“I don’t know. I was reading and when I looked up, everything was blurry. I’m not sure what that means.”
She smiled at me. “It means you need glasses. I’ll make an appointment for you with my optometrist.”
“Glasses? I’m not a glasses kind of guy.”
“Well, you are now.”
“I can’t see me in glasses.”
“You can’t see without them.”
“Shit.”
She combed my hair with her fingers. “Ari, you’ll look even more handsome wearing glasses.”
“Can’t I get contact lenses?”
“No.”
“Why not.”
“Because I said so. They’re a lot of trouble. They’re expensive. And you shouldn’t wear contacts until you get used to wearing regular glasses.”
“ ‘Because I said so’? Really?”
“Did you hear any of the words that followed ‘because I said so’?”
“Aristotle Mendoza was not born to wear glasses.”
“Apparently, Aristotle Mendoza’s eyes do not agree.”
* * *
I kept staring at myself in the mirror. The glasses were kind of cool. But still, they were glasses. And I felt like I was someone else. I had to admit, though, when I put them on for the first time, I was fucking amazed. The world was sharper. Like I could read street signs, and the words the teacher wrote on the board. And I could see Dante’s face as he walked toward me. I hadn’t realized I’d known it was him not because I could see his face clearly but because of his walk. I didn’t know how long I’d been seeing things out of focus. That’s what I’d been doing: looking at the world with eyes that were out of focus.
I liked that I could see now. It was a good thing. Beautiful, really.
“This is the new you, Ari.” I pulled myself away from the mirror.
* * *
When Dante answered the doorbell, he took a long look at me. “This is the Ari of my dreams,” he said.
“Oh, knock it off,” I said.
“I want to kiss you.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“I’m not. Now I’m going to want to kiss you all the time.”
“You always want to kiss me all the time.”
“Yeah, but now, it’s like I want to tear your clothes off all the time.”
“I can’t believe you just said that.”
“Oh well, I thought that honesty was the best policy.”
“Honesty doesn’t have to be verbally expressed.”
“Silence equals death.”
I couldn’t help but shake my head and grin.
He took my hand and pulled me inside. “Mom! Dad! Come see Ari wearing his new glasses.”
I felt like an animal at the zoo. I found myself standing before Mr. and Mrs. Quintana. “The look of an intellectual becomes you, Ari.”
Mrs. Quintana nodded her approval. “Handsome as ever. And somehow it reflects the intelligence that you so love to hide.”
“You think I like to hide my intelligence?”
“Of course you do, Ari. It doesn’t fit the image you have of yourself.”
I nodded as in I see. “It’s three against one. It’s hard to argue with a united front.”
Mrs. Quintana smiled, and then all of a sudden, she bent over. She touched her side and sat down and took a deep breath. “Oh, this one’s going to be a fighter. And I think he or she wants out.”
She reached for Mr. Quintana’s hand and placed it right where the baby was kicking.
I thought Mr. Quintana was going to cry. “Dante, put your hand right here.”
When Dante felt his mother’s belly, he got that incredible look on his face—it was as if he had become a sentence ending with an exclamation point. “That’s amazing, Mom!”
“Ari,” Mrs. Quintana said, “here. Put your hand right there.”
I looked at her. “I don’t—”
“Don’t be shy. It’s okay.”
She took my hand and placed it on her belly. And I felt it, the baby. Maybe that’s where the expression “alive and kicking” came from.
“Life, Ari. This is life.”
Ten
HALLOWEEN. YES, I WAS THE spoilsport. I refused to wear a costume to the party at Gina’s house. Susie said I should come as a wet blanket. Ha, ha.
“I’m going to uninvite you,” Gina said.
“Okay, fine. Uninvite me. I’ll just crash the party.”
“Sometimes I hate you.”
“You just hate that peer pressure doesn’t work on a guy like me. And besides, I’ll be wearing my new pair of glasses.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“So I won’t wear them. I’ll go as Ari, BG.”
“Ari, BG?”
“Ari, before glasses.”
“You’re too much, you know that? Why can’t you just let yourself play? ‘Play’ as in ‘to have fun.’ ‘Play’ as in ‘you’re in a play and you can be anyone you want to be just for a night.’ ”
“I am in a play. It’s called life, and I already play a role, Gina. I’m a gay guy who plays a straight guy. And it’s fucking wearing me out. And it’s not play, it’s work. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just wear the false face I wear every day, the one that makes me feel like a fraud.”
“You know, Ari, the same things that I hate about you are the things I love about you.”
“Thank you, I think.”
“You’re impossible to hate.”
“You’re impossible to hate too.”
“You’re more stubborn than I am.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that one, Gina. I’d call that a toss-up.”
“Do you really feel like a fraud?”
“I am a fraud.”
“You’re not. You’re trying to make it out of high school alive. You don’t owe anybody anything. Repeat after me: I am not a fraud.” She waited. “I don’t hear you.”
“I am not a fraud,” I whispered.
“That’s a start, Ari. We’ll have to repeat this lesson often.” Yeah, yeah, we both laughed.
Sometimes everybody was a comedian. And sometimes everybody was a teacher. And sometimes I just said too much. I had a running argument with that silence = death thing.
* * *
Cassandra went dressed as the goddess Athena. Dante went as William Shakespeare. They had the best costumes by far. Nobody came even close. Certainly, they were the most elaborate. But Susie’s costume was the funniest, and maybe the most original. She was dressed as a ghost, which was pretty cliché—but on top of the ghost’s head, there was a wrapped gift. And when people asked her who she was, she said, “I am the ghost of Christmas present.” And people would laugh their asses off.
Susie Byrd was awesome.
You would have thought Dante went to school with all of us. He had a way of making himself fit in. Most people would have sat in a corner saying to themselves, I don’t know anybody here. That’s exactly what I would have done. But not Dante. Not Dante Quintana.