Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World (Aristotle and Dante, #2)

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I wondered if Dante and I would ever be allowed to write our names on the map of the world. Other people are given writing instruments—and when they go to school, they are taught to use them. But they don’t give boys like me and Dante pencils or pens or spray paint. They want us to read, but they do not want us to write. What will we write our names with? And where on the map would we write them?

She nodded. “This is hard, isn’t it?” “Yes,” I said. “Is it supposed to be hard, Mom?” She nodded. “Love is easy and it’s hard. It was that way with me and your father. I wanted him to touch me so much. And I was so afraid.” I nodded. “But at least—” “At least I was a girl and he was a boy.”

And then I heard myself whisper, “Mom, why didn’t anybody tell me that love hurts so much?” “If I had told you, would it have changed anything?”

Maybe my real hobby would be having to keep my whole life a secret. Was that a hobby? Millions of boys in the world would want to kill me, would kill me if they knew what lived inside me. Knowing how to fight—that was no hobby. It was a gift I just might need to survive.

“Correcto. Isn’t that how you would say it in Spanish?” “Well, that’s how a gringo would say it.” He rolled his eyes. “And how would a real Mexican say it? Not that you’re a real Mexican.” “We’ve had this discussion before, haven’t we?” “We’ll always come back to this topic because we live in this topic, a fucking no-man’s-land of American identity.” “Well, we are Americans. I mean, you don’t look like a Mexican at all.” “And you do. But that doesn’t make you more Mexican either. We both have giveaway last names, names that mean some people will never consider us real Americans.” “Well, who wants to be?”

“You know, Ari, we’re screwed.” “Yup, we’re screwed.” “We’ll never be Mexican enough. We’ll never be American enough. And we’ll never be straight enough.” “Yup,” I said, “and you can bet your ass that, somewhere down the road, we won’t be gay enough.” “We’re screwed.”

There was a young couple, looked like college students, and they were kissing. I wondered what that was like, to be able to kiss someone you liked any time you wanted. In front of everybody. I would never know what that would be like. Not ever.

In a dark theater, where no one could see us, a boy kissed me. A boy who tasted like popcorn. And I kissed him back.

“You do know a lot of those names sound very Mexican.” “What’s your point?” “I’m just saying.” “Look, Ari, I want him to be Mexican. I want him to be all the things that I’m not. I want him to know Spanish. I want him to be good at math.” “And you want him to be straight.” “Yes,” he whispered. I couldn’t stand to see the tears running down his face. “Yes, Ari, I want him to be straight.” He sat up on his bed, covered his face with his hands—and cried. Dante and tears. I sat next to him and pulled him close to me. I didn’t say anything. I just let him sob into my shoulder.

“You’re not such a boy anymore. You’re on the edge of manhood.” “It feels like I’m at the edge of a cliff.”

This life that I was living now, it was like diving into an ocean when all I had known was a swimming pool. There were no storms in a swimming pool. Storms, they were born in the oceans of the world.

“I think most people think it will just disappear. It’s amazing the capacity we have to lie to ourselves.”

I thought of the sound of his voice the very first time I heard it. I didn’t know that voice was going to change my life. I thought he was only going to teach me how to swim in the waters of this swimming pool. Instead, he taught me how to dive into the waters of life.

Dante really was my only friend. It was complicated to be in love with your only friend.

Oh hell, talking to yourself was no good. You just went around in circles.

“You wanna mess with me? That’s great. I’ll fuck you up. Try me. You won’t live to be eighteen.”

The world according to Ari and Dante. Dante and me walking through a world, a world nobody had ever seen, and mapping out all the rivers and valleys and creating paths so that those who came after us wouldn’t have to be afraid—and they wouldn’t get lost.

Last year, Mr. Blocker said we could find ourselves in our own writing. All I could think was this: Sounds like a good place to get lost. Yeah, I think I might get lost a hundred times, a thousand times, before I find out who I am and where I’m going. But if I carry Dante’s name with me, he will be the torch to light my way in the darkness that is Aristotle Mendoza.

“Oh, Ari, let your sisters love you. Let yourself be loved. For all you know, there’s a long line of people wanting you to let them in.”

“You are the most incredible human being who ever walked on planet Earth.” I smiled into the receiver. “You might not think so after spending three days with me. Maybe that’s the antidote for falling for a guy like me.” “I don’t need an antidote. I don’t happen to have a sickness.” I do, I thought. I’m as love-sick as you can get.

THE NIGHT BEFORE WE WERE heading out for our camping trip, the Quintanas invited me over for dinner. My mother baked an apple pie. “It’s not polite to arrive at someone’s house empty- handed.” My father grinned at her and said, “Your mother often engages in immigrant behavior. She can’t help herself.” I thought that was pretty funny. So did my mother, actually. “Sending over a pie isn’t immigrant behavior.” “Oh yes, it is, Lilly. Just because you’re not sending over tamales and roasted chiles doesn’t make it not immigrant behavior. You’re just wrapping it up in an American costume. Apple pie? It doesn’t get any more American than that.”

I normally walked to Dante’s house, but I decided to take the truck. I had this vision of me dropping the pie on the sidewalk, and I just didn’t want to be the center of all that drama. I was scarred for life when I dropped a porcelain plate loaded with my mother’s Christmas cookies when I was seven.

Mrs. Quintana answered the door. I felt a little shy and a little stupid as I stood there, holding an apple pie. “Hi,” I said. “My mom sends her love and this apple pie.” God, Mrs. Quintana could win a smiling contest. She took the pie from my hands. And all I could think of was that I hadn’t dropped the pie and it was safely in the hands of an experienced pie handler.

