I stare at the poem, focusing in on the line about Guy Smiley, and my stomach twists.
I think about me, at eight, with Skeeter and those guys. How they left me all alone, and I smiled.
I think about me, last year, when Marquez from the baseball team made a fag joke when we were in the dugout at San Marcos, and I smiled.
And after, when Betts lingered by my locker, and he put his arm on my shoulder and he asked, “You okay, dude?” And I smiled. Of course I was.
I always am.
The morning after with Kevin. “You enjoy yourself?” His face looks seedy, like slimy almost, a film of grease around his lips like he’s just eaten hash browns from McDonald’s.
I smile. “Yeah,” I say.
Jordan hops back up on the truck and I turn to him, the notebook still in my hand.
“Hey,” he says, forceful, angrier than I’ve ever seen him. “Did I say you could read that? You have no right —” He comes and grabs it out of my hand. It is still open to the poem. He looks and he reads, and a look of something else comes over his face, which turns white.
“Max,” he says. “Sorry. I mean. Sorry you read that, and sorry I wrote that. You should ask before —” he exhales. “You shouldn’t have read my private stuff. But also I wrote that last week and I didn’t mean it even then, and definitely not now.”
I smile. I don’t know what else to do.
“Dude,” I say. “It’s all good, dude. Sorry I snooped. Not cool. I won’t do that again.”
We finish cleaning up and head off to the market and the energy between us is all messed up. Jordan is suddenly very talkative, like overly, like he’s trying to make up for writing the shitty thing he wrote about me in his journal, and I’m over smiley, I guess, and over laugh-y, guffawing at every little thing he says as if I’m a freakin’ idiot. I can’t help it. I don’t know what else to do.
On Sunday we go to the Ahwatukee Farmers’ Market, the scene of our awful first day, when we sold twenty-eight dollars’ worth of food.
But that was a week ago, when we were Coq Au Vinny and clueless. Now we are either Coq Au Vinny, if you look at the truck, or Savory and Sweet — Max’s name — if you look at our whiteboard.
That was also a week ago, when Max and I hated each other. Now we — I don’t know. I really don’t. I think maybe Max thinks I hate him, because of this poem I wrote that he read when I was off the truck yesterday at Gilbert. And yeah, that was a total invasion of my privacy, but it’s hard to be mad at him when I know he thinks I hate him. My clumsy attempts at making him understand that are not exactly a rousing success.
“We’re gonna break a thousand today,” I say as Max is prepping his cloud eggs and I am chopping lemons. We went to Safeway yesterday and I bought fifty pounds of lemons for seventy-five dollars, and forty pounds of sugar for twenty-four bucks. Add ice to that, and I basically put out a hundred and twenty bucks for ingredients. I don’t know how long it will take, but we have enough supplies for two hundred frozen lemonades. At five bucks a pop, we’d make a thousand dollars out of our hundred-and-twenty-dollar investment.
In other words, we’re a bunch of geniuses. If people buy it.
“That would be awesome,” he says, and I wish I could figure out whether we’re good or not. It’s so hard knowing, and it sucks not to know.
I am psyched as I write Homemade Frozen Lemonade under Cloud Eggs and Max’s new item, Breakfast Grilled Cheese, on the whiteboard in blue Magic Marker. I stand back and regard it, and then, feeling ballsy, I erase it and write: Jordan’s World-Famous Homemade Frozen Lemonade.
After I write it, I beckon Max out to see it. He comes out and stands next to me and crosses his arms.
“It’s … long,” he says.
“There’s room.”
“It’s … not necessarily, um, true.”
“Since when do advertisements need to be true?”
“True ’nuff. I like it.”
We open for business, and fairly quickly I find the fly in the ointment of my lemonade boast.
“What’s so special about the lemonade?” a burly guy with curly black hair and a mole on his chin asks.
“Homemade,” I say.
“Yeah, but you say world-famous. What’s in it that’s so special for five bucks?”
Dang it. I hadn’t thought about that.
“Well, it’s … organic.”
“Cool,” he says. “Organic lemons and sugar, both?”
“Yep,” I say, swallowing.
“Okay.”
I nod. This is not exactly true, but there’s really no way he’ll find that out unless he comes on the truck and roots through our trash.
“Is that it?”
“Um. Well, there is usually a special … ingredient,” I say.
“Sure. I know Bruce’s truck down the way has pomegranate and that stuff is great.”
“Ours is prickly pear,” I say without thinking.
“Hmm,” he says. “Okay. I’d try that.”
“Well, it’s not quite ready,” I say, backing up and smacking into Max, who is standing at the grill.
“Did you forget the prickly pear again?” he asks.
I say, “Dang it.”
The guy says, “When do you think you’ll have it? Would love to try. Frozen prickly pear lemonade sounds off the hook.”
“An hour,” I say, and he smiles, salutes, and walks away.
So that’s how I wind up in an Uber, heading to the closest grocery store, Bashas’. It’s only half a mile away, but in this heat? I don’t think so.
I ask the Uber to hang when we get there. He takes that as an opportunity to drive away when I close the door, and I think, Well, there goes your five-star rating. Bashas’ doesn’t have prickly pear in any form, of course, so I make an executive decision that probably won’t win me a place in heaven but should get us through today.
Max is busy doing two jobs when I get back, and there’s an actual line. Impressively, I see he’s actually sold some frozen lemonades, and I remind myself to keep trying to get back into his good graces. The dude is a machine, and a nice one, to boot. I decide if we do make a ton of money today, I’m gonna give him a percentage on top of his salary. He’ll like that.
“What’d you get?” he asks when he sees that the bag I’ve brought back could not hold even a single prickly pear.
I beckon him over, hiding from the view of those in line. I show him what I have. He laughs.
“Seriously, dude?”
“Hey. It’ll be like a psychology experiment.”
He shakes his head, but at least he has a smile on his face, and I feel like maybe we’re back, past the trouble from yesterday. And I haven’t even unveiled my secret weapon yet. I might not either. Depends how I feel, I guess.
I cross out my menu item and write it again. It’s even longer now: Jordan and Max’s World-Famous Organic Homemade Prickly Pear Frozen Lemonade.
I turn the sign toward Max, and he squints as he reads it. He grins, and when I get back on the truck, he whispers, “Leave me out of this, dude.”
I mumble, “Too late. You’re in. If I go down, you’re going down with me.”
Something about the sentence sounds vaguely sexual to me, and when Max’s eyes don’t leave mine, I feel this jolt of energy climb up my spine and look away. It’s super weird.
I find that a drop of the red food coloring does a nice job of turning the lemonade a pleasing, light shade of electric pink. My heart is pulsing as I pour our first lemonade for our first victim, a girl maybe in her twenties who barely looks up from her cell phone while ordering, waiting, or receiving her drink. I watch as she takes a sip.
“Mmm,” she mumbles, licking her lips, and as she walks away, I turn to Max. He’s watching too.
“One down,” he says.
The next one goes to a hipster guy, who scares the shit out of me when he starts talking about prickly pear, and how it’s one of his favorite flavors.