The Music of What Happens(2)

The kid is behind the ordering window, his chin on his hands like he’s uber bored, staring off into space. He’s wearing a maroon V-neck T-shirt that highlights his almost alabaster, toothpick-thin arms, which take up almost the entire windowsill. He has dark emo hair that covers his eyes.

I walk up to him, and he turns and sees me. I smile, and his eyes go wide like he’s shocked, like I’ve found him in his secret life as Food Truck Guy.

“What up?” I ask. “You go to Mesa-Guadalupe, right?”

He gulps and looks around nervously, and I immediately feel sorry I said anything. “Oh hey. Yeah.”

Acne blemishes dot his cheeks, and his eyebrows look manscaped, raised up at the ends. It makes him look a little bit like the angry chicken, or maybe just like he’s questioning everything and everyone. Not sure if he’s gay or not, but anyway, he’s that kind of emo kid who hates jocks. I can just tell.

“I’m Max,” I say.

He looks behind him. There’s a large blond woman frantically scraping off the grill with the edge of a metal spatula. Maybe his mom?

He turns back to me. “Jordan,” he says, kinda monotone.

“Nice to meet you. And you work on a food truck. That’s cool.”

“Is it?” he mumbles, raising an eyebrow, and I nod my head because, yeah. It totally is. I’m about to be sentenced to a summer at State Farm Insurance with my mom as punishment for a night I wish didn’t even happen, and I’d much rather do this than that.

I point to the truck and read the name. “Coq au Vinny?” I ask.

“Yup,” he says, like he thinks it’s embarrassing. “Coq au Vinny. Um. ‘We do Italian things with chicken.’ ”

I laugh. There he goes again, saying shit I could never get away with. “Italian things, eh?”

He raises his eyebrows twice in quick succession. It just makes his face more angular, and it’s like I can’t look away. “This ain’t exactly Florence. Well, it’s almost Florence, Arizona, I guess.” His voice is soft, a little high.

“Ha. So nothing too fancy, eh?”

He looks back at the hefty woman for a moment and then turns toward me, rolling his eyes. “We fry chicken fingers in oil and put Italian seasoning on it. Or sometimes mozzarella cheese and marinara sauce.”

“Man. That shit be Italian, yo,” I deadpan, and Jordan’s face animates for like a split second before he glances over his shoulder a second time, as if he’s afraid of hurting the woman’s feelings. When Jordan looks back at me, he’s grinning again and it’s nice, and then, like he’s not used to smiling, he drops it. It’s like he’s panicked about how to keep a conversation going.

“I swear there’s years of soot caked onto this damn thing. We should be condemned,” the woman says, not turning around, way too loud given she’s trying to sell food from the very truck she’s condemning. “This is hopeless, Jordan. Hopeless.”

Then she turns around, and she sees me, and she blushes.

“Oh shit,” she says. “I was kidding. It’s plenty clean. I’m just. I’m hopeless. That’s all. Me. Hopeless mess.”

“Mom,” Jordan says, very chill-like, like he’s used to calming her down. “This is Max. A kid from MG.”

“Oh!” she says. “Hi. Lydia. Lydia Edwards. Worst chef ever. Nice to meet you.”

“Hey,” I say.

“We just took this thing out for the first time in a long time today, and it’s. It’s a lot.” She runs her hands through her hair and widens her eyes at me. They are lined like she hasn’t slept in a week. “Hey. You want to be our first customer?”

“Um, no thanks,” I say.

“Oh, I was just kidding about the — come on. On the house. I’ll eat one if you eat one. Okay? Come on.”

It’s weird because I don’t owe Jordan or his mom anything. He’s a cute boy from my comp class who I don’t know that well. But I don’t exactly know how to walk away. I instinctively reach into my pocket for my phone, like I just got a text, but then I pull my hand back out. “Sure,” I say. “Okay. Thanks.”

This gets Lydia Edwards to smile at me for the first time, and when she does her face energizes. There is something kind of — charismatic? — about her.

“What can I get ya?” she asks.

The menu is printed on a whiteboard with orange marker. The handwriting looks like a third grader’s, and I wonder which one of them wrote it. There are four items. “Can I try … the chicken parm hero?”

Her eyes light up and she says, “Oh my God, you’re going to love it! Love it!” She rushes to the back of the truck and I look at Jordan and I almost laugh, because his expression is like — have you ever seen one of those TV shows about people behind bars in prison? He looks like he’s serving two to four years. Something about that miserable expression next to the freaky chicken drawing cracks me up, but he’s not laughing and I don’t want to piss him off.

“So this is like a family thing?”

He nods. “My dad. He used to run it. But he —”

I wait for him to finish and when I realize he isn’t going to, I say, “Oh. Okay. My dad lives in Colorado Springs, so I get it. My folks divorced six years ago.”