I get the devil dog, which has red pepper, green chilies, sriracha, onion, cheddar, and jalape?os. It’s the perfect mix of spicy and savory. Betts of course gets the most disgusting thing on the menu. It has smoked Gouda, bacon, peanut butter, BBQ sauce, and Cracker Jacks. He eats like a caveman, and Kayla makes a big show of getting up and moving as far away from Betts as possible. Betts reacts by chewing with his mouth open.
“They have a food truck,” I say.
Jordan says, “I saw that. You ever think about doing something with hot dogs?”
“Totally. We should re-paint and re-name the truck,” I say, and Jordan cracks up. It’s day six of us being without a food truck, and we just found out yesterday that the license will be ready on Monday. The truck, though, needs some love, according to the guys at the shop my mom helped me find. It’s gonna cost about two grand, and it’s gonna take another full week before it’s ready.
“I think we can expand off chicken, though,” Jordan says.
I nod and sip my soda. “Sure. As long as we have the chicken options front and center. Yeah.”
Pam rolls her eyes and says, “Our friends have gotten weird and boring,” to Zay-Rod, and he nods.
“I know, right? You know they have a food truck? Haven’t heard that five trillion times.”
Pam laughs. Jordan curls his lip down like his feelings are hurt.
He says, “You are.”
Pam kisses him on the cheek. For effect, Zay-Rod kisses me on the cheek too, only he does it after rubbing mustard on his lips, leaving a mustard stain.
“What is wrong with you?” I say, wiping it off. “Did your momma not love you as a child?”
Zay-Rod takes his fingers and rubs mustard on my forehead. Betts slams his fist into the table, because he’s enjoying this, and because he’s an idiot.
We finish up, pay, and wander down Roosevelt. Third Friday is this thing Phoenix does on the third Friday of every month, where they open art galleries downtown, food trucks show up, and it’s like a mini-festival atmosphere. A lot of kids from school do it. It’s an opportunity to drink beers out of paper bags and the police don’t bug anyone unless you get out of hand.
“Are we really outside? Purposefully?” Kayla asks as we saunter past the church where people go in and listen to this famous choir as they practice.
“Wimp,” Betts says. “You stay inside all summer?”
“Basically,” she says. “Do you not do that? That’s like Darwin Award–level idiocy.”
“Oh good, I get to be called an idiot again by a chick.”
She swats him in the shoulder. He grabs his shoulder in mock agony. She swats him in the other shoulder, and I can actually see the slight grin she’s trying to hold in. Maybe they won’t be a couple, but I’m kinda glad they’re starting to dig each other.
Meanwhile, Pam and Zay-Rod are going the other direction. They’re quiet, just sort of walking together. Both looking at their phones. Both with serene expressions, as if they’re just minding their own business. It does not take a genius to know they are texting each other.
I nudge Jordan and watch the picture of our friends doing their collective things. He nudges me back.
“This makes me happy,” he says.
“This makes me feel sorry for your friends.”
He laughs. “This makes me feel sorrier for your friends.”
We pass a woman who is drawing a mural on the sidewalk in turquoise chalk. I turn to Jordan.
“Hooligan do-gooder?” I ask.
His face lights up. “Yes!” he says. Betts and Kayla and Zay and Pam have kept walking, and we’re fine with that. We can find them later.
“You got a poem?”
He looks so happy. That makes me smile. Jordan has changed quite a bit from the emo dude I met a month ago. He radiates now, and that makes me feel good. I’m Super Max. I have the power to transform people.
He flips through his phone. “I sent myself one yesterday,” he says. “I think it doesn’t totally suck.”
“People love poems that don’t suck,” I say, and I tap the woman on the shoulder and ask if I can borrow some chalk. She smiles and hands me a variety of colors and points to the ground next to her, inviting me to join her in making the street beautiful. I thank her, kneel down, and touch the sidewalk. Even though it’s nighttime and the sun has been down for a couple hours already, the concrete is hot hot hot. I can touch it for like five seconds and then I have to pull my hand off. That’s how powerful the sun is.
Jordan kneels down and says, “Did I tell you about that poem my dad liked?”
I remember something about that while we painted the truck. I nod.
“So basically I looked it up. It’s by Seamus Heaney, this famous Irish poet. Can I read it to you?”
I nod, and I sit on the hot concrete, savoring the heat emanating from the ground through my shorts.
He reads:
“A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens.”
I look up at him. He’s staring intently at me.
“I like that,” I say. “I don’t get it, but I dig it. I wanna draw the trees.”
Jordan shakes his head. “I haven’t read you my poem yet. That one influenced mine.”
“Oh,” I say, and for just a tiny sliver of a second, I’m uncomfortable. Because people are gathered around now. I am sitting on the ground, ready to draw, and they listened to the poem Jordan read, and it was good. What if Jordan’s poem isn’t? Will I have to lie to him and tell him that it is?
Jordan’s eyes read fear, and I realize he’s reacting to me saying, “Oh.” So I smile wide, swallowing down my own stuff.
“Go for it!” I say. “I wanna hear.”
He smiles tentatively, and I give him an encouraging nod. My boyfriend the poet. It’s cool, really. I dig it.
“I call it, ‘The Music of What Happens.’ After the last line of the Heaney poem.”
He reads.
“Down the street from me
Ms. Carter douses her head
The shower pulses
And spits her sins down the drain
Next house over, with the red plastic Adirondack chairs Mr. Simmons cries while eating waffles
His sink bone dry
Dishes with dried-up barbeque pork and oatmeal pile high Mowing the front lawn next door
Jimmy Fowler dreams of Jenny Carmichael
And her fantastic tits
Mr. Torres in his two-story mini-palace
Sits on his bathroom throne
His waste meeting Ms. Carter’s sins somewhere Under Carriage Lane
Here and there
We
Eat blueberries out of a ramekin
Chat with strangers about the sex we won’t be having Read fake news about the end of the world
Peer over our shoulder at the pimