The Boy Across Enemy Lines

Lacrosse is more interesting than I thought.

It’s been 2 weeks since that day. The day at the arcade. Dante and I haven’t talked since. Or, well, I haven’t talked to Dante. Over the past two weeks he has tried to get a hold of me. Like a lot.

137 texts messages

203 missed phone calls

198 voicemails

35 notes in class

13 emails

All over the course of two weeks. I have read some of the messages and listened to some of his voicemails. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m tired of them being in my phone or if I just really miss his voice. I think it’s the latter. His texts mainly involved…

Ali, please talk to me.

Ali, I miss you.

Please, just say something.

Tell me you hate me.

Can you just call me? Or at least text me back.

Ali… please. I really miss you. I know you miss me too.

Damnit Ali, just respond. It can be with one word… one letter.

The text messages are easy to ignore. Kind of. I mean, their just words on a screen. I can ignore them and delete them. I don’t even have to read them. I can just go through and clear them all. Then poof. No more. The ones that are really hard are the voicemail. Those are bad. I actually have to listen to them in order to delete them. Those mainly include…

“Ali, please call me back”

“Ali, I really miss you. Can we please just talk or something? We don’t even need to talk we can sit on the phone in silence or something. Or you can yell at me.”

“Ali, we don’t have to let our parent’s stupid little feud ruin what we have.”

It takes everything in me not to call him back. I can’t do that. And then there’s school. We see each other at school every single day in almost every class. It’s a lot easier ignoring him over the phone. It’s much harder ignoring him in person. You know, when he’s looking at you with his perfect green eyes and smiles at you with his heart melting sad smile. Yea, all that. It’s hard to ignore him when all you really want to do is kiss him. Ugh! Screw my life.

Ever sine I was little, probably since I was born, my dad, or my adopted dad, has been straight up honest with me about everything. He never hid what he did from me. One day when I was 8 my mom and my dad sat me down and explained what the whole Mafia thing really meant. They explained what dad did. They explained what it meant for my safety. From that day forward they drilled into my head that I’m not really safe and the main threat was the D’Angelo family. They told me all about the many decades long war that has been going on between our families. They told me about when they kidnapped my mom while she was pregnant with me. They told me everything. I’m so grateful that my parents told me everything and was honest with me from the very beginning. I swore to them that I’d stay away from the D’Angelo family and that I would hate them as much as my parents did. For all my life I did. I did hate them. I saw them as the enemy. I saw them as the threat. What I didn’t see was me getting involved with my family’s enemy’s son! Like what? This cannot seriously be happening. The one guy I actually find that I can communicate with, share secrets with, relate to, all of that. I finally find like the perfect guy and he turns out to be off limits. Like as off limits as the forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden. It seems, though, the more a thing is forbidden the more you want it.