The Music of What Happens(28)

“I gotta tinkle,” he says, and he jumps out the back of the truck.

“I’ll miss you very much,” I say under my breath. “You’re a real pleasure.”

I take a tray over to the sink to clean it, and Jordan’s notebook is there.

I can’t help it. Call me curious. What was he writing last week when the truck was so dead?

At the top of the first page, it reads,

Under are three entries:



The last one cracks me up. Jordan doesn’t always show it, but he’s funny. When I first met him, he said something like “We do Italian things with chicken,” which isn’t funny ha ha, but funny like a unique way of speaking. I wonder if he’s holding back? Like not comfortable being himself with me?

I turn the page, and the next page says,

Under is a poem.



I stare at the poem, focusing in on the line about Guy Smiley, and my stomach twists.

I think about me, at eight, with Skeeter and those guys. How they left me all alone, and I smiled.

I think about me, last year, when Marquez from the baseball team made a fag joke when we were in the dugout at San Marcos, and I smiled.

And after, when Betts lingered by my locker, and he put his arm on my shoulder and he asked, “You okay, dude?” And I smiled. Of course I was.

I always am.

The morning after with Kevin. “You enjoy yourself?” His face looks seedy, like slimy almost, a film of grease around his lips like he’s just eaten hash browns from McDonald’s.

I smile. “Yeah,” I say.

Jordan hops back up on the truck and I turn to him, the notebook still in my hand.

“Hey,” he says, forceful, angrier than I’ve ever seen him. “Did I say you could read that? You have no right —” He comes and grabs it out of my hand. It is still open to the poem. He looks and he reads, and a look of something else comes over his face, which turns white.

“Max,” he says. “Sorry. I mean. Sorry you read that, and sorry I wrote that. You should ask before —” he exhales. “You shouldn’t have read my private stuff. But also I wrote that last week and I didn’t mean it even then, and definitely not now.”

I smile. I don’t know what else to do.

“Dude,” I say. “It’s all good, dude. Sorry I snooped. Not cool. I won’t do that again.”

We finish cleaning up and head off to the market and the energy between us is all messed up. Jordan is suddenly very talkative, like overly, like he’s trying to make up for writing the shitty thing he wrote about me in his journal, and I’m over smiley, I guess, and over laugh-y, guffawing at every little thing he says as if I’m a freakin’ idiot. I can’t help it. I don’t know what else to do.





On Sunday we go to the Ahwatukee Farmers’ Market, the scene of our awful first day, when we sold twenty-eight dollars’ worth of food.

But that was a week ago, when we were Coq Au Vinny and clueless. Now we are either Coq Au Vinny, if you look at the truck, or Savory and Sweet — Max’s name — if you look at our whiteboard.

That was also a week ago, when Max and I hated each other. Now we — I don’t know. I really don’t. I think maybe Max thinks I hate him, because of this poem I wrote that he read when I was off the truck yesterday at Gilbert. And yeah, that was a total invasion of my privacy, but it’s hard to be mad at him when I know he thinks I hate him. My clumsy attempts at making him understand that are not exactly a rousing success.

“We’re gonna break a thousand today,” I say as Max is prepping his cloud eggs and I am chopping lemons. We went to Safeway yesterday and I bought fifty pounds of lemons for seventy-five dollars, and forty pounds of sugar for twenty-four bucks. Add ice to that, and I basically put out a hundred and twenty bucks for ingredients. I don’t know how long it will take, but we have enough supplies for two hundred frozen lemonades. At five bucks a pop, we’d make a thousand dollars out of our hundred-and-twenty-dollar investment.

In other words, we’re a bunch of geniuses. If people buy it.

“That would be awesome,” he says, and I wish I could figure out whether we’re good or not. It’s so hard knowing, and it sucks not to know.

I am psyched as I write Homemade Frozen Lemonade under Cloud Eggs and Max’s new item, Breakfast Grilled Cheese, on the whiteboard in blue Magic Marker. I stand back and regard it, and then, feeling ballsy, I erase it and write: Jordan’s World-Famous Homemade Frozen Lemonade.

After I write it, I beckon Max out to see it. He comes out and stands next to me and crosses his arms.

“It’s … long,” he says.

“There’s room.”

“It’s … not necessarily, um, true.”

“Since when do advertisements need to be true?”

“True ’nuff. I like it.”

We open for business, and fairly quickly I find the fly in the ointment of my lemonade boast.

“What’s so special about the lemonade?” a burly guy with curly black hair and a mole on his chin asks.

“Homemade,” I say.

“Yeah, but you say world-famous. What’s in it that’s so special for five bucks?”

Dang it. I hadn’t thought about that.

“Well, it’s … organic.”