The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

changed the locks on me—I had started staying out late, going to the Limelight because even though I was fourteen I looked twenty-five—I would knock on Oscar’s window and he would let me in, scared because the next day my mother would run around the house screaming, Who the hell let that hija de la gran puta in the house? Who? Who? And Oscar would be at the breakfast table, stammering, I don’t know, Mami, I don’t.
    Her rage filled the house, flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow. My brother didn’t know what to do. He stayed in his room, though sometimes he would lamely try to ask me what was going on. Nothing. You can tell me, Lola, he said, and I could only laugh. You need to lose weight, I told him.
    In those final weeks I knew better than to walk near my mother. Most of the time she just looked at me with the stink-eye, but sometimes without warning she would grab me by my throat and hang on until I pried her fingers from me. She didn’t bother talking to me unless it was to make death threats. When you grow up you’ll meet me in a dark alley when you least expect it and then I’ll kill you and nobody will know I did it! Literally gloating as she said this.
    You’re crazy, I told her.
    You don’t call me crazy, she said, and then she sat down, panting.
    It was bad but no one expected what came next. So obvious when you think about it.
    All my life I’d been swearing that one day I would just disappear.
    And one day I did.
     
    I ran off, dique, because of a boy.
    What can I really tell you about him? He was like all boys: beautiful and callow, and like an insect he couldn’t sit still. Un blanquito with long hairy legs I met one night at Limelight.
    His name was Aldo.
    He was nineteen and lived down at the Jersey Shore with his seventy-four-year-old father. In the back of his Oldsmobile on University I pulled my leather skirt up and my fishnet stockings down and the smell of me was everywhere. That was our first date. The spring of my sophomore year we wrote and called each other at least once a day. I even drove down with Karen to visit him in Wildwood (she had a license, I didn’t). He lived and worked near the boardwalk, one of three guys who operated the bumper cars, the only one without tattoos. You should stay, he told me that night while Karen walked ahead of us on the beach. Where would I live? I asked and he smiled. With me. Don’t lie, I said, but he looked out at the surf. I want you to come, he said seriously.
    He asked me three times. I counted, I know.
    That summer my brother announced that he was going to dedicate his life to designing role-playing games and my mother was trying to keep a second job, for the first time since her operation. It wasn’t working out. She was coming home exhausted, and since I wasn’t helping, nothing around the house was getting done. Some weekends my tía Rubelka would help out with the cooking and cleaning and would lecture us both but she had her own family to watch after so most of the time we were on our own. Come, he said on the phone. And then in August Karen left for Slippery Rock. She had graduated from high school a year early. If I don’t see Paterson again it will be too soon, she said before she left. That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn’t do school anymore. Something inside wouldn’t let me. It didn’t help that I was reading The Fountainhead and had decided that I was Dominique and Aldo was Roark. I’m sure I could have stayed that way forever, too scared to jump, but finally what we’d all been waiting for happened. My mother announced at dinner, quietly: I want you both to listen to me: the doctor is running more tests on me.
    Oscar looked like he was going to cry. He put his head down. And my reaction? I looked at her and said: Could you please pass the salt?
    These days I don’t blame her for smacking me across my face, but right then it was all I needed. We jumped on each other and the table fell and the sancocho spilled all over the floor and Oscar just stood in the corner bellowing, Stop it, stop it, stop it!
    Hija de tu maldita madre, she shrieked. And I said: This time I hope you die from it.
    For a couple of days the house was a war zone, and then on Friday she let me out of my room and I was allowed to sit next to her on the sofa and watch