The black-and-white drawing, in charcoal and pencil, is of a boy underground. There’s a tree and roots heading down and the roots wrap around him, and he has his hands clawed like he’s trying to dig up. My chest buzzes and my jaw goes numb. It’s beautiful. On top of the earth, another boy lies, looking down, and what’s amazing is that the boys are basically lying on each other, with only the thin earth between them.
No. Nothing in the world has ever, ever been more surprising than this. I am lost for words. Just looking at Max’s drawing, my whole body goes erect. My eyes, my hair, my nipples, my cock, my toes.
“Oh,” I say, adjusting my stance. “Cool.”
He pulls the drawing slightly away, like it’s a living thing and it is offended by something I’ve said. What I want to do is cry, actually, but I cannot cry, because that’s not what a boy does when Superhero Max shows them a drawing. They say, “That’s good,” I guess, and not much else, because saying more would be the scariest, most out-there feeling possible, and I don’t know if I can do it.
“No,” I say, breathing into the deep part of my chest that is twisting and trying to make sure my erect soul does not overstep. “I mean, it’s really great, Max. I — I love it.”
“Oh,” he says, no expression on his face. “Oh. Okay.”
“Yeah.”
We don’t say anything more. I can’t breathe. I don’t know what he’s thinking. I truly, utterly have no idea and couldn’t possibly guess. Relief? Why would he care what I think, anyway? That’s the biggest mystery of all.
“You’re a really talented artist. How can you be talented at so many things?”
“Nah,” he says, but his face reddens slightly, and I recognize that actually he does care what I think. Which is crazy with a capital “C.”
I am so relieved when he puts the drawing away, because I feel as though I will lose consciousness if I stare at it any longer, if these foreign feelings course through my brain and body for even one second more.
My hand shakes as I write up our menu. Then we open the awning, and even though it’s summer, immediately all the trucks have long lines. Our lemon-sriracha chicken is quickly our biggest seller, and we do a brisk frozen lemonade business too.
“Where’s your local source for lemons?” a brash, red-haired woman in a sunflower dress asks. She looks graduate-school age. She’s chewing her first bite of lemon-sriracha chicken and she holds her lemonade in her left hand.
I swallow. “I have to protect our sources,” I say, a bit jittery.
She screws up her face at me. “It’s lemonade. Not journalism,” she says, and once she’s gone, I glance back at Max and lower my voice.
“Do lemons grow in the summer here?” I whisper back to him.
He shrugs. “I think of all citrus as winter, early spring, maybe?”
“This locally sourced thing is — what do they call it — problematic?”
“Maybe everything but the lemons are locally sourced?”
I turn back to our line and smile. “What can I get you?” I ask a very hippy-dippy-looking older guy in gray sandals and a faded orange tank top.
“Where do you get your chicken?” he asks.
I make sure not to move my eyes from his. Good liars are able to hold eye contact while fibbing. I am able to do it, which may mean that I am a bad person. I’m not sure.
“Kennewick Farms,” I say, using the first word that comes to my mind.
“Oh,” he says, smiling. “Where is that?”
“Kennewick.”
“I’m not familiar with that. Is it near Winkelman? I know Double Tree Ranch pretty well.”
“About an hour southeast of there,” I say, and then, realizing that an hour southeast of an unknown location could be in New Mexico, I add, “Maybe just a half hour as the crow flies?”
“Huh,” he says, and I can’t tell if his bullshit meter has just been activated. Possibly. “I’ll just try a prickly pear lemonade, I think.”
“Sure,” I say, and because I am wanting to prove that I am a basically honest person on a basically honest food truck, I come back holding a piece of prickly pear. “You’ll love it.”
He just stares at me, and I realize what I’ve just done is that thing where you’ve just cheated on a quiz, and out of a guilty conscience, you make sure you say something to your teacher as you leave the classroom. Something like, Man, that Julius Caesar sure was assassinated in 44 BC, and your teacher nods at you, and you realize you might as well have just said, Hey, I cheated on the quiz. Here is the one fact I know that is supposed to throw you off scent.
The next time I have a chance to say something sotto voce to Max, I mumble to him as I brush past. “We’re gonna have to go on the lam in a hurry. I’m setting off bullshit meters left and right.”
He laughs and puts his mouth close to my ear. “We’ll take it as a good sign that you’re a shitty liar, I guess.”
My ear feels on fire. “Am I?”
“The worst,” he says, and I can’t help but smile.
The next guy, college age with a blue faux-hawk, wants a habanero-peach chicken breast, without a bun. We don’t actually offer buns (it says nothing about bread on the menu), so I nod. It’s an easy order to grant.
“Habanero all day,” I say, and Max says, “Roger that.” We’ve picked up some good food prep slang from our video watching.
I take the guy’s money and try to sell him on a lemonade, but he’s not buying. Max says, “Habanero up,” turns around, and hands me the paper dish. He stops moving. Freezes up.
“Oh, hey,” the guy says, smiling.
Max just stares. “Hey.”
“Didn’t know you worked a food truck.”
Max looks suddenly stoned, which is weird. I’ve never seen him at a loss for words. “Yep.”
“We should hang out again,” the guy says. “Kevin, in case you forgot.”
“Sure,” Max says. “Okay.”
I pry the paper dish from Max’s clenched hands. I am all agog. Like, what just happened? Former hookup? I realize I don’t know almost anything about Max in terms of that.
“Text me,” the guy says, Max nods, and the guy walks off, and I’m like, Huh? It’s a little funny, actually. How could a waif of a skinny dude like that make Max speechless? And then I realize: That guy is about my build. Maybe Max actually likes ’em skinny?
Nah. No way.
A few minutes later, Max glances over to see how big the line is. It is slowing down.
“I need to take a break,” he says.
“Can you wait? I don’t know how to do the chicken.”
He shakes his head. “Break,” he says, not looking at me, and I’m like, What the fuck?
He jumps off the back of the truck and disappears, and I turn and look at the grill, feeling lost. I’ve watched him enough that I basically get how long it needs to cook, and how to squirt the water to make the grill sizzle, and how to cover the chicken with the round, silver thing so it cooks in the juice, and how to squirt the sauce on top after and serve the chicken with a slice of tomato and two pickle spears, like a sandwich minus the bread.
As I take orders, grill chicken, blend lemonade, and plate dishes all by myself, for what is probably five minutes but feels much longer, my mind is on Max. Is he going off to find Kevin? Is he making a date? Was he trying to be polite and not do that in front of me? This ugly feeling wraps around my throat and chest. Like I’m the butt of a joke. Like, make sure you don’t do it in front of Jordan, because he’s a wuss and it’ll hurt his feelings and he can’t take it.
As I throw away a burned chicken breast, I start to feel furious. Working my ass off while Max works on his secret dating life, which puts him so far ahead of me, so far out of my league, that it isn’t even funny.
He comes back wordless, not even a sorry.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I held down the fort while you did whatever.”
“Thanks,” he says, not taking the bait, and once again I’m totally unsure of everything in my life. Who is this guy, Max? What are we? Why did he bother to draw that picture and show it to me, if he doesn’t even give a shit about me?
I’m handing Jordan a particularly awesome-looking habanero-peach chicken breast when I lose control of my hands and my stomach heaves. Luckily, I’m close enough to the handoff that no one notices. I put my hands behind my back and feel them shake as Kevin recognizes me.