Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Someday, I’m going to discover all the secrets of the universe.”

While stargazing in the desert, Dante feels inspired to tell Ari this. Ari thinks it is a beautiful thing to say and believes him when he says it. The desert stars and night sky are a source of wonder for both of the boys.

“I didn’t know what was happening to me. Everything was chaos and I was scared. I felt like Dante’s room before he’d put everything in order. Order. That was what I needed. So I took my journal and started writing.”

While thinking about his older brother, Ari feels overwhelmed. He misses his brother dearly and compares his absence to a kind of death. He begins writing as a way to express the emotions he cannot share with his family. This hints at Ari’s love for writing that develops throughout the story.

“Dante’s mother loved him more than he would ever know. I didn’t know what to do with that piece of information. So I just kept it inside. That’s what I did with everything. Kept is inside.”

Ari is very observant of the adults around him, especially his parents and Dante’s parents. After the accident, Mrs. Quintana tells Ari that she will love him forever, and Ari realizes how special these words are coming from a woman who usually hides her true feelings. In turn, this flash of emotion helps him understand how much Mrs. Quintana loves Dante as well. He doesn’t tell Dante, but he makes note of it.

“What I really want for my birthday: for someone to talk about my brother. I want to see his picture on one of the walls of our house.”

Still recovering from the terrible accident, Ari has avoided writing in his journal for a long while but finally begins writing a new entry. As he writes he realizes that, although he is thrilled at the thought of receiving a truck for his birthday, he feels sadness about Bernardo. The sadness he feels about Bernardo’s absence invades even Ari’s happiest moments. Until his parents are able to talk with him about Bernardo, he carries the burden of this sadness.

“I flipped the page and stared at a sketch of me. I didn’t say anything. There were five or six sketches he’d done of me the day he’d come over. I studied them carefully. There was nothing careless about his sketches. Nothing careless at all. They were exact and deliberate and full of all the things he felt. And yet they seemed so spontaneous.”

When Ari finally looks at Dante’s sketches, he realizes that Dante is a gifted artist. He sees in Dante’s sketches honesty and talent, and he tells Dante he will be great someday. Ari feared looking at Dante’s sketches of him because he knew that the sketches would express his feelings for Ari, and Ari was not ready to acknowledge his own feelings toward Dante.

“It felt like there was a whole world living inside of her. I didn’t know anything about that world.”

When Aristotle meets Ileana, he is instantly attracted to her. At this phase in his life, Ari is curious about women and wonders about what the world is like for them. His crush on Ileana complicates Ari’s sexuality. Ultimately, Ileana is not interested in Ari, but they kiss and Ari enjoys it.

“Do you know what dead skin looks like when they take off a cast? That was my life, all that dead skin. It was strange to feel like the Ari I used to be. Except that wasn’t totally true. The Ari I used to be didn’t exist anymore. And the Ari I was becoming? He didn’t exist yet.”

The accident has long term effects on Ari. Although he heals physically and is able to walk and do everything he did before, he realizes that he has changed on the inside into a new person. Ari fears this change from the person he originally thought he was.

“Somewhere toward the end of the shift we all started singing U2 songs. ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking for.’ Yeah, that was a good song. My theme song. But really I thought it was everybody’s theme song.”

Like most teenagers, music is meaningful for Ari. He ponders music’s effect on him and its relevance to his specific problems. He relates to the song’s theme of an eternal search and reflects on the fact that everyone is searching for their life’s purpose.

“Do you think, Ari, that love has anything to do with the secrets of the universe?” 

Gina, Susie, and Ari are hanging out when Susie exhibits surprising insight into Ari’s mental state by asking this question. While talking about Ileana, Ari tells Susie that he might have loved Ileana a little, but she didn’t break his heart. With this question, the author shows the connection between Ari’s search for his identity and his love for Dante.

“‘Is love a contest?’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘Maybe everyone loves differently. Maybe that’s all that matters.’”

Dante tells Ari that he thinks his mother loves his father more than his father loves her back. Ari thinks about it and realizes that maybe love can’t be compared in the way that Dante is trying to quantify it. In Ari and Dante’s first meeting in nine months, Ari shows how his view of love has matured; he no longer views it as a battle.

“One of the secrets of the universe was that our instincts were sometimes stronger than our minds.” 

In a state of anger and sadness, Ari is shocked that he is able to find his favorite spot in the desert and park there with no issue. Although this thought refers to a relatively mundane situation, it hints that Ari is beginning to develop an awareness of his true feelings. His mind is slow to catch up to what his body and heart already know.

“I was always thinking of Dante, always trying to figure him out, always wondering why it was that we were friends and why it seemed to matter so much. To both of us. I hated thinking about things and people—especially when they were mysteries I couldn’t solve.”

Ari is frustrated by how complicated Dante is. He wants answers and is impatient, but for some reason he can’t let go of the mystery that is Dante. He wants to solve Dante and compartmentalize his feelings for him, but he slowly begins to see that this will never work.

“What did words matter to a desert?”

As Ari drives to Tucson with his dad for his Aunt Ophelia’s funeral, he thinks about the silence between them. He jokes with his father that they would never talk if it weren’t for his mother, and they sit in contented silence for a while as his father smokes a cigarette. Ari enjoys the desert landscape and begins to let his mind drift to the many questions he wants to ask but never does.

“He nodded. He got out of the car. He stood out in the heat. I knew he was trying to organize himself. Like a messy room that needed to be cleaned up. I left him alone for a while. But then, I decided I wanted to be with him. I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.”

