Read chapters 5 And 6. Answer the following questions: At first, Lorenzo does not want Olivia to stay with him. Why? Why does he initially agree to allow her to stay? After a while, he begins to feel sorry for Olivia and wants to help her? Why? Explain in detail and use direct quotes from the novel.
Lorenzo, the main character and also the narrator of the book Me and You, who was a twenty-four-year-old grown up man in the year of 2010, wrote down a long flash back about his childhood in 2000 when he was fourteen. In the prologue of the book, Lorenzo's sister's name appears; she is Lorenzo's step sister, who is nine years older than Lorenzo. She appears in the prologue, disappears for four chapters in the book, and finally appears in chapter five.
Lorenzo was a kid that has bad relationships with all the inferiors- people who was not one of his family member; in his mind, the only people who could understand him is his mom, his father, and his grandmother. In order to make his mother happy of him making friends in school and being invited by them, Lorenzo fabricates an event which is a ski trip with his "friends" and hides in the basement of their living house which is a building. Lorenzo is afraid of his mom asking him to have her talk to his friend Alessia's mom, because this whole event is a lie. He hides in the basement and pretends that he went to the ski trip with his friends, and he thought that he could hide there for the whole week, but on one day someone fiddles with the lock on the door and finds him in the basement.
It is his sister, Olivia. She is looking for the money in a box in the basement that she gave her father before; she finds the box but she doesn't find her money in it. She promises Lorenzo that she wouldn't tell his parents about him hiding in the basement and left, but the second day she comes again. This time she is asking for Lorenzo to let her stay and live for a night; Lorenzo refused to do so because he finds his sister's diary of how she hates their father; he also thinks that the basement is his personal space, the food supplies are limited, so he didn't want her to stay. His sister threatens him by telling his parents that Lorenzo is hiding in the basement and he has no friends at all, which makes Lorenzo compromised. He really wants to maintain a good relationship between his mom and him, so he doesn't want his mom to know the truth. For hiding the truth, he let his sister stayed for one night.
In the next morning, Lorenzo wants Olivia to leave because the time he promised to let her stay is up. Olivia was cursing at him because he did not let her stay in the shelter and she has no money at all. When she is deciding to leave, Lorenzo's mother called Lorenzo and ordered him to let her talk to Alessia's mom, and to make sure that everything is alright. Lorenzo bagged her sister to pretend like Alessia's mom for making his mom less worried, by swearing that "on my parents’ lives that I will be Olivia Cuni’s slave...For the rest of my life...And I will always be kind and generous to her" and letting her sister stay in the basement. It is really a great effort for Lorenzo to swear so. His sister helps him went through the crisis, and for exchange, she stays in the basement. Accidentally, Lorenzo found her sister vomiting in the bathroom feeling extremely uncomfortable because of malaria. In the text it says that Olivia "...was distressed, constantly changing position like she was lying on a carpet of broken bottles. She wrapped herself in the blanket then threw it off and fidgeted and flinched like somebody was torturing her." Her sister was so sick that she couldn't stop groaning; Lorenzo feels annoyed first, but then he might feel a little bit sorry for her sister because she looks really skinny and sick. He finds some syringes in her sister's backpack while she's showering in the bathroom with cold water. He might feel pity of his sister because he used to like his sister's beauty and suddenly she was not as pretty as before because of the illness, and she is so poor and frustrated which Lorenzo had never experienced.
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