“You do have a nice butt,” Betts says, kicking his legs up and floating on his back for a second. “For a dude,” he says to the sky.
I wince and think about how straight dudes are all caught up in gay sex stuff. Like when I came out to my dad down in Colorado Springs over spring break. It’s okay to be gay, but real men don’t take things into their bodies. That’s what girls and women do; it’s what separates us. So when Betts does his whole “You got a nice butt” thing, I kinda want to strangle him a little. It’s straight supremacy.
Instead I grab a yellow noodle, submerge it in water, put my mouth on one end, and blow. Water soaks Betts, who interrupts his float, grabs the noodle from me, and beats me over the head with it.
“So when do we get to meet this new boyfriend of yours? You never introduce us to your boyfriends,” Betts says.
“You blame me?”
Zay-Rod laughs. “Truth.”
My mom approaches the pool. “First I’ve heard of this. New boyfriend?”
“The kid from the food truck,” Betts says.
My mother nods, like, That’s some information. I want to tell her no, like, Don’t worry, Ma. We aren’t dating. Guys like Jordan don’t date guys who hang with guys like Betts and Zay-Rod. This other part of me wants her — and them — to butt the hell out.
“Are the hot dogs ready?” I ask, and my mother rolls her eyes.
“You need to teach this boy how to communicate,” she says to my friends.
“Yeah, ask these guys for help. Good thinking,” I say.
The worst thing about Coq Au Vinny’s re-boot is the truck’s design. It would be so much better if we could just change the name so that people know what we are. As it stands, it’s Saturday morning at the Gilbert Farmers’ Market, and I’m concerned that no one in the world is going to come close enough to see our whiteboard, which contradicts the angry bird logo on the side of the truck.
How are they going to know about the frozen drinks and cloud eggs?
Cloud eggs are this thing we saw on Instagram, where you create like a baked meringue circle, put the egg yolk in the middle, and then bake it. I haven’t tasted one, but I’m intrigued. Someone online said it tasted like egg-flavored marshmallow. I can’t really imagine that.
“So here goes nothing,” Max says, cracking the first egg. He separates the whites from the yolks, putting the yolks in a small bowl. Then he starts whisking the whites to within an inch of their lives, and I stare at the whites as they slowly stiffen and form peaks.
“You’re amazing,” I say, and he snorts.
“That’s me. Max the Amazing Egg Whisker.”
“I couldn’t do it.”
“That’s something you should probably deal with. Who can’t whisk an egg?”
I ignore his dig and start in on my contribution. We convinced Max’s mom to part with her Vitamix, and I’m going to have two frozen drink offerings: frozen mango lemonade and frozen cherry lemonade. I have enough lemonade concentrate and frozen fruit to make a hundred lemonades. At five bucks a pop, that’s five hundred dollars net if we sell out, and it cost me just under a hundred bucks for the ingredients at Safeway. Not bad for a day’s work, and I figure if we sell out, maybe we can streamline the process and sell even more on days in the future.
I place my notebook down by the sink, aware that for the first time, I’m not likely to get much writing done today. I actually wrote some funny stuff and some poems last week. Then I start with the first can of concentrate, combining it with water to create sixty-four ounces of lemonade. I shake and shake and shake, and then pour myself a little bit. Real tart, real sweet. Not too bad. Then I pour eight ounces into the Vitamix, tear open a package of frozen mangos, and pour a quarter of it into the blender. I hit the button and watch the machine whir to life. I didn’t actually try it at home; it seemed simple enough, but as I watch the ingredients combine, I realize maybe I should have experimented. My lemonade looks frothy but watery.
“Hmm,” I say, stopping the blender for a moment.
Max walks over. “How did it work at home?”
I press the button again as an answer. He presses it off.
“Jordan. Tell me you tried this at home. I was doing cloud eggs all night last night.”
“Sounds like a real party,” I say, and I press the button again.
“Dude,” he says, shaking his head and moving away. “Dude.”
We’re falling into this routine, where Max is awesome and I’m a screwup. I can’t say I love it. I purse my lips and try to put it out of my mind.
I find that if I do half the packet of mango instead of a quarter and some ice — yes, I didn’t even think of ice, I’m that dense — my drink thickens up in about a minute on high blend. I wait until it looks sufficiently thick, stop the blender, and pour myself a cup. It’s bright orange-yellow, a color that would definitely catch my eye if I were walking by and thirsty.
The taste is, well, it’s pretty good. Mango-y. Sweet. Refreshing. Super cold. Max watches as I drink and I make an exaggerated show of enjoying it.
“Ahh,” I say dramatically. “Perfection. Imagine: I was able to blend lemonade and fruit all by myself, without testing it out at home!”
He gives me a dirty look, and I assuage him by offering him a sip from my cup. He pauses for a moment, and I realize that there is a sort of intimacy to sharing a cup. But finally he takes it, and I have to admit my arms tingle as I watch his Adam’s apple go up and down while he tastes it.
“That is some sweet shit, dude. How much sugar is in that lemonade?”
I shrug. “Frozen.”
“You know, we could have actually done real lemonade.”
I swallow, tighten my jaw, and — remembering how much I need Max — I try to keep things light. “We could do lots of things. At this point I’m just looking to make some money.”
I set things up so that we have a blender full of mango lemonade, ready to go. A real food truck would probably have two Vitamixes, one for each fruit. As it stands, I realize I’m going to have to hope people want the same one over and over, or else there’s gonna be lots of Vitamix washing.
Once I’m set up, I watch him tenderly place the egg yolks in the center of the white clouds, which look like marshmallow fluff circles. I have to admit that I’d totally order one of those. Max is a talented guy. Too bad he’s stuck with a slack ass.
“I told my friends that my truck mate is gay,” I say, after Max puts the tray of twelve cloud eggs into the oven.
He looks over his shoulder as he shuts the oven door. “How did that go?”
“They started to play matchmaker,” I say.
He laughs. “That’s so funny. Same as my friends. It’s like, what if every time two straight people met, we went around saying, ‘You guys are both straight! You should date!’ ”
I laugh too, even though I realize that this argument isn’t exactly fair. Straight people meet all the time. By the numbers, it’s rarer for two gay people to meet. Also I guess I kind of was asking Pam and Kayla, so it’s not like they overstepped. Still, I say, “Exactly. Of course, one of my friends was all ‘Don’t shit where you eat,’ which is a disgusting image.”
“True,” he says. “As if we’re a bunch of sex-starved pervs just looking for a willing hole.”
I laugh and blush at his use of “hole.” And also because, well, I am sort of a sex-starved perv looking for a willing whatever. But Max doesn’t need to know that.
When the eggs are ready, we put up our awning and open for business.
“Cloud eggs. Frozen lemonade!” Max calls, and even though being loud is way out of my comfort zone, I recognize that this is basically it. That my family’s future depends on the success of this food truck re-boot. So I start yelling too, and then I start coming up with clever slogans.
“Got frozen lemons? Learn to make frozen lemonade!” I yell, and Max snorts.
“Cheesy,” he says.
I shrug.
“Mango lemonade. Round the corner cloud eggs are made,” I yell, and this one just makes him say, “Stop. Please. Stop.”
“Hey, at least I’m trying,” I say.