I TRIED TO PICTURE DANTE WITH SHORT HAIR. I TRIED to

imagine him kissing a girl. Dante was complicated. Gina would have liked Dante. Not that I was ever going to introduce them.

I lay in bed and thought about writing back to him. Instead, I sat down to write in my journal.

What would it be like to kiss a girl? Specifically, Ileana. She wouldn’t taste like cigarettes. What does a girl taste like when you kiss her?

I stopped writing and tried to think of something else. I thought about the stupid essay on the Great Depression that I didn’t want to write. I thought about Charlie Escobedo who wanted me to do drugs with him. I started to think about Dante kissing a girl again and then I thought about Ileana. Maybe she would taste like cigarettes. Maybe she smoked. I didn’t know a damn thing about her.

I sat up on my bed. No, no, no. No thinking about kissing. And then I don’t know why, but I felt sad. And then I started thinking about my brother. Every time I felt sad, I thought about him.

Maybe deep down a part of me was always thinking about him. Sometimes, I caught myself spelling out his name. B-E-R-N-A-R-D-O. What was my brain doing, spelling out his name without my permission?

I sometimes think that I don’t let myself know what I’m really thinking about. That doesn’t make much sense but it makes sense to me. I have this idea that the reason we have dreams is that we’re thinking about things that we don’t know we’re thinking about—and those things, well, they sneak out of us in our dreams. Maybe we’re like tires with too much air in them. The air has to leak out. That’s what dreams are.

And now that I think about it, I’d had a dream about my brother. I was four and he was fifteen and we were taking a walk. He was holding my hand and I was looking up at him. I was happy. It was a beautiful dream. The sky was blue and clear and pure.

Maybe the dream came from a memory. Dreams don’t come from nowhere. That’s a fact. I think maybe I want to study dreams when I’m old enough to actually choose what I want to study. I sure as hell don’t want to study Alexander Hamilton. Yeah, maybe I’ll study dreams and where they come from. Freud. Maybe that’s what I’ll do—I’ll write a paper on Sigmund Freud. That way, I’ll get a head start.

And maybe I’ll help people out who have bad dreams. So they won’t have them anymore. I think I’d like to do that.