Are We There Yet? by David Levithan

closing. Elijah wanders to the gift shop and buys a few more postcards for Cal. Then he steps through the gate, back into the expected world. He looks to the exhibition sign and learns that the Biennial is closed tomorrow. Danny is out of luck. Elijah is disappointed. And at the same time, he is relieved. Not because the experience will solely be his (really, he wants Danny to see it). But instead because he knows deep in his heart that it would be foolish to return.
    Discovery cannot be revisited.

“Do you wonder why we wander?” Cal had asked.
    It was the night of the first snow; you could hear the branches bending and the icicles falling outside the window, beyond the wall.
    They were warmth together. They were hot breath and blankets and wrapping themselves close.
    And Elijah had thought,
I wonder why I never kiss you. I wonder what would happen.
    But he didn't say anything out loud.

Danny and Elijah had been walking the back way to school—even though Danny's first bell rang twenty minutes earlier than Elijah's, they usually walked together, with Danny dropping Elijah off at the playground before heading to middle school.
    The back way went by the brook, by the strand of trees that the boys could call a forest without feeling any doubt. Sometimes along the way they found signs of trespass—teenage beer cans, hand-smashed or misplaced intact; gum wrappers folded into the ground; once, a high-heeled shoe.
    That morning, they found a large spool of red twine. Elijah picked it up, the twine end pointing out like a tail.
    “Let's tie the trees together,” he suggested.
    And Danny said, “Sure.”
    They tied the tail end to a branch—Elijah looping it like a shoelace, Danny double-knotting so it would hold. Then they ran randomly from tree to tree, sometimes throwing the spool high to get a branch that was just out of reach, other times dipping low to let the lowest of bushes in on the action.
    They laughed, they looped, they were hopelessly late for school.
    There was no way to explain it, so neither of them tried.

As Elijah wanders through the Biennial, Danny is in another part of town, altering his concept of nationality. At first, he thought he had it figured out: the American tourists were the loud walkers with Chicago Bulls T-shirts, and the Europeans were the teeter-walkers with an unfortunate propensity toward dark socks. But no. That was not the case at all.
    Take baseball caps. Danny initially assumed that anyone wearing a baseball cap was from the U.S.—after all, baseball is not exactly America's most exportable pastime. But does that matter? No. Alongside postcards and Venezia T-shirts, street vendors are flush with New York Yankees, Washington Redskins, and Dartmouth (
Dartmouth?
) paraphernalia.
    Even in the Doges' Palace, things are askew. Danny stands beside an Ethan Hawke look-alike who is clearly a semesterabroad NYU student. Then Ethan opens his mouth and speaks an unintelligible language. Danny retreats to the side of a glamorous woman with a Spanish complexion and raven hair. She speaks fluent Brooklyn, albeit with a curator's vocabulary. (To her, the subtle curve of a David is a “mask-uline ref-rence to thuh fem-nin ark-uh-type.”) Danny is confounded—the Europeans are trying to be American, the Americans are trying to be European, and the Japanese are furiously upholding their stereotype by taking a horrendous number of snapshots for no clear reason.
    Internationality is a German teenager in Venice wearing a Carolina Panthers jersey. (Danny passes three of them as he leaves the museum.)
    And if this is internationality…where does that leave nationality? Danny has a fierce desire to identify Americans. Finally, he realizes: you can tell an American not by the American-ness of his T-shirt but by the level of its obscurity. For example, if the shirt reads “Snoopy” or “New Jersey Sports” or (especially) “U.S.A.,” odds are it's not an American. But if the shirt says “Lafayette