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"That afternoon, I learned two new words. "Inscrutable." And "friend." Words were different when they lived inside of you. -- I annotated this quote and made a prediction that the friendship Dante and Artiste shared would leave Ari feeling unsure about himself.

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“I have always felt terrible inside. The reasons for this keep changing.” (p.98)
This quote hit me-hard. I have struggled with my mental health since I was a young adolescent throughout adulthood, and for the longest time I hated myself, inside and out, and like Ari, I felt trapped by this since the reasons why I felt this way was constantly changing. Many adolescents can identify with these feelings, and need our love and support to know that they matter, now and always.

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“I used to tell people my name was Dan. I mean, you kno, I just dropped the two letters. But I stopped doing that, it wasn’t honest. And anyway, I always got found out. And I felt like a liar and an idiot.” (18).
"We made up stories about the other bus riders. For all we knew, they were writing stories about us.”
People will always assume who you are and feel the need to place you in their story as a specific and binary character. The only person that can validate who you are is yourself.

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“Weird.” “Weird.” On Page 40 almost strikes me as an echo of “Okay?” “Okay.” from The Fault In Our Stars

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“It bothers you that you’re Mexican, doesn’t it?” + connection to struggling to feel like you fit into a certain group that you’re “supposed” to.

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⭐️ “Dante. I really liked him. I really, really liked him.”

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+ (Connection) On page 16, the author chooses to call the lifeguards at the pool “budding Walt Whitmans” as an ironic jab at their way with words, but also because of the poet’s own often suppressed sexuality.

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On page 70, there's the quote "I don't think you know how loved you are."
I think this constant self doubt and unhappiness is going to be a consistent them throughout the book and it will be interesting to see if it changes.

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Music was a consistent theme that I think will be a major foreshadowing tool throughout the book.

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“But at least the idea was mine” (9).

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“Well, you have to become a person first” top of page 8. It resonated with me very strongly because I truly believe that you have to figure out how to live and be human before you can do anything else.

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On page 17, Dante and Aristotle meet.  I find it interesting that their names reflect the experience of each other and each other's needs.  Alighieri Dante wrote Dante's Inferno, and Aristotle is the father of philosophy and Western Philosopy, whose name means Angel.  In the story, Aristotle needs the father figure and Dante saves him, but name wise, they play the opposite roles, thus, being each other's salvation.

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Pg 8

!! “The problem with my life was that it was someone else’s idea”

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"And Dante believed you had to tell the truth in words. Out loud. Tell someone." p. 50 ----- There is power in words, affirmation, and confirmation. In justifying truth and in creating/carving your own identity. It is one thing to feel a way; it is another to voice it and allow that feeling into the world. The emphasis on words and the effects they have is prevalent up to this point.

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On page 16 at the bottom of the page, it says "I had a feeling there was something wrong with me. I guess I was a mystery even to myself."
I had a major connection to how beings teenager and self identifying not only sexuality, but personality can be the hardest on their mental health and image of themselves. I am interested to see how Dante and Aristotle fend through the pains of high school and truly finding themselves as teenagers.

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“What do you do in a pool when you don’t know how to swim? Learn. I guess that was the answer” (15).  Also “[Dante] taught me how to swim” (32). These two quotes are complementary in that they describe how Ari learns more about living once he meets Dante.