Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace Page A

Wardine cry. Wardine look like crazy she so scared. She say she
     kill herself if me or Reginald tell our mommas. She say, Clenette, you my half Sister,
     I am beg that you do not tell you momma on my momma and Roy Tony. Reginald tell Wardine
     to hush herself and lie down quiet. He put Shedd Spread out the kitchen on Wardine
     cuts on her back. He run his finger with grease so careful down pink lines of her
     getting beat with a hanger. Wardine say she do not feel nothing in her back ever since
     spring. She lie stomach on Reginald floor and say she aint got no feeling in her skin
     of her back. When Reginald gone to get the water she asks me the truth, how bad is
     her back look when Reginald look at it. Is she still pretty, she cry.
    I aint tell my momma on Wardine and Reginald and Wardine momma and Roy Tony. My momma
     scared of Roy Tony. My momma be the lady Roy Tony kill Columbus Epps over, four years
     gone, in the Brighton Projects, for Love.
    But I know Reginald tell. Reginald say he gone die before Wardine momma beat Wardine
     again. He say he take his self up to Roy Tony and say him to not mess with Wardine
     or breathe by her mattress at night. He say he take his self on down to the playground
     at the Brighton Projects where Roy Tony do business and he go to Roy Tony man to man
     and he make Roy Tony make it all right.
    But I think Roy Tony gone kill Reginald if Reginald go. I think Roy Tony gone kill
     Reginald, and then Wardine momma beat Wardine to death with a hanger. And then nobody
     know except me. And I am gone have a child.
    In the eighth American-educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with
     a classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because
     if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-Simone
     or something like that, it was Mildred Bonk. She was the kind of fatally pretty and
     nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every
     nocturnal emitter’s dreamscape. Hair that Green had heard described by an overwrought
     teacher as ‘flaxen’; a body which the fickle angel of puberty—the same angel who didn’t
     even seem to know Bruce Green’s zip code—had visited, kissed, and already left, back
     in sixth; legs which not even orange Keds with purple-glitter-encrusted laces could
     make unserious. Shy, iridescent, coltish, pelvically anfractuous, amply busted, given
     to diffident movements of hand brushing flaxen hair from front of dear creamy forehead,
     movements which drove Bruce Green up a private tree. A vision in a sundress and silly
     shoes. Mildred L. Bonk.
    And then but by tenth grade, in one of those queer when-did-that-happen metamorphoses,
     Mildred Bonk had become an imposing member of the frightening Winchester High School
     set that smoked full-strength Marlboros in the alley between Senior and Junior halls
     and that left school altogether at lunchtime, driving away in loud low-slung cars
     to drink beer and smoke dope, driving around with sound-systems of illegal wattage,
     using Visine and Clorets, etc. She was one of them. She chewed gum (or worse) in the
     cafeteria, her dear diffident face now a bored mask of Attitude, her flaxen locks
     now teased and gelled into what looked for all the world like the consequence of a
     finger stuck into an electric socket. Bruce Green saved up for a low-slung old car
     and practiced Attitude on the aunt who’d taken him in. He developed a will.
    And, by the year of what would have been graduation, Bruce Green was way more bored,
     imposing, and frightening than even Mildred Bonk, and he and Mildred Bonk and tiny
     incontinent Harriet Bonk-Green lived just off the Allston Spur in a shiny housetrailer
     with another frightening couple and with Tommy Doocey, the infamous harelipped pot-and-sundries
     dealer who kept several large snakes in unclean uncovered aquaria, which smelled,
     which Tommy Doocey didn’t notice because