There’s not the right terror in Jordan’s face.
To fix the face, I fill in the blank space next to it because there’s no light down there. I look at it. It looks a little more right that way. I take the black pencil and re-sketch an ear. Then I look at what I have again.
The boy on bottom looks like he’s given up. Like he’s sort of clawing, expressionless. And I have this crazy, crazy thought:
Am I actually the boy on the bottom? Am I digging up and out of oxygen? Is Jordan digging down to save me?
On Monday, we try the food truck area on the north side of the Arizona State University campus. It’s a lunchtime gig, so suddenly we need to do something other than breakfast grilled cheese and cloud eggs.
We meet at my place at eight, which gives us three hours to shop, prep, arrive, and open. Not as much time as you might think. The sun is already fully up, which is what happens here in the summer because Arizona doesn’t do Daylight Savings Time. Because it’s so hot, we wind up on Pacific Standard Time in the summer and Mountain Standard Time in the winter.
“What about chicken and waffles?” I ask. We’re sitting in the living room.
Max winces. “I don’t know, dude. The heat from the fryer? That could get intense. Plus cleaning it.”
I nod. He’s right. “I keep going to chicken. But we had all that boring chicken stuff before and it didn’t sell. On the plus side, Coq Au Vinny would actually make sense if we did chicken.”
Max pulls out his phone and goes to YouTube, our trusty source for stealing good food truck ideas. He surfs around and finally motions me over.
“How about this?” He plays me one of those videos where the cooking is done in fast motion and what normally takes an hour plays in about a minute. I see lemon and sriracha, and I admit it makes me salivate. I like spicy and citrusy. A lot.
“Well we already have a lot of lemons,” I say.
“Exactly. Plus basically what we want to do is marinade chicken, grill it, and sauce it. Let’s come up with two or three combos and just do it.”
We decide on lemon-sriracha, mango-cayenne, and habanero-peach. I’ve never had any of them, and I tell Max that. He smiles.
“Me neither.”
“Well what could possibly go wrong?” I say, and then, because I see a slight bit of hurt register on his face, I say, “I trust you. Completely. If anyone can do this first time out, it’s you.”
He nods and his eyebrows relax.
We go to Safeway to get our ingredients. It’s awesome because we can afford it. When I told Mom how much we made Saturday and Sunday, she looked so proud and grateful, and she hugged me tight, which was great. And then she teared up again, and she started in about what a success I’ve become, and I don’t know. It was like I was receiving a lifetime achievement award and she was talking to an imaginary audience. It was … odd, and it made me all fidgety.
Then we go to Food City because they sell prickly pear fruit. I was on board to continue with the red food coloring, but Max said sooner or later someone would figure it out. I pick up ten with the green skin for four bucks. The fine folks at Food City have removed the thorns, and they look like a cross between a pear and a melon — pear-shaped and colored, but with hard melon skin. As we stand in line, I feel a bit like I’m in Mexico; I’m the only white person here.
“Mucho Latinx,” I say, and Max looks at me and says, “What?”
I repeat it, and he says, “Whatever the hell PC shit that is, is just — grammatically wrong, for one thing. If you mean there are lots of Latino people, you’d say, ‘Muchos Latinos.’ If you mean it’s very Latino, you’d say, ‘Muy Latino.’ As for the Latinx thing? I have never met any Mexican person who has ever said that, as far as I know.”
My face turns red. “Oh, okay,” I say, glancing around me to see if anyone else heard my stupidity. “Sorry. Microaggression.”
He rolls his eyes.
I say, “What?”
“I just — I’m not down with that. Microaggressions and shit. You didn’t know the right grammar, and the Latinx thing is new and some people use it, but not me. Who cares? People say shit and some of it is wrong and some of it is racist and it’s like, whatever. You can focus there, or you can live your life. IMO.”
I nod, even though I don’t really know if I agree with the last part of what he said. I mean, with friends is one thing, but I’d be horrified if in school some jock kid came up to me and was like, So what do gay people think about … ? I’d totally not be okay with that. Even if I didn’t say anything, which I probably wouldn’t, Kayla, Pam, and I would dissect that microaggression for days.
“Yeah, sure,” I say, and we unload our prickly pears on the conveyor belt. “Sorry.”
He stops and looks at me. “Are you actually apologizing for apologizing for a microaggression?”
“Sorry,” I say again, and he grins.
We arrive in this big parking lot where four food trucks — one grilled cheese, one Vietnamese, one burrito, and one hamburger — are already setting up. We take the far end and Max starts working on his marinades, which I guess is a lot of guesswork about proportions of heat to sweet. I get to work on my frozen lemonade. This time I start by cutting up the prickly pear. The first one I just about eviscerate, unaware of what I’m doing. But then I watch a YouTube video and find that if I cut just so, it comes out looking like a cucumber.
I take a taste of the fruit. It’s like an earthy watermelon, with hard seeds in it. I pull the seeds out of my mouth and wince. It does not taste very much like red food coloring at all, and I worry that it’s not exactly going to augment our world-famous frozen drink.
But when I blend some up with ice, lemon juice, and sugar, it tastes totally refreshing and delicious. I hand Max my cup, he takes a sip, and nods affirmatively.
“Serious business, dude. Nice.”
“Thanks, man,” I say, and I feel like I’m being a different person and I don’t entirely know what’s happening to me. Part of me is like, Bitch, please. When’s the last time you called someone “man”? Never. That’s when. Part of me likes it, even if I can’t imagine Max or any other “dude” ever hanging out in my bordello bedroom.
When Max has his chicken breasts marinated and ready for the grill and his sauces ready for slathering, and when I have my Vitamix ready for action, we turn to each other and smile.
“Ready?” I ask. It’s already so intensely hot in the truck that I cannot imagine how I’m going to withstand four hours of this. And yet I’m ready to try.
“Oh,” he says. “One sec.”
He goes over to his backpack in the back of the truck, fishes around in it, and takes out a notebook. He brings it over to me.
“So last night. I — you know how you showed me that poem?”
“Yeah,” I say, and I look away. My pulse quickens.
“Right. Well, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And you don’t know this but I used to draw? So. Um. I drew something.”
“Oh,” I say, and my whole body goes numb. Of all the things he could have just said to me, this is perhaps the most surprising. Unless he had said, “At nighttime, I turn into a superhero and save the Phoenix suburbs from dragons,” his words could not be more unforeseen. And even that, in some ways, would have been less shocking.
His hand shakes as he turns the pages, and I am amazed that he’s actually nervous. Why? What in the world would make Max nervous? He has the whole world figured out.
“Here,” he says.