Althea and Oliver by Cristina Moracho Read Free Book Online Page A

to a parallel universe that would go on after ours had come to its ignoble end. He had been casually dismissed, but Oliver found it deeply comforting, imagining people stepping through a portal in the sky as easily as boarding a plane, slipping into another dimension where soccer games and trips to the beach and arguments over whose turn it was to mow the lawn could all continue apace.
    His enthusiasm for science in general and astronomy in particular has matured since then, and he loves the concomitant math and equations underlying these grandiose ideas about the universe, but in the back of his mind that original urgency remains, that there’s more at stake than acing the SATs or getting into MIT—somewhere out there has to be a wormhole that is going to save us all.
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    Two months later, as their junior year is winding down, Oliver cajoles Althea into attending a house party thrown by someone they hardly know. When he arrives to pick her up, she is pacing around her bedroom in a short terrycloth bathrobe. The soles of her feet, pink-white like shells, are picking up dust from the floor. She is brushing her hair in long frantic strokes, anxiously trying to loosen the tangles.
    â€œCould you please, for one second, just pretend you’re a girl and help me pick something to wear?” she yells.
    â€œTo do that, first I would have to pretend that you’re a girl.” Even as he says it, he’s studying the place below her neck, the dark crevice where the two sides of her robe meet.
    That shuts her up. In truth, it’s a decision that mostly comes down to which jeans and which T-shirt; her wardrobe doesn’t consist of much else. But at the last minute she digs out a plaid pleated skirt and her steel-toed boots. She sits on the edge of the bed lacing them up while Oliver watches the muscles flex in her runner’s legs. As her fingers nimbly work the frayed laces through the endless eyelets, he mentally removes the outfit she just put on while he was facing the other way.
    â€œWhat?” she says. “You’re staring.”
    He snaps back into himself. “The skirt and the boots. I don’t know. Isn’t it, like, a mixed message?”
    â€œYou’re a fucking mixed message. You lost your vote ten minutes ago. Let’s go.”
    The party is close, so they walk. Althea crosses her arms over her chest, occasionally smoothing her hair or running her fingers over her skirt, looking quietly alarmed that the hemline ends several inches above her knees. Oliver can see that she’s already in a bad mood. If he doesn’t take action, she’s going to stand in a corner, sulk for forty-five minutes, and then demand to go home.
    Reaching up, he swipes several leaves from an overhead branch, shredding them as they walk. The sap gets in between his fingers, sticking them together. “You know what I was thinking? About tonight?” he says.
    â€œMmm?”
    â€œLet’s play a game. Make the party into a game.”
    â€œLike a drinking game?” says Althea.
    â€œNot exactly. It’s a new game; I just made it up. Let’s try saying yes. To everything.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    â€œWhenever someone proposes something, asks us if we want to do something, let’s just say yes.”
    â€œThis is your idea of a new game?” she asks skeptically.
    â€œYes. We will be receptive to all that the universe has to offer. And I shall call it: the Non-Stop Party Wagon.” He tosses the leaf pieces into the air over their heads like confetti.
    The first game Althea and Oliver ever played was Candy Land. One night, ten years ago, the babysitter canceled on a panicked Nicky, who in desperation took her son down the street to the house of a college professor who she knew had a little girl Oliver’s age. Garth let them play in the basement, fed them red velvet cupcakes, and pulled out the only board game