Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe: Part Two, Chapter Seven Summary & Analysis

Ari’s fever breaks, but he continues to experience bad dreams. He lies around and thinks that this next school year is going to be awful. Dante is going to Cathedral, where there’s a swim team, but Ari is going to Austin High. This is because, though Mom and Dad wanted to send Ari to Cathedral on a scholarship, Ari argued that he hated the boys there and wasn’t smart enough. Ari thinks of Mom saying that he doesn’t have any friends and of Dante’s drawing of the chair. He feels sad and like he’s not a boy anymore. He thinks that “man loneliness” is bigger than kid loneliness and, somehow, that his friendship with Dante makes him feel lonelier. Dante seems to fit in everywhere.

Ari explains that when he was a kid, he started keeping a journal. In sixth grade, Mom and Dad gave Ari a baseball glove and a typewriter for his birthday. The glove made sense, but Ari was perplexed by the typewriter and uninterested in it. Despite this, he did learn to type and though he was good at baseball, he hated playing. Ari thinks about Cecelia and Sylvia, and how they talk about Ari being born “a little late.” Once, he suggested that they were born early and used foul language while he did it, which made them stop talking like that.

Ari thinks that he was mad then because he couldn’t talk to Bernardo, Cecelia, or Sylvia. He feels alone, since his sisters treat him like a baby, and thinks that keeping a journal counts as talking to someone his own age. Sometimes, he writes down every bad word he knows, and other times he muses about his name. He doesn’t like Angel or Aristotle, his grandfather’s name. He hates that his name is that of the world’s most famous philosopher, too, which is why he goes by Ari. He likes that he can switch letters around to be Air, so that he can be necessary but invisible.