The Music of What Happens(53)

She looks at me with vacant eyes as I hand her three bucks back. “Free lemonade for you!”

“Cool,” she says, monotone, but I don’t give a shit, because I am feeling so … something. Grateful? For Max? Without whom this never would have happened? I’ll have to look, but I’m pretty sure we have five grand now, and we’re not even that close to our deadline.

When we close up, I wrap my arms around Max, which seems to stun him because he’s Max, and he can go from super warm to uber distant in a heartbeat. But again I don’t care. I am elated.

“We’ve done it,” I say, kissing his ear five times in succession. “That was one kiss for every thousand. We have the money I need to save my house.”

Max pulls back and looks me in the eye.

“For reals?”

“Yeah, for reals! I mean, I gotta pay you for today, but even after that we’re up five grand already.”

He breaks into a huge Max grin and then pulls me close. “Awesome, dude! I lose track not working with the register. I knew it was a shit ton today, but I had no idea how much of a shit ton.”

I grab hold of his forearms and stare deep into his eyes. “We netted eleven hundred, seventy-one dollars, and fifty-six cents,” I say, joyful shivers just dancing through my entire body. I hand him a hundred-dollar bill and say, “Bonus.”

He stares. I stare. He starts laughing. I start laughing.

“No. No damn way.”

“Damn way.”

“Lunch?” he asks. “To celebrate?”

“Absolutely,” I say. “Anywhere you want to go. On me.”



Not even giving a shit that the truck has no AC, we go straight to our lunch destination. First we decided it had to be a new place. Then he suggested In-N-Out Burger.

I grimaced. “Oh my God I hate that name. Way too descriptive of the eating process.”

He snickers. “Dude. You’re so weird, dude.”

Instead we wind up at the Angry Crab, which I’ve passed like a million times because it’s just past school on Guadalupe, in the strip mall where Dairy Queen is.

“It makes a meal an activity,” Max says, just about running toward the door. I can’t run as fast, because (a) I’m Jordan, he’s Max, and (b) I am cradling our cashbox. No way am I leaving that in our truck, even if we can see it out the window the whole time.

“You say that like having to work for food makes things better,” I say.

He shrugs. “Don’t you feel awesome about having worked to make all that money?”

I don’t answer right away. Man. He’s right. I feel amazeballs. Part of my whole thing with Kayla and Pam is that we have this aversion — allergy, almost — to hard work. I don’t know if it’s true for them, but honestly, after this experience, I wouldn’t even want to win the lottery or something. Making honest money from a hard day’s work feels like nothing I’ve ever felt before. (And yeah. There needs to be an asterisk after “honest,” because the locally sourced thing is total bullshit, but still.)

Max orders for us. We get a pound of snow crab legs, a pound of king crab legs, and a pound of shrimp.

“Um, leave some for the … whatever animals eat shellfish?”

“Fuck that,” he says. “We’re celebrating.”

And man, is it a celebration. The food comes out in these plastic bags with all this sauce at the bottom. The sauce is called Trifecta, and it’s lemon and garlic and pepper, and Max shows me how to puncture the bag without getting sauce all over everything, and how to open the crab legs. Snow ones are not that hard, but the king ones are like a death struggle with a spiky creature that really does not want you to eat its flesh. At first I demur, because it looks painful. And it is when I try it. Super hard and ouchy. But when I finally manage to open one and I pull a hulking piece of crab leg meat just about the size of my forearm out, I change my tune.

“Nice,” he says.

“Yeah.” I dip it into the sauce and put it in my mouth and the taste. Oh my God, the taste. It’s like eating a salty stick of tangy, spicy butter, maybe. So rich and sweet and … perfect. I almost cry. “Oh my God.”

He cracks up. “I love crab legs more than I love my mom,” he says. “And I love my mom a lot.”

“I get that. And can we get, like, more? Do a crab leg flight?”

“Absolutely. We worked our asses off in that heat. We got the rest of the day to do whatever. You up for an adventure?”

I nod and nod and nod. No words are needed. Clearly nothing in the world would be better than more time with Max.



We park the truck in my garage, Max picks me up in his truck, and we do up the town.

First we go to a trampoline park. Trampoline parks are about the last thing I would ever do on my own, or with the girls. Sounds like a good way to lose a testicle, or at best get annoyed by loud, boisterous boys. But suddenly I am kind of a loud, boisterous boy, and we get on the mats and Max shows me he can do a three-sixty jump off the side wall, where he somersaults in the air and somehow lands back on his feet.

“Whoa!” I say. I know better than to try to copy it, so instead I chance a side jump, where I get next to the wall, jump, twist my feet so they bounce off the wall, and land back on the mat.

“Weak, dude,” he says.