I noticed a big canvas on his easel, covered with a sheet. It had to be the painting he’d been working on. He’d been working on it for a long time. “When can I see it?”
“It’s a surprise. You’ll see it when it’s time.”
“When will that be?”
“When I say so.”
I felt Dante’s hand on my back.
I turned around. Slowly. Slowly. And I let him kiss me. Yeah, I guess you could say I kissed him back.
Twenty
I KEEP THINKING ABOUT DANTE and the cartographer thing. Making a map of the new world. Wouldn’t that be something fantastically, amazingly beautiful? 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. How beautiful was that?
Yeah, Dante was wearing off on me.
But, hey, all I have is a journal that I’m going to write in. That’s about as fantastic and beautiful as it’s going to get for me. I can live with that. It’s funny, I’ve had this leather-bound journal for a long time. It was just sitting there on my bookshelf with a note from my aunt Ophelia that said: One day you’re going to fill these pages with words that come from you. I have a feeling that you will have a long relationship with words. Who knows? They might even save you.
So now I’m sitting in the kitchen and I’m staring at the blank page and I’m thinking of Aunt Ophelia’s note and I’ve been staring at the blank page for a long time as if I were facing down an enemy. I want to write something, and I want to say something that matters—not something that matters to the whole fucking world, because the whole fucking world doesn’t give a damn about me or about Dante. In fact, when I think about the story of the world, I think whoever wrote that story wouldn’t include us. But I don’t want to write for the world—I just want to write what I’m thinking and the things that matter to me.
I’ve thought about this all day: me kissing Dante on a starry night in the desert. It was like someone lit me like a firecracker and I felt like I was about to explode and light the whole desert sky. How can my own words save me? I wish my aunt Ophelia were with me right now. She’s not. But me, Ari, he’s here. I think I’m going to begin like this: Dear Dante. And I’m going to pretend I’m talking to him. Though really, I’m doing what I always do—yeah, talking to myself. Talking to myself is the only thing I’m good at. I’ll just pretend I’m talking to Dante and make myself believe that I’m talking to someone who’s worth talking to.
Mom says I have to learn how to love myself—which is a strange thought. Loving yourself seems like a really weird goal. But, hell, what do I know?
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.
Dear Dante,
I don’t like it when you get mad at me. It makes me feel bad. I don’t know what else to say about this. I have to think about this some more. You getting angry isn’t part of the way I thought of you. But you shouldn’t have to fit in my definition of you. I don’t want you to live in the prison of my thoughts. I’m the only one who should be living there.
The problem is this: I think about you all the time, about how it might feel to watch you stand in front of me and you would take your clothes off and say: This is me. And I would take my clothes off and say: This is me.
And we would touch. And it would feel like I’d never touched anybody or anything, like I’d never really known what touch was until I felt your hands on my skin.
I keep picturing my finger running over your lips over and over again.
I try not to think about these things. I don’t want to think about them.
But the thoughts are so incredibly beautiful to me. And I’m asking myself why the entire world believes that these thoughts—my thoughts—are so ugly. I know you don’t have the answers to my questions. But I think you ask those questions too.
I just keep picturing you in a hospital room, your smile almost hidden by the bruises those guys left on you. They thought you were just an animal they could kick around and even kill. But I think it was them—they were the animals.
When will we all get to be human, Dante?
Twenty-One
LEGS AND I WENT FOR a run. I loved the morning and the desert air, and it seemed as if Legs and I were the only living things in the world.
I never knew how far I ran. I would just run. I wasn’t really into measuring things. I just ran and listened to my breathing and to the rhythms of my body just like Dante listened to his body in the water.
I always ran past Dante’s house.
* * *
There he was, sitting on the steps of his house, barefoot, wearing the ratty T-shirt that was so worn you could see through it and still carrying the sleep in his eyes. He waved. I stopped, unleashed Legs, who ran up to Dante and licked his face. I never really let Legs lick my face, but Dante was all about getting kisses from Legs.
I watched them. I liked watching them. And then I heard Dante’s voice. “You like watching, don’t you?”
“Guess so,” I said. “Maybe I’m like my dad.”
I made my way up the steps and sat next to him. He and Legs were busy loving on each other. I wanted to lay my head on his shoulder—but I didn’t. I was too sweaty, and I smelled bad.
“You want to go somewhere today?”
“Sure,” I said. “We could take a long ride in the truck, you know, before school starts.”
“School. Ugh.”
“I thought you liked school.”
“I know all I’m ever gonna learn in high school.”
That made me laugh. “So there’s nothing left to learn?”
“Well, not a whole year’s worth. We should go straight to college and live together.”
“Is that the plan?”
“Of course that’s the plan.”
“What if we kill each other—as roommates?”
“We won’t kill each other. And we’ll be more than roommates.”
“I get that,” I said. I so didn’t want to have this conversation. “I’m going home to take a shower.”
“Take one here. I’ll shower with you.”
That made me laugh. “I’m not sure your mother would be big on that idea.”
“Yeah, well, parents sometimes get in the way of all the fun.”
On the way home, I pictured Dante and me in the shower together.
A part of me wanted to run away from all the complications of being in love with Dante. Maybe Ari plus Dante equaled love, but it also equaled complicated. It also equaled playing hide-and-seek with the world. But there was a difference between the art of running and the art of running away.
Twenty-Two