The Music of What Happens(75)

My head pulses. “What?”

He shakes his head and laughs. “You look Mexican, but really you’re a white guy with dark skin,” he says.

“What does that even mean?”

“You’re supposed to be passionate. You’re the opposite. You’re actually bad in bed.”

The fist glances off his chin. The bone-on-bone crack is gratifying, but also surprising.

Because it isn’t my fist colliding with Kevin’s jaw that creates that sound.

“Ow,” Kevin says, shocked.

I look to my left and there is Jordan, staring at the back of his hand like it’s operated without his consent. Everyone is staring at us, eyes wide.

Kevin’s hand is squeezing the center of his chin, like he’s popping a big zit. His mouth looks funny.

“Jesus. You misaligned my jaw, what the fuck.”

“He what?” I ask.

“It’s a thing that happens,” Kevin says, his mouth sideways, and in that moment I realize for the very first time that he’s a person. A bad one, to be sure. I’d never do what he did to another person. But it floods me that this person who hurt me has a mother, and probably wore braces, and they probably hurt sometimes.

“Go. Now. You fucking rapist piece of shit,” Jordan says, making his hand into a claw. “Next I claw your eyes out.” He says it calmly, and I am putty at his slender feet.

The guy runs. People go back to doing what they were doing, like they didn’t just watch my boyfriend punch my rapist and misalign his jaw.

I just stare at Jordan, my unlikely, shocking savior, and part of me feels humiliated that I needed saving, but a much bigger part feels so grateful he’d hit someone for me. I try to give one of my smiles but it’s beneath something else and all I can do is stare into Jordan’s beautiful face.

“You followed me here?”

He nods. “Your mom asked me to.”

“Wow,” I say, and the shaking is gone. I find myself smiling.

We walk back out into the sunshine, his arm around my shoulder. I put mine around his, still stunned.

“See you at your house?” he asks, getting into my mom’s car.

“I didn’t know you drive,” I say.

“I don’t. I couldn’t tell your mom. It was actually kinda hard to get here. I never learned. I winged it.”

I shake my head and open the passenger-side door of my truck.

“We’ll pick that up later,” I say, and he nods. “I don’t want you to die.”

“Kindest thing you’ve said to me today,” he says, and I kiss him on the lips.

“Thanks, by the way.”

“Hey. I’m as shocked as you are,” he says, shaking out his hand.

We drive, and I’m thinking about users and abusers, like my mom says. The time my dad swung me around by my feet and I got hurt, and how he told me to man up. Who came up with that?

Who came up with all those rules and ideas about how a guy’s gotta be?

Kevin said he expected a chili pepper. Why say that? Why is it okay to say shit like that to other people? I would never say something like that. That’s some fucked-up, racist shit.

And with white folks, why is racism my issue and Zay-Rod’s issue, but not Betts’s?

With my white friends, I’m always half-Mexican. They never say I’m half-Irish. Never say I’m half white. Like I’m tainted halfway away from standard. It’s like when I was a kid and I thought vanilla ice cream meant no flavor, like it was the base of all the flavors. But vanilla is a bean. Like chocolate is a bean. Like cinnamon is a root. All roots and beans. All flavors. There is no base. No ice cream without a flavor.

I glance over at Jordan in the passenger seat. His profile. His slight nose. It’s the nose of a guy who would never use or abuse me. And I wouldn’t use or abuse him, either. I grab for his hand.

“Ouch,” he says, and he shakes his hand out again.

I crack up. “Sorry.”

“God. You’re always apologizing,” Jordan says in this funny voice, and I realize he’s imitating me. It’s a fucking terrible imitation, and I smile, and I almost throw it back at him by emulating him saying “Sorry” again. But then I don’t because I realize: He isn’t sorry. Nope. Not anymore.





“What is that thing?” I ask, pointing a crooked finger at the ball in my lap as Max drives us to Carriage Lane Park. It’s two days after the punch, and we’re hanging out midday because we are still a few days away from getting the truck back.

“That thing is a football. You did know that, right? We don’t need to drive you to a hospital because you have managed to go through seventeen years of life without knowing what a football is, do we?”

“Aren’t we in some sort of health-care crisis where they don’t have enough beds or something? Do you really think a hospital would take me in because of that?”

He shrugs. “They should. That’s just un-American, dude.”

I roll my eyes. “Oh my God. That’s not a thing, Max. You don’t need to know what a football is or, like, where to stick it to be American.”

He grins, parks the truck, and jumps out onto the broiling asphalt of the parking lot. As I slowly get out, he twirls the football high in the air and catches it just above his head. I glance out at the greenbelt between the parking lot and the canal pathway, where I usually take Dorcas in the mornings when it isn’t insanely hot out. It’s empty, not surprisingly. We are the only freaks out in the middle of a June day.