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Being around guys made me feel stupid and inadequate. It was like they were all a part of this club and I wasn’t a member.
And I felt real. Until Dante, being with other people was the hardest thing in the world for me. But Dante made talking and living and feeling seem like all those things were perfectly natural. Not in my world, they weren’t.
Words were different when they lived inside of you.
As Dante was watching me search the sky through the lens of a telescope, he whispered, “Someday, I’m going to discover all the secrets of the universe.”
I thought it might be a great thing to be the air. I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.
And I thought that maybe there were ghosts inside of me that I hadn’t even met yet. They were there. Lying in wait.
I learned that nurses liked to make small talk and were in love with taking your vitals. That’s what they did. They gave you a pill to help you sleep, then they woke you up all night. Shit.
“You’re the best friend he’s ever had. I think you should know that.” I didn’t want to know that. I didn’t know why I didn’t want to know that.
I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.
“Swimming and you, Ari. Those are the things I love the most.” “You shouldn’t say that,” I said. “It’s true.” “I didn’t say it wasn’t true. I just said you shouldn’t say it.”
Maybe my dad just didn’t need words to get by in the world. I wasn’t like that. Well, I was like that on the outside, pretending not to need words. But I wasn’t like that on the inside. I’d figured something out about myself: on the inside, I wasn’t like my dad at all. On the inside I was more like Dante. That really scared me.
But I had learned how to hide what I felt. No, that’s not true. There was no learning involved. I had been born knowing how to hide what I felt.
Not that she meant it to be a weight. But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.
It was as if my eyes were a camera and I was photographing the moment, knowing that I would keep that photograph forever.
“It was fun, wasn’t it?” The way he said that. Like he knew we would never play that game again. We were too old now. We’d lost something and we both knew it. We didn’t say anything for a long time.
One of the secrets of the universe was that our instincts were sometimes stronger than our minds.
Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer morning could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.
I was always thinking of Dante, always trying to figure him out, always wondering why it was that we were friends and why it seemed to matter so much. To both of us. I hated thinking about things and people—especially when they were mysteries I couldn’t solve.
Even though summers were mostly made of sun and heat, summers for me were about the storms that came and went. And left me feeling alone. Did all boys feel alone? The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
Dante who loved kissing dogs, who loved kissing his parents, who loved kissing boys, who even loved kissing girls. Maybe kissing was part of the human condition. Maybe I wasn’t human. Maybe I wasn’t part of the natural order of things.
I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren’t meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever.
Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you’re thinking but because you’re feeling. Because you’re feeling too much. And you can’t always control the things you do when you’re feeling too much.
I knew I’d gone crazy but I couldn’t explain it to myself. Maybe that’s what happens when you go crazy. You just can’t explain it. Not to yourself. Not to anyone.
Sometimes, it seems like it just hurts too much to look at something. So you don’t. You just don’t look. But it doesn’t go away, Ari.”
“Can I tell you a secret, Ari?” “Can I stop you?” “You don’t like knowing my secrets.” “Sometimes your secrets scare me.” Dante laughed. “I wasn’t really kissing Daniel. In my head, I was kissing you.”
“Ari, it’s time you stopped running.” I looked at my dad. “From what?” “Don’t you know?” “What?” “If you keep running, it will kill you.” “What, Dad?” “You and Dante.” “Me and Dante?” I looked at my mother. Then looked at my father. “Dante’s in love with you,” he said. “That’s obvious enough. He doesn’t hide that from himself.”
My father nodded. “Ari, the problem isn’t just that Dante’s in love with you. The real problem—for you, anyway—is that you’re in love with him.” I didn’t say anything. I just kept looking at my mother’s face. And then my father’s face. I didn’t know what to say. “I’m not sure, I mean, I don’t think that’s true. I mean, I just don’t think so. I mean—” “Ari, I know what I see. You saved his life. Why do you suppose you did that? Why do you suppose that, in an instant, without even thinking, you dove across the street and shoved Dante out of the way of a moving car? You think that just happened?
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stopped, I took a big drink from my beer. “Dad, I think I liked it better when you didn’t talk.”
“What did I say when you kissed me?” “You said it didn’t work for you.” “I lied.” He looked at me. “Don’t play with me, Ari.” “I’m not.” I took him by the shoulders. I looked at him. And he looked at me. “You said I wasn’t scared of anything. That’s not true. You. That’s what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of you, Dante.” I took a deep breath. “Try it again,” I said. “Kiss me.”
This was what was wrong with me. All this time I had been trying to figure out the secrets of the universe, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart. All of the answers had always been so close and yet I had always fought them without even knowing it. From the minute I’d met Dante, I had fallen in love with him. I just didn’t let myself know it, think it, feel it. My father was right. And it was true what my mother said. We all fight our own private wars.
