The Music of What Happens(32)

I turn the page upward so I can check the perspective. It looks about right. Sometimes when you draw flat, you can’t see how things will look right-side up.

The upper character has dirt under his nails that I create with more black pencil, and sweat on his face, which I don’t want to be perfect drops of dew but more just like black lines that add to the movement of the piece.

I add some white smudges to make him more three-dimensional.

Hmm. The boy has no clothes. No clothing line. Maybe shorts? I don’t know yet.

I stand up and move over to my bed. Sometimes I need to get away so I don’t lose perspective. When I come back, what I see is a mess that might turn into something.

I focus in on the tree. Maybe it’s an avoidance so I don’t have to deal with Jordan’s face yet. I switch to a different pencil to give the tree its own texture, different from the rest.

I realize I’m drawing a tree again and I smile, thinking about Mr. Zimmer’s comment. Well, maybe I am a jock. Maybe I can’t do this. But I like it, you know? I like trying.

I can’t find the guy on the bottom. I smear some color together, and focus in on the outline, and suddenly it’s like, There you are. He shows up and what’s so funny is the guy on the bottom is darker than the guy on top, which is opposite. But somehow it just works. I strengthen the jawline with more charcoal.

I wonder if Jordan would let me draw him. This isn’t him even if it stands in for him. It would help me get beyond skin texture and eye color. Man, I need to ask him. I wonder what he would say if I asked?

I sketch in his top eye. I won’t know the emotion for sure until the eye comes through. Then I’ll know if it’s right or not.

I flare his nostril more to make him more panicky.

I erase his ear. I do not like what happened there at all.

There’s a knock on my door and I respond with a fevered “What?” as if I’m jerking off.

“Never mind,” my mom says, and I hear the smirk in her voice. She thinks she’s caught me in the act.

“I’ll be right out,” I say, trying to sound more normal and less jerk-off-y. Of course that just makes me sound more guilty. Oh well.

Damn. Jordan looks a little like a fetus. That’s not great.

I use white pencil to show more of his eye, to invoke that sense of panic.

There’s not the right terror in Jordan’s face.

To fix the face, I fill in the blank space next to it because there’s no light down there. I look at it. It looks a little more right that way. I take the black pencil and re-sketch an ear. Then I look at what I have again.

The boy on bottom looks like he’s given up. Like he’s sort of clawing, expressionless. And I have this crazy, crazy thought:

Am I actually the boy on the bottom? Am I digging up and out of oxygen? Is Jordan digging down to save me?





On Monday, we try the food truck area on the north side of the Arizona State University campus. It’s a lunchtime gig, so suddenly we need to do something other than breakfast grilled cheese and cloud eggs.

We meet at my place at eight, which gives us three hours to shop, prep, arrive, and open. Not as much time as you might think. The sun is already fully up, which is what happens here in the summer because Arizona doesn’t do Daylight Savings Time. Because it’s so hot, we wind up on Pacific Standard Time in the summer and Mountain Standard Time in the winter.

“What about chicken and waffles?” I ask. We’re sitting in the living room.

Max winces. “I don’t know, dude. The heat from the fryer? That could get intense. Plus cleaning it.”

I nod. He’s right. “I keep going to chicken. But we had all that boring chicken stuff before and it didn’t sell. On the plus side, Coq Au Vinny would actually make sense if we did chicken.”

Max pulls out his phone and goes to YouTube, our trusty source for stealing good food truck ideas. He surfs around and finally motions me over.

“How about this?” He plays me one of those videos where the cooking is done in fast motion and what normally takes an hour plays in about a minute. I see lemon and sriracha, and I admit it makes me salivate. I like spicy and citrusy. A lot.

“Well we already have a lot of lemons,” I say.

“Exactly. Plus basically what we want to do is marinade chicken, grill it, and sauce it. Let’s come up with two or three combos and just do it.”

We decide on lemon-sriracha, mango-cayenne, and habanero-peach. I’ve never had any of them, and I tell Max that. He smiles.

“Me neither.”

“Well what could possibly go wrong?” I say, and then, because I see a slight bit of hurt register on his face, I say, “I trust you. Completely. If anyone can do this first time out, it’s you.”

He nods and his eyebrows relax.

We go to Safeway to get our ingredients. It’s awesome because we can afford it. When I told Mom how much we made Saturday and Sunday, she looked so proud and grateful, and she hugged me tight, which was great. And then she teared up again, and she started in about what a success I’ve become, and I don’t know. It was like I was receiving a lifetime achievement award and she was talking to an imaginary audience. It was … odd, and it made me all fidgety.

Then we go to Food City because they sell prickly pear fruit. I was on board to continue with the red food coloring, but Max said sooner or later someone would figure it out. I pick up ten with the green skin for four bucks. The fine folks at Food City have removed the thorns, and they look like a cross between a pear and a melon — pear-shaped and colored, but with hard melon skin. As we stand in line, I feel a bit like I’m in Mexico; I’m the only white person here.