Drown

This story is told in second-person by Yunior, who is now an adolescent. It is a set of instructions for dating. The “you” of the second-person narration is simultaneously an “I”. In the story, Yunior alternates between several scenarios, some seeming to be memories and some seeming to be imagined. They each revolve around having girls over to his house after he has conned his family into letting him stay home alone. He categorizes the girls according to their race, and runs through the different things that may happen with each girl. At this point in Yunior’s life, his father has left the family.

Yunior opens the story by coaching himself to wait for his brother and mother to leave the apartment. He’s given the excuse that he is too sick to go to Union City to visit “that tía who likes to squeeze [his] nuts” (143). Although his mother knows it’s a lie, she has allowed him to stay. This is one scenario that he can engineer in order to be left in the house alone.

He coaches himself to remove the boxes of government-issued food supplies (which he calls “government cheese”) from the refrigerator. He specifies: If the girl he has invited over is from the Park or Society Hill, he will hide the boxes in the cabinet or the oven, where she will never see them.