Read This Is How You Lose Her for Free Online

fit. There are four other people at the counters, broke-ass-looking niggers with kneesocks and croupier’s hats and scars snaking up their arms, and they all seem like sleepwalkers compared with her. She shakes her head, grinning. Your brother, she says.
    Rafa.
    She points her finger at me like my brother always did.
    I miss him sometimes.
    She nods. Me, too. He was a good guy to me.
    I must have disbelief on my face because she finishes shaking out her towels and then stares straight through me. He treated me the best.
    Nilda.
    He used to sleep with my hair over his face. He used to say it made him feel safe.
    What else can we say? She finishes her stacking, I hold the door open for her. The locals watch us leave. We walk back through the old neighborhood, slowed down by the bulk of our clothes. London Terrace has changed now that the landfill has shut down. Kicked-up rents and mad South Asian people and whitefolks living in the apartments, but it’s our kids you see in the streets and hanging from the porches.
    Nilda is watching the ground as though she’s afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It’s all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we’re back in the world we’ve always known.
    Remember the day we met? she asks.
    I nod.
    You wanted to play baseball.
    It was summer, I say. You were wearing a tank top.
    You made me put on a shirt before you’d let me be on your team. Do you remember?
    I remember, I say.
    We never spoke again. A couple of years later I went away to college and I don’t know where the fuck she went.



Y OU, Y UNIOR, HAVE A GIRLFRIEND named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you. Ain’t a day that passes that you don’t want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an after-school special.
    Alma is a Mason Gross student, one of those Sonic Youth, comic-book-reading alternatinas without whom you might never have lost your virginity. Grew up in Hoboken, part of the Latino community that got its heart burned out in the eighties, tenements turning to flame. Spent nearly every teenage day on the Lower East Side, thought it would always be home, but then NYU and Columbia both said nyet, and she ended up even farther from the city than before. Alma is in a painting phase, and the people she paints are all the color of mold, look like they’ve just been dredged from the bottom of a lake. Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your frowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable. She did give you one huge forearm.
I told you I’d get the muscles in.
The past couple of weeks, now that the warm is here, Alma has abandoned black, started wearing these nothing dresses made out of what feels like tissue paper; it wouldn’t take more than a strong wind to undress her. She says she does it for you:
I’m reclaiming my Dominican heritage
(which ain’t a complete lie—she’s even taking Spanish to better minister to your moms), and when you see her on the street, flaunting, flaunting, you know exactly what every nigger that walks by is thinking because you are thinking it, too.
    Alma is slender as a reed, you a steroid-addicted block; Alma loves driving, you books; Alma owns a Saturn, you have no points on your license; Alma’s nails are too dirty for cooking, your spaghetti con pollo is the best in the land. You are so very different—she rolls her eyes every time you turn on the news and says she can’t “stand” politics. She won’t even call herself