling for a parking space. My father used to take us here when it was still a drive-in. Did you ever come here back then?
    He shook his head. Though I heard they steal plenty of cars here now.
    Nobody’s stealing this baby.
    It was so hard to believe what was happening that Oscar really couldn’t take it seriously. The whole time the movie— Manhunter —was on, he kept expecting niggers to jump out with cameras and scream, Surprise! Boy, he said, trying to remain on her map, this is some movie. Ana nodded; she smelled of some perfume he could not name, and when she pressed close the heat off her body was vertiginous .
    On the ride home Ana complained about having a headache and they didn’t speak for a long time. He tried to turn on the radio but she said, No, my