THE FEVER WAS GONE.
But the dreams stayed.
My father was in them. And my brother. And Dante. In my dreams. And sometimes my mother, too. I had this image stuck in my mind. I was four and I was walking down the street, holding my brother’s hand. I wondered if it was a memory or a dream. Or a hope.
I lay around and thought about things. All the ordinary problems and mysteries of my life that mattered only to me. Not that thinking about things made me feel better. I decided that my junior year at Austin High School was going to suck. Dante went to Cathedral because they had a swim team. My mom and dad had wanted to send me to school there, but I’d refused. I didn’t want to go to an all-boy Catholic school. I’d insisted to myself and to my parents that all the boys there were rich. My mom argued that they gave scholarships to smart boys. I argued back that I wasn’t smart enough to get a scholarship. My mom argued back that they could afford to send me there. “I hate those boys!” I’d begged my father not to send me there.
I never said anything to Dante about hating Cathedral boys. He didn’t have to know.
I thought about my mom’s accusation. “You don’t have any friends.” I thought of my chair and how really it was a portrait of me.
I was a chair. I felt sadder than I’d ever felt.
I knew I wasn’t a boy anymore. But I still felt like a boy. Sort of. But there were other things I was starting to feel. Man things, I guess. Man loneliness was much bigger than boy loneliness. And I didn’t want to be treated like a boy anymore. I didn’t want to live in my parents’ world and I didn’t have a world of my own. In a strange way, my friendship with Dante had made me feel even more alone.
Maybe it was because Dante seemed to make himself fit everywhere he went. And me, I always felt that I didn’t belong anywhere. I didn’t even belong in my own body—especially in my own body. I was changing into someone I didn’t know. The change hurt but I didn’t know why it hurt. And nothing about my own emotions made any sense.
When I was younger, I’d had this idea that I wanted to keep a journal. I sort of wrote things down in this little leather book I bought, filled with blank pages. But I was never disciplined about the whole thing. The journal turned into a random thing with random thoughts and nothing more.
When I was in the sixth grade, my parents gave me a baseball glove and a typewriter for my birthday. I was on a team so the glove made sense. But a typewriter? What was it about me that made them think of getting me a typewriter? I pretended to like it. But I wasn’t a good pretender.
Just because I didn’t talk about things didn’t make me a good actor.
The funny thing was, I learned how to type. At last, a skill. The baseball thing didn’t work out. I was good enough to make the team. But I hated it. I did it for my father.
I didn’t know why I was thinking about all these things—except that’s what I always did. I guess I had my own personal television in my brain. I could control whatever I wanted to watch. I could switch the channels anytime I wanted.
I thought about calling Dante. And then I thought that maybe I wouldn’t call him. I didn’t really feel like talking to anyone. I just felt like talking to myself.
I got to thinking about my older sisters and how they were so close to each other but so far away from me. I knew it was the age thing. That seemed to matter. To them. And to me. I was born “a little late.” That’s the expression my sisters used. One day, they were talking to each other at the kitchen table and they were talking about me and that’s the expression they used. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone say that about me. So I decided to confront my sisters because I just didn’t like being thought of that way. I don’t know, I just sort of lost it. I looked at my sister, Cecilia, and said: “You were born a little too early.” I smiled at her and shook my head. “Isn’t that sad? Isn’t that just too fucking sad?”
My other sister, Sylvia, lectured me. “I hate that word. Don’t talk that way. That’s so disrespectful.”
Like they respected me. Yeah, sure they did.
They told my mom I was using language. My mother hated “language.” She looked at me with the look. “The ‘f’ word shows an extreme lack of respect and an extreme lack of imagination. And don’t roll your eyes.”
But I got in worse trouble for refusing to apologize.
The good thing was that my sisters never used the expression “born too late” ever again. Not in front of me, anyway.
I think I was frustrated because I couldn’t really talk to my brother. And my sisters? They cared, but they treated me more like a son than a sibling. I didn’t need three mothers. So, I felt alone. And being alone made me crave someone my own age to talk to—someone who understood that swearing wasn’t about a lack of imagination, but sometimes just made me feel free.
Talking to myself in my journal felt like conversing with someone who got it.
Sometimes, I’d write down every curse word I could think of. It helped. My mother had her rules—no smoking in the house for my father, and no cussing for anyone. She wasn’t having any of it. Even when my dad let loose with a colorful string of expletives, she’d shoot him a look and say, “Take it outside, Jaime. Maybe you’ll find a dog who’ll appreciate that kind of language.”
My mom was soft but strict. That’s how she managed things. I wasn’t about to push the cussing issue with her. So, I did most of my swearing in my head.
And then there was my name. Angel Aristotle Mendoza. I hated “Angel” and refused to let anyone call me that. Every Angel I knew was a real jerk. I wasn’t fond of “Aristotle” either. Even though I was named after my grandfather and the world’s most famous philosopher, I resented the expectations that came with it.
So, I renamed myself Ari.
If I switched the letters, my name became Air.
I thought it might be something special to be like air.
I could be both something and nothing at the same time—necessary yet invisible. Everyone would need me, and no one would see me.
