In the last section, we got to know a little bit more about the narrator's prospects in life, his relationship with the larger world. What would you say is the narrator's relationship with school? What do you see him doing with his life? What directs his life?
Now for this next post, you're going to read pp. 7 (starting with "Twice. That's it...") through the end. You're continuing to look for important events, but now you're only listing 6 events, so you're expanding your powers of synthesis without losing any of your attention to detail. Continue to keep track of what is happening in the present and what is happening in the past (introduce past events with "He remembers when...").
Challenge Paragraphs:
"Twice. That's it." The narrator has two sexual encounters with Beto. The first one was a surprise. The second one was not a surprise, but how does he feel about it?
"He put his hand on my shoulder, my pulse a code under his palm. Let’s go, he said. Unless of course you’re not feeling good.
I’m feeling fine, I said.
Since his parents worked nights we pretty much owned the place until six the next morning. We sat in front of his television, in our towels, his hands bracing against my abdomen and thighs. I’ll stop if you want, he said and I didn’t respond. After I was done, he laid his head in my lap. I wasn’t asleep or awake, but caught somewhere in between, rocked slowly back and forth the way surf holds junk against the shore, rolling it over and over. In three weeks he was leaving. Nobody can touch me, he kept saying. We’d visited the school and I’d seen how beautiful the campus was, with all the students drifting from dorm to class. I thought of how in high school our teachers loved to crowd us into their lounge every time a space shuttle took off from Florida. One teacher, whose family had two grammar schools named after it, compared us to the shuttles. A few of you are going to make it. Those are the orbiters. But the majority of you are just going to burn out. Going nowhere. He dropped his hand onto his desk. I could already see myself losing altitude, fading, the earth spread out beneath me, hard and bright.
I had my eyes closed and the television was on and when the hallway door crashed open, he jumped up and I nearly cut my dick off struggling with my shorts. It’s just the neighbor, he said, laughing. He was laughing, but I was saying, Fuck this, and getting my clothes on."
Why does the narrator describe his pulse as "a code under his palm"? If his pulse is a code, what is the message?
Why does the narrator say "I wasn't asleep or awake, but caught somewhere in between"?
Why does Beto say "Nobody can touch me"?
Why does he think about school at this moment? Why does he remember visiting Beto's campus and about what his high school teacher said?
What makes the narrator say "Fuck this"?
Share your list of events and answer the Challenge Questions here:
Feel free to share your questions and thoughts on the reading in Comments section.