The author compares one’s emotional state to a clean or messy room, a metaphor that is used several times in the novel. After Ari’s father opens up to Ari about how Bernardo being sent to prison affected his mother, he shows vulnerability, a rarity for him. Ari is unsure about how to react because this is new territory for them, but he realizes that he needs to be there for his father in this emotional moment.

“I was so ashamed. For having kept her on the margins of my memory. I was so ashamed.”

When his Aunt Ophelia passes away, Ari realizes how much he loved her and wishes he had spent more time with her. His Aunt Ophelia cared for him for nine months when he was four, and she always favored him. Another part of Ari’s growth is dealing with the loss of his beloved aunt.

“She reached over and wiped my tears. I couldn’t speak. ‘We don’t always make the right decisions, Ari. We do the best we can.’ I nodded, but there weren’t any words and the silent tears just kept running down my face like there was a river inside me. ‘I think we hurt you.’ I closed my eyes and made the tears stop. And then I said, ‘I think I’m crying because I’m happy.’”

Ari and his parents have an emotional conversation about Aunt Ophelia’s life. This conversation makes his mother realize that she needs to be honest with Ari. She says she wants to show him some pictures of Bernardo when they get home to El Paso, and Ari is filled with tears of joy.

“I looked out the window at the black clouds ahead of us. I opened the back window and smelled the rain. You could smell the rain in the desert even before a drop fell. I closed my eyes. I held my hand out and felt the first drop. It was like a kiss. The sky was kissing me. It was a nice thought. It was something Dante would have thought. I felt another drop and then another. A kiss. A kiss. And then another kiss. I thought about the dreams I’d been having—all of them about kissing. But I never knew who I was kissing. I couldn’t see. And then, just like that, we were in the middle of a downpour. I rolled up the window and I was suddenly cold. My arm was wet, the shoulder of my T-shirt soaked.”

This beautiful passage showcases the author’s eloquent, poetic style. He compares the raindrops to kisses and personifies the sky. Ari’s positive connection to the natural world is highlighted in this passage and his love for the rain emerges again. Ari’s dreams of being kissed by a mysterious person prophesy the kiss he and Dante share in the last chapter.

“I pictured Legs lying at Dante’s feet, whimpering at the sound of the thunder. I pictured Dante kissing her, telling her everything was all right. Dante who loved kissing dogs, who loved kissing his parents, who loved kissing boys, who even loved kissing girls. Maybe kissing was part of the human condition. Maybe I wasn’t human. Maybe I wasn’t part of the natural order of things.”

Aristotle’s discomfort with open affection and repression of his sexuality is contrasted with Dante’s openness and love of physical affection. Ari feels less human because he is ashamed of some aspects of his humanity, while Dante is not as ashamed of his need for love and affection. This is yet another example of the book’s themes of overcoming shame as one progresses into adulthood.

“‘I think I knew,’ he said. ‘How?’ ‘The way he looked at you sometimes.’ ‘Oh.’ I looked down at the floor. ‘But why didn’t he tell me, Ari?’ ‘He didn’t want to disappoint you.’”

Ari and Dante have had numerous conversations and exchanged letters about the topic of disappointing their parents. Both boys want to please their parents, but Dante in particular fears that being himself and being openly gay will cause his parents to reject him. After Dante’s terrible beating at the hands of a group of four boys, Ari is forced to tell Mr. Quintana that Dante is gay. Mr. Quintana is a kind and loving father, so he is shocked that Dante didn’t feel comfortable telling him.

“I’d never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren’t meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around.”

When Dante is in the hospital after being beat up, Ari converses with Dante’s mom and dad. His mom tells Ari that he needs to stand by Dante and that she thinks Dante loves him. As they are talking to Ari, he begins to feel emotional about what happened to Dante, but he can never express the words for his feelings. He wishes he could tell them how he really feels about Dante. Ari is finally getting in touch with his true emotions, but he is still not ready to fully articulate them yet.

“‘He killed someone, Ari. He killed someone with his bare fists.’ She almost smiled. But it was the saddest smile I’d ever seen. ‘I’ve never said that before,’ she whispered.”

Ari’s mother tells Ari what caused his older brother Bernardo to end up in prison. She is so ashamed of what happened and feels so much pain that she has never talked about it with anyone before. When she finally tells Ari about it, she tells him that she blames herself for what happened, and Ari tries to comfort her.

“I loved her for her silence. Or maybe I just understood it. And loved my father too, for the careful way he spoke. I came to understand that my father was a careful man. To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.”

Once his mother has shared her pain over Bernardo, Ari views his parents in a new light. He sees them as complete people, with flaws and burdens that they carry just as he has burdens to carry. Ari is appreciative of his parents’ characteristics, including what he thought were flaws, because these vulnerabilities are real.

“This was what was wrong with me. All this time I had been trying to figure out the secrets of the universe, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart. All of the answers had always been so close and yet I had always fought them without even knowing it. From the minute I’d met Dante, I had fallen in love with him. I just didn’t let myself know it, think it, feel it. My father was right. And it was true what my mother had said. We all fight our own private wars.”

When Dante first spoke about the secrets of the universe, he was referring to the heavens above. Ari, however, realizes that the greatest secrets for him are located inside of himself. As Ari learns who he is through his relationships and the struggles he experiences, he develops compassion for others and for himself.