The Music of What Happens(33)

“Mucho Latinx,” I say, and Max looks at me and says, “What?”

I repeat it, and he says, “Whatever the hell PC shit that is, is just — grammatically wrong, for one thing. If you mean there are lots of Latino people, you’d say, ‘Muchos Latinos.’ If you mean it’s very Latino, you’d say, ‘Muy Latino.’ As for the Latinx thing? I have never met any Mexican person who has ever said that, as far as I know.”

My face turns red. “Oh, okay,” I say, glancing around me to see if anyone else heard my stupidity. “Sorry. Microaggression.”

He rolls his eyes.

I say, “What?”

“I just — I’m not down with that. Microaggressions and shit. You didn’t know the right grammar, and the Latinx thing is new and some people use it, but not me. Who cares? People say shit and some of it is wrong and some of it is racist and it’s like, whatever. You can focus there, or you can live your life. IMO.”

I nod, even though I don’t really know if I agree with the last part of what he said. I mean, with friends is one thing, but I’d be horrified if in school some jock kid came up to me and was like, So what do gay people think about … ? I’d totally not be okay with that. Even if I didn’t say anything, which I probably wouldn’t, Kayla, Pam, and I would dissect that microaggression for days.

“Yeah, sure,” I say, and we unload our prickly pears on the conveyor belt. “Sorry.”

He stops and looks at me. “Are you actually apologizing for apologizing for a microaggression?”

“Sorry,” I say again, and he grins.



We arrive in this big parking lot where four food trucks — one grilled cheese, one Vietnamese, one burrito, and one hamburger — are already setting up. We take the far end and Max starts working on his marinades, which I guess is a lot of guesswork about proportions of heat to sweet. I get to work on my frozen lemonade. This time I start by cutting up the prickly pear. The first one I just about eviscerate, unaware of what I’m doing. But then I watch a YouTube video and find that if I cut just so, it comes out looking like a cucumber.

I take a taste of the fruit. It’s like an earthy watermelon, with hard seeds in it. I pull the seeds out of my mouth and wince. It does not taste very much like red food coloring at all, and I worry that it’s not exactly going to augment our world-famous frozen drink.

But when I blend some up with ice, lemon juice, and sugar, it tastes totally refreshing and delicious. I hand Max my cup, he takes a sip, and nods affirmatively.

“Serious business, dude. Nice.”

“Thanks, man,” I say, and I feel like I’m being a different person and I don’t entirely know what’s happening to me. Part of me is like, Bitch, please. When’s the last time you called someone “man”? Never. That’s when. Part of me likes it, even if I can’t imagine Max or any other “dude” ever hanging out in my bordello bedroom.

When Max has his chicken breasts marinated and ready for the grill and his sauces ready for slathering, and when I have my Vitamix ready for action, we turn to each other and smile.

“Ready?” I ask. It’s already so intensely hot in the truck that I cannot imagine how I’m going to withstand four hours of this. And yet I’m ready to try.

“Oh,” he says. “One sec.”

He goes over to his backpack in the back of the truck, fishes around in it, and takes out a notebook. He brings it over to me.

“So last night. I — you know how you showed me that poem?”

“Yeah,” I say, and I look away. My pulse quickens.

“Right. Well, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And you don’t know this but I used to draw? So. Um. I drew something.”

“Oh,” I say, and my whole body goes numb. Of all the things he could have just said to me, this is perhaps the most surprising. Unless he had said, “At nighttime, I turn into a superhero and save the Phoenix suburbs from dragons,” his words could not be more unforeseen. And even that, in some ways, would have been less shocking.

His hand shakes as he turns the pages, and I am amazed that he’s actually nervous. Why? What in the world would make Max nervous? He has the whole world figured out.

“Here,” he says.

The black-and-white drawing, in charcoal and pencil, is of a boy underground. There’s a tree and roots heading down and the roots wrap around him, and he has his hands clawed like he’s trying to dig up. My chest buzzes and my jaw goes numb. It’s beautiful. On top of the earth, another boy lies, looking down, and what’s amazing is that the boys are basically lying on each other, with only the thin earth between them.

No. Nothing in the world has ever, ever been more surprising than this. I am lost for words. Just looking at Max’s drawing, my whole body goes erect. My eyes, my hair, my nipples, my cock, my toes.

“Oh,” I say, adjusting my stance. “Cool.”

He pulls the drawing slightly away, like it’s a living thing and it is offended by something I’ve said. What I want to do is cry, actually, but I cannot cry, because that’s not what a boy does when Superhero Max shows them a drawing. They say, “That’s good,” I guess, and not much else, because saying more would be the scariest, most out-there feeling possible, and I don’t know if I can do it.