His face gets close enough to mine so that I can smell past the coconut to get a whiff of his sour breath. “I can tell when a guy is enjoying himself. You really were. Your eyes. Have you ever seen that passion look that a guy gives when he’s, like, blissed? And it’s not like you were soft.”
I try to imagine that look I must have given. And I was hard. I know I was. That was like what was so crazy. How can something feel so good and so bad at the same time? Shit. Am I being, like, a snowflake? Too sensitive? I’m not like that usually. Maybe this is just, like, buyer’s remorse? Am I making it into something it wasn’t?
But didn’t I say no?
No means yes, yes means anal?
“You’re really intense, dude,” he says.
“What?”
“Your eyes. They’re beautiful. You’re one of those guys who really listens and really thinks. I like that. It’s so sexy.”
More leg chattering. No. I put a stop to it. This time, it’s harder. I try harder. Super Max, turning his powers on himself. I can control my own body.
“You want it again,” he says.
“What?”
“I can tell you do.” That uneven smile again, but this time bigger so I can see his bottom teeth, which are small, crooked, and uneven. “The quiet ones always do. C’mon. Come back to my room. I got weed. You ever done it high?”
Before him, I’d never done it at all. So no. There’s so much he doesn’t know about me, and he hasn’t asked. And I’m a guy, so I should want that. No strings attached. Just fun, nothing intense. So why do I feel this way? What’s wrong with me?
I know that nothing that comes out of my mouth now will do anything good, so I stand up, take my iced tea with me, and walk out. I feel his eyes on my back as I walk to my car, and this white-hot something pulses through my veins.
I slam the iced tea down onto the asphalt. It explodes, splashing red liquid onto my bare legs. I stomp down on it. Three times. Flatten the thing. I look back at the coffee shop. He’s in the window, staring, mouth agape. I close my eyes, turn, and walk to my car.
I drive away so he can’t get to me, all the way to the other side of the mall parking lot. Then I put the car in park, close my eyes, and think.
I don’t want to feel bad anymore. I don’t want to waste another minute on that guy. I can do this myself. Warrior up. I sit up taller and clench my stomach muscles, puff up my chest.
In a world where lesser mortals crumble, Super Max stands tall and says, “I’m the decider of my fate. I’m not a victim. Shut the hell up with all that victim shit.”
I’m freakin’ Max Morrison. I carried a dude through the desert in 120-degree heat. No skinny-ass, blue-faux-hawked dipshit has power over me. No way.
I start the car up, turn up the music, loud, and drive off, victorious. Mind over matter.
Things start to get crazy good on the truck. Beyond-my-wildest-dreams good.
Max gets on Instagram and Twitter and Snapchat and shows pictures of his various food concoctions, and suddenly we have regulars who say things like, “This time I gotta try the habanero-peach.” The lemonade isn’t the star, but something about ordering food outside while standing on the surface of the sun makes people of all different shapes and sizes say the same thing each time: “Let me get a prickly pear lemonade too. That’ll cool me down.”
A lot of other trucks take the summer off, I guess. To the victor go the spoils, or more like, to the fools who don’t mind working on a scalding truck all summer goes the cheddar.
“Stop calling it that,” Max says, when I remark that we got hella cheddar after the lunch rush slows down on a Wednesday afternoon. “I’m embarrassed for you, dude.”
“Mo’ cheddar less problems. I got so much cheddar I don’t even care,” I say, and he swats me on the shoulder and paints my face with habanero-peach sauce. Which is seriously delicious.
Hella cheddar, by the way, means our first day of netting a thousand bucks.
No. Really.
Like including our huge shopping to start the day, which cost us four hundred and fifty-three dollars. I keep a running tally in my mind, and when a girl in short gold shorts that let me see all her business orders a mango-cayenne chicken and adds on a frozen lemonade, we hit a thousand and two.
“Ding ding ding!” I yell after I give the girl change for her twenty and she puts a dollar in our tip jar. “You, my dear, are our thousandth customer!”
She looks at me with vacant eyes as I hand her three bucks back. “Free lemonade for you!”
“Cool,” she says, monotone, but I don’t give a shit, because I am feeling so … something. Grateful? For Max? Without whom this never would have happened? I’ll have to look, but I’m pretty sure we have five grand now, and we’re not even that close to our deadline.
When we close up, I wrap my arms around Max, which seems to stun him because he’s Max, and he can go from super warm to uber distant in a heartbeat. But again I don’t care. I am elated.
“We’ve done it,” I say, kissing his ear five times in succession. “That was one kiss for every thousand. We have the money I need to save my house.”
Max pulls back and looks me in the eye.
“For reals?”
“Yeah, for reals! I mean, I gotta pay you for today, but even after that we’re up five grand already.”
He breaks into a huge Max grin and then pulls me close. “Awesome, dude! I lose track not working with the register. I knew it was a shit ton today, but I had no idea how much of a shit ton.”
I grab hold of his forearms and stare deep into his eyes. “We netted eleven hundred, seventy-one dollars, and fifty-six cents,” I say, joyful shivers just dancing through my entire body. I hand him a hundred-dollar bill and say, “Bonus.”
He stares. I stare. He starts laughing. I start laughing.
“No. No damn way.”
“Damn way.”
“Lunch?” he asks. “To celebrate?”
“Absolutely,” I say. “Anywhere you want to go. On me.”
Not even giving a shit that the truck has no AC, we go straight to our lunch destination. First we decided it had to be a new place. Then he suggested In-N-Out Burger.
I grimaced. “Oh my God I hate that name. Way too descriptive of the eating process.”
He snickers. “Dude. You’re so weird, dude.”
Instead we wind up at the Angry Crab, which I’ve passed like a million times because it’s just past school on Guadalupe, in the strip mall where Dairy Queen is.
“It makes a meal an activity,” Max says, just about running toward the door. I can’t run as fast, because (a) I’m Jordan, he’s Max, and (b) I am cradling our cashbox. No way am I leaving that in our truck, even if we can see it out the window the whole time.
“You say that like having to work for food makes things better,” I say.
He shrugs. “Don’t you feel awesome about having worked to make all that money?”
I don’t answer right away. Man. He’s right. I feel amazeballs. Part of my whole thing with Kayla and Pam is that we have this aversion — allergy, almost — to hard work. I don’t know if it’s true for them, but honestly, after this experience, I wouldn’t even want to win the lottery or something. Making honest money from a hard day’s work feels like nothing I’ve ever felt before. (And yeah. There needs to be an asterisk after “honest,” because the locally sourced thing is total bullshit, but still.)
Max orders for us. We get a pound of snow crab legs, a pound of king crab legs, and a pound of shrimp.
“Um, leave some for the … whatever animals eat shellfish?”
“Fuck that,” he says. “We’re celebrating.”
And man, is it a celebration. The food comes out in these plastic bags with all this sauce at the bottom. The sauce is called Trifecta, and it’s lemon and garlic and pepper, and Max shows me how to puncture the bag without getting sauce all over everything, and how to open the crab legs. Snow ones are not that hard, but the king ones are like a death struggle with a spiky creature that really does not want you to eat its flesh. At first I demur, because it looks painful. And it is when I try it. Super hard and ouchy. But when I finally manage to open one and I pull a hulking piece of crab leg meat just about the size of my forearm out, I change my tune.