The Music of What Happens(82)

“You wanna just hang out?” He sits down on my bed.

I nod, and Rosa comes back and tells us she’s gonna do some work in her office unless I need her. When she walks off, I shake my head amazed at how not like my mom Rosa is. Lucky Max.

“So we’ll just hang?” he asks.

“What I really want is my truck,” I say. “Our truck. In some ways, I’m more pissed about that than I am about my mom.”

He winces. “Really?”

I plop down next to him. “No.”

“Yeah. Didn’t think so. I miss the truck too. But that’s your mom.”

I think about the night I took her to Sweeties, and what she said when we were in my room. That I was great just as I am. And I think two things. One, how can I trust that now? Because when she said it, she knew that she was fucking us over and screwing up our lives. And two is how much I can’t believe that as of this moment, I no longer live with her.

“She used to be so different,” I say. “One time a couple summers ago, we did this experiment where we tried to cook an egg on the actual sidewalk in June.” I laugh. “I have no idea why I’m telling you that.”

He laughs. “That’s cool.”

“It worked when we put it in a pan.”

“Nice.”

“When my dad died, it was like my mom became real fragile. And yeah, she gambled, and then she went in this program for it. But she told me it wasn’t that big a deal even when it was bad, and she told me she’d stopped, and I believed her.”

“Yeah,” Max says, and I’m glad he doesn’t try to make things better, because he can’t.

I’m thinking about how she made a point of telling me she was thinking about gambling but that she hadn’t. And is that in some ways worse? That she tried to make it seem like she was honest, but she was lying? And how do you ever trust a person again after they gamble away your house? You don’t, that’s what. You don’t. When I think that, the tear ducts fill up again, and Max puts his hand on my arm and squeezes.

“It’s okay,” he says. “You let me cry. I’ll let you cry.”

I crack up. “Permission granted,” I say. “But nah. Too angry to cry. I want to burn something.”

“I hear ya,” he says, and I know it’s not his fault, but momentarily I want to yell at Max, because no, he doesn’t know what this is like. No one does.

“Tired,” I say. I’m exhausted. From feeling all this stuff.

“Wanna take a nap?”

I nod.

He comes and puts his arms around me. I put mine around him, but I’m not feeling it. Too something. Like how I feel about him is behind something. A screen I can’t break through. I pull him closer, too close for intimacy, because I don’t want him to feel like I don’t care about him. I do. I’m just the boy in the bubble right now I guess.

He kisses me lightly on the cheek, stands, and walks out of the room.

“You do you, friend,” he says, and he leaves.





It’s kinda weird, but having my mom home from work is actually really nice. When she comes into the living room, Jordan is asleep in his new room, and I’m sitting on the couch, watching episodes of Catfish.

“Quite the day,” she says, and she gives me a hug and sits down next to me.

“Yup,” I say.

“How are you doing with all this?”

I shrug. “I can’t make him feel better. That part sucks.”

“You just have to give him time. This will always be one of the hardest days of his life, as long as he lives.”

“Yeah.”

“Just like you, when you were assaulted. You weren’t ready to talk about it right away. Sometimes people just need a little time to stew in their juices.”

“Sometimes I think I’m a superhero,” I say, and my mom laughs.

“I know,” she says.

“You know?”

“I know you a little bit, mijo. You like to think you can save people and make people better, and nicer. Your superpower is your smile.”

I can’t help but grin at that, and she does too.

“It’s okay, though, if sometimes you don’t smile and make everything better.”

“I know,” I say.

“Okay. I just worry sometimes. That you take too much on yourself. Other people can figure out their problems. And you have to take care of you.”

The thing is, I don’t know if people can. Figure out their problems. Would Jordan have gotten here, or somewhere like here, if it weren’t for me? I don’t think so.

Then this thought comes to me, and it makes me gasp out loud.

“What?” my mom asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

She rolls her eyes. “Nothing,” she repeats.

The thought is that no, Jordan wouldn’t be here. But I wouldn’t be, either. Without his help. Without my mom. Without the Amigos.

That feels like a profound thought. Cheesy as shit, but also simple and true.

“So you’re not going to tell me?”

I shake my head. “No. But something else I will say.”

She sits back on the couch and puts her legs across my lap and waits for me to speak.