Jordan is a pussy boy. I can’t believe I even wanted to hang with him in the first place. Get him and his useless ass out of my truck.
“Don’t mention it,” he says, and I recline and close my eyes. My throat is totally parched, like sandpaper.
“No really, thanks. I’m aware I’m the worst.”
“Seriously, dude?”
“What?”
He sighs. “Never mind.”
I crease my forehead. I hate when people do that. Edit themselves because they think I can’t handle something. “No. Tell me.”
He shrugs. “You sound just like your mom sometimes. She says she’s the worst too.”
I laugh and fold my arms over my chest. How come I always forget? When someone says never mind, you should always believe them. I’m so stupid.
“Well there ya go. I’m not perfect. I get that you are, but I’m an actual flawed human being. Thanks for the important life lesson.”
“Dude,” he says.
I turn toward the window and take in the mostly empty strip malls. “You can just drop me off at home,” I say. “Thanks for everything, but I think I’m gonna chill in the relative comfort of my bedroom, with the air on blast.”
He doesn’t respond. He’s heading east on Elliot, and he doesn’t say anything, so I assume that’s what’s happening. Aborted hangout on account of pussy boy. I can hardly blame him. I’m fucked up, and on top of that, I’m overly dramatic. I suck.
The truck passes I-10 and then Priest, and then he gets in the median lane and pulls into a Sonic Drive-In. I used to love Sonic. Worst hamburgers ever, but where else can you get a blue coconut slush with candy bits mixed in? Nerds, they use. How ingenious is that? I wonder if we should add that to our menu, or if we’d get sued if we did.
“Drinks on me,” I say, my throat scratchy.
“Okay,” Max says, and I wonder two things: One is if this is how real boys make up after a little argument. If it is, I’m truly okay with it. Two is if this is his way of letting me make it up to him. The whole life-saving episode. Fine with me.
“Whataya like?” I ask.
“We’re doing a lemonade flight.”
“A wha?”
“You never had a bacon flight?”
“A what?”
“Dude,” he says. “My mom took me to this awesome place called the Oink Café. South Tempe. They do this bacon flight where you sample, like, all eight kinds of bacon. Jalape?o. Apple cider, maple.”
“Do they include a defibrillator?”
He rolls his eyes and smiles a little. “God. Could you be any more like a cranky eighty-year-old? Here. Repeat after me: ‘Get off my lawn.’ ”
I laugh and my shoulders loosen up a bit. I imitate the grandfather from The Simpsons. “Get off my lawn.”
Max smiles. “Perfect. So are you in? Frozen lemonade flight? We’ll go from Sonic to Sonic, trying out all their lemonade concoctions to see if any of them are as good as ours.”
I can’t help but smile back. Yes. This is totally something I would do with Kayla and Pam.
“Sure,” I say.
He presses the red button and almost immediately, a girl’s voice asks us how she can help us.
We peruse the lengthy drink menu. They have lemonades and limeades, frozen and not, and there’s a list of about twenty flavors you can mix in to them. Some of them make sense, like peach or strawberry. My mind immediately goes to the ones that don’t make sense. As thirsty as I am, I can’t resist.
“Large frozen banana lemonade,” I say.
Max gives me a horrified look. “Okay,” he says.
“Oh come on. There has to be a part of you that wants to find the weirdest mix.”
“Nope,” he says. “Atomic lemon lemonade, large, frozen,” he says into the microphone.
“Boring.”
“Smart,” he responds.
The cost appears on the screen, and I mock groan. Then I put on my best Grandpa Simpson voice again. “Six fifty? When I was a kid, two lemonades cost five fifty.”
This cracks Max up. “Oh my God,” he says. “You’re like the world’s most boring old dude.”
I say, “I’m Stan, the Somewhat Uninteresting Curmudgeon.”
This earns me an actual cackle from Max, which surprises me. I always worry that the weird shit I think will be too much for him, but sometimes it really isn’t.
He says, “You kids, get off my lawn! You can stand there later, when it’s dry.”
I counter with, “When I was a kid, I walked three blocks to school, in reasonably comfortable shoes.”
Our drinks arrive, and I immediately find out that there’s a reason people don’t do banana lemonade. I happen to love banana flavor, especially in Laffy Taffy. But it goes with lemon sort of like cantaloupe goes with chocolate. Yep, tried that one before. Never again. The sweet of the banana hits the sour of the lemon and it sort of trips over it, muddles it, makes it nearly undrinkable. Still, I am so thirsty I’d drink a banana lemonade. So I do. But not without making an exaggerated face while I do.
Max laughs. “Delicious, huh?”
“The best,” I say, taking another slurp.
Max takes a huge, loud sip and then returns to his Grandpa Simpson impersonation. “You kids don’t know the value of a hard day’s work. The value can be determined by calculating the salary, plus benefits. Ow! Jesus! Brain freeze!”
He hides his head under his arms, as if the brain freeze won’t be able to find him down there.
“Press your tongue to the top of your mouth, hard,” I say.
“That’s an old wives’ — oh! Wow. Okay. Life hack by Jordan.”
“Stick with me, kid. I am a Somewhat Uninteresting Curmudgeon in training.”
Max smiles at me and takes another sip through his straw. I meet his eye contact and take a similar sip, and then cringe when the banana syrup hits my taste buds. “God does that suck.”
I decide to abort the banana lemonade halfway through, and Max pulls the car out of the spot we’re in, and then directly into the next spot. I laugh, surprised. I like silly Max.
I order a frozen cherry limeade, which Max at first says does not count on our lemonade flight. But I explain that limeade is lemonade’s weird, ugly kid cousin, and we laugh about what it’s like when limeade comes over and wants to play Kabuki Warriors on Xbox, which I surmise from the way Max says it was an old, shitty game. I pretend I have any idea about these things, and suddenly we are off to the next Sonic, the one a mile from me on Dobson, for more drinks.
I’ve never really believed in the whole jacked-up-on-sugar thing. Until drinks four and five. We order some cheese sticks to soak up some of the extra sugar, and as the sun sets, we are literally buzzing and coming up with the worst possible food truck ideas.
“Fruit salad,” Max says.
“Ew. Yes. Something about cutting up fruit on a hot truck. Agreed. What about a fondue truck?”
He laughs. “So we just give ’em like a big vat of cheese?”
“And a bucket of cauliflower to dip in it. That wouldn’t be cumbersome at all.”
“Cumbersome,” he says. “You are the anti-Betts.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
He takes a huge slurp of his grape limeade. “Betts. Him and Zay-Rod. They’re my boys.”
“Do they know you’re gay?”
He nods.
“You said you play baseball, right?”
He nods again.
“How does that work?”
He rolls his eyes. “Well, there’s this ball, and you pitch it …”
“Fuck you. I know how baseball works. That’s the one with the basket?”
He laughs. “Yes. That’s exactly right.”
“I mean how does it work, being gay on the baseball team?”
He shrugs. “I haven’t told them, other than my boys. I just think, I don’t know. It’s none of their business.”
I laugh. “It’s interesting how that works. When it’s someone who won’t take it well, suddenly it’s none of their business.”