The Music of What Happens(36)

“I like hanging with you,” I say. “Okay?”

He drops the sponge he’s been holding in his left hand. “Oh.”

“Do you want to do something? Like prickly pear hunting?”

“Oh. Um. Yeah. Sure.” He swallows a smile, and then, on the way down, he finds he can’t hold it in. I feel myself blushing because Jordan is so. Damn. Sexy. And totally oblivious about that fact.



He drops me off at home so I can shower, and around four I pick him up in my Durango. He climbs in smelling of soap and sweat, and he juts his face in front of the air-conditioning vents, which are on full blast. My dashboard thermometer says 121 degrees.

“Jesus,” he says, and I accelerate down Curry.

“Too hot for ya?” I ask, and he snorts.

“I refuse to have conversations about heat or humidity,” he says.

“So we just ignore weather from here on in?”

“Let’s just say, ‘That’s a lot of pasta.’ That will be our stand-in for any and all weather-related discussions.”

“You’re weird.”

“You’re just figuring that out?” He points out the window. “Slow down.”

I slow a bit. “Why?”

He points again. “Prickly pears, silly.”

I keep driving slowly, trying to figure out what it is that Jordan is thinking. That we’ll go in people’s yards and pick fruit? First off, not many houses have them. We pass many lots with tall saguaro plants towering over ranch houses, some at precarious angles, like a strong wind could blow it crashing onto the roof. Fewer yards seem to have the small cacti that we’re looking for. Second, that’s just. No.

“Stop!” Jordan says, and I tentatively pull over next to a pink tract house with a dirt yard filled with various cacti.

I stop the car and look over at Jordan. “You are aware that you’re not supposed to, um, trespass, right? Like going onto someone’s property is not allowed?”

He shrugs. “Do you think they’re really going to miss a few green bulbs?”

I stare at him for a bit and finally shake my head and put the car in drive.

“What? Why?”

“Jordan. Dude. You ever have someone pull a gun on you for trespassing?”

“No. Have you?” He crosses his arms in front of his chest and pouts a bit.

“No, but also I don’t want to. Folks are crazy. You never know who has a gun and who is all, ‘Get off my lawn or I’ll blow your head off.’ ”

“Fine,” Jordan says. “But just know that you’re being ridiculous. It’s cactus. We would be relieving them of little green bulb-y fruits from cactus plants. We’re not stealing hubcaps. Jesus.”

I don’t respond. Unspoken in this argument is the fact that when your skin is brown and you live in the suburbs of Arizona, you don’t stroll onto some stranger’s property to pick prickly pears. Maybe if you have white skin you can. But I don’t want to discuss that. Instead, I turn up the radio. Daft Punk comes on. Jordan sighs dramatically and turns the tuner knob.

“Are you really messing with my radio?”

“Are you really defending Daft Punk? They don’t even have faces, Max. They are faceless musicians. Unacceptable.”

I don’t know how to argue with that sort of twisted logic, so I let it go. I turn west on Elliot and head toward South Mountain. I think about Betts and Zay-Rod. Right now I could be relaxing with them in Betts’s living room, sipping a Pepsi and eating some Poore Brothers jalape?o potato chips. Instead I have this enigma of a new friend whose very presence makes me both inexplicably excited and nervous, who doesn’t approve of faceless musicians. Who puts on some weird ’80s shit, that ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s channel that old people listen to like my mom.

“So who was that Kevin guy?” Jordan asks, and my stomach drops. I don’t respond.

“No answer,” he says.

“It’s private,” I say.

“He your boyfriend?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Someone you hooked up with?”

I punch the steering wheel, and the horn wheezes slightly from the impact. “Jesus. None of your business. Stop asking.”

“Okay then,” Jordan says. “Sorry.”

We get quiet again, and again I’m thinking it was a mistake to make this plan. It’s like I only like part of Jordan. The fun part. The part that doesn’t ask a million personal questions like we’re on some talk show. I don’t want to talk about that. How is that not clear to him?

We don’t say a word to each other until we park on Desert Willow Drive in Ahwatukee. There’s an opening in the fence that leads to a path through the desert that, if you take it all the way, leads to South Mountain. I turn off the ignition and we hop out into the unforgiving heat of the hottest part of the afternoon.

“Sweet gay Jesus,” he says. “What was I thinking?”

I laugh. “I like it.”

“You like a hundred and twenty with no shade?”

I shrug. Anything over 114 and it’s a bit like your skin sizzles. To me, it makes me feel alive, like the Arizona sun feeds my bloodstream and makes me invincible. It’s not that it doesn’t sap me; it’s just that if I can take this, nothing can stop me.