Dante gave his dad a snarky look. “Dad thinks he’s Switzerland. He’s always going for neutrality.” “No. I’m going for survival.”

And then I noticed Mr. Quintana was serving himself seconds of my mother’s pie. “Sam, did you even taste it? Or did you just inhale it?” “Oh, I tasted it, all right. The rest of you can go ahead and talk. I’m busy bonding with Lilly’s apple pie.”

This was the quietest moment I had ever been in. Even my busy brain—it was quiet. So quiet that I felt that I was in a church. And the thought entered my head that my love for Dante was holy, not because I was holy but because what I felt for him was pure.

“You stole your dad’s bourbon.” “Petty theft does not make me a thief—it makes me a rebel.” “You’re overthrowing your father’s government?” “No, I’m taking from the rich and giving to the poor. He’s bourbon rich and we’re bourbon poor.”

“I can’t believe you stole a whole bottle of bourbon from your dad. Is it because you enjoy the drama?” “I dislike drama. It’s just that I want to feel alive and push the limits and reach for the sky.” “Yeah, well, if you drink enough bourbon you’ll be kneeling on the ground and tossing your cookies.” “Okay, I’m done with this conversation. The man I love does not support me.” “What was that you said about not liking drama?”

I had never felt this alive and I thought that I would never love anyone or anything as much as I loved Dante in this very moment. He was the map of the world and everything that mattered.

“It’s not fucking fair.” I didn’t know what to say. He was right—and so what? Most of the rest of the world didn’t see things the way we did. The world would look at that boy and that girl and smile and think, How sweet. If the world saw me and Dante doing the same thing, the world would grimace and think, Disgusting.

But here we are, we’re in it, this world that does not want us, a world that will never love us, a world that would choose to destroy us rather than make a space for us even though there is more than enough room.

“I’m such an asshole. I—I mean—I mean, I acted like a five-year-old last night. I don’t know what’s wrong with me sometimes. Sometimes I think that I’m nothing but a lot of emotions all tangled up in my body and I don’t know how to untangle them.”

If we’re very lucky, the universe will send us the people we need to survive.

There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone. “Ari, did you hear what you just said to me?” “Unfortunately, after I said it, I did hear it.”

“If you haven’t learned by now, girls do math very differently from boys. We grow up faster. Boys’ math is the very basic, one plus one equals two. Girls’ math is theoretical math—the kind of math you get a PhD in.”

“They’re fine, Mr. Mendoza. They’re still recovering hippies, but they’re moving along.” “Well, I think being a recovering hippie is a far easier task than being a recovering Catholic.”

“My dad told me that during the Vietnam War, there was a body count. He said that the country was counting bodies when they should have been studying the faces of the young men who had been killed. I was thinking that the same thing is happening with the AIDS epidemic.”

“You’re funny. One minute you’re talking as if you’re so fucking sophisticated that, if you lived in London, you’d be speaking BBC English. And the next minute you’re speaking like a ninth grader.”

HIGH SCHOOL. Teachers. Students. Some students would have preferred to have no teachers. Some teachers would have preferred to have no students.

She had the habit of calling all her students by their last names, adding Mr. or Ms. as suffixes. She explained that she meant to honor her students by addressing them as though they had already become adults or to remind them that adulthood was a goal. If she’d had any powers of observation, she would have realized that most of us did not consider adulthood a goal worthy of pursuing.

“We can do this. One of these days the world is going to be very surprised by the things we accomplish. But we won’t be. We won’t be surprised at all. Because we will have learned by then what we have in us.”

He reached his hand across the table. And I took his hand—and I held on to it. Sometimes you did discover all the secrets of the universe in someone else’s hand. Sometimes that hand belonged to your father.

There was this chola-type of girl in the class. She kind of dressed like a guy. Her name was Gloria, and she didn’t take any crap from anybody. “If I hear one more word out of your mouth, Sheila, I’m gonna take you outside and stuff your bra down your throat.” And the room got real quiet. And everybody just took out their textbooks and started reading.

I’m not grateful that I’m gay. Maybe that means that I hate myself. And I’m wondering if I told you that, I’m wondering how you’d feel? How can I not want to be gay and love you at the same time? The thing I’m most grateful for is you. How does that work? The only thing I know about sexuality is you. Me and you. That’s all I know. And the only word that comes to mind is “beautiful.” Dante, there are so many things I don’t get. There are so many things I’m still so confused about. But the one thing that I’m not confused about is that I love you. I’m not a faggot. And neither are you. I won’t label myself with an ugly word when what I feel for you is so fucking beautiful.

“Just wait till I show you how to change his diapers.” “I didn’t sign up for that one.” “You don’t have to sign up. You’re going to get drafted.”

“I have one,” Susie said. “I’m going to be dating someone by the end of the new year. Someone really nice.” “Oh,” Cassandra said, “so you’ll be dating a gay guy?” “Stop it. There are nice straight boys out there.” “Let me know when you find one.”

“I’m really not up for company. I’m sorry, that was rude. I’m just tired—hell, Cassandra, I’m just sad. I’ve never been this sad and I don’t know what to do and I just want to fucking hide somewhere and not come out until it stops hurting.” “Ari, not a day goes by that I don’t think of my brother. It will be a long time before it stops hurting. But you’re not a possum. You can’t play dead.”

I felt that I was living in the land of the dead. But I knew that I had to return to the land of the living—that’s where I belonged. My father was dead. But I wasn’t.

“You’re right. We’re surrounded by privileged straight people who think they’re superior. And they’d freak out. Why are straight people so oversensitive about things? Jeez, they’re so fucking delicate.”

“People are going to hear me? Really? High school students aren’t people. They used to be people before they got to high school. And they will return to being people after they leave high school. For now, they’re just taking up space.”