High school was Don Bosco Tech, and since Don Bosco Tech was an urban all-boys Catholic school packed to the strakes with a couple hundred insecure hyperactive adolescents, it was, for a fat sci-fi-reading nerd like Oscar, a source of endless anguish. For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that's not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked to school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. (1.1.2.1)

When [Oscar] returned to the house his sister said, Well?

[Oscar:] Well what?

[Lola:] Did you f*** her?

[Oscar:] Jesus, Lola, he said, blushing.

[Lola:] Don't lie to me.

[Oscar:] I do not move so precipitously. He paused and then sighed. In other words, I didn't even get her scarf off.

[Lola:] Sounds a little suspicious. I know you Dominican men. She held up her hands and flexed the fingers in playful menace. Son pulpos [They are octopuses]. (1.1.5.32-1.1.5.38)

Oh, they got close all right, but did they ever kiss in her car? Did he ever put his hands up her skirt? [...]. Did they ever f***?

Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's-Be-Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women. (1.1.6.2-1.1.6.3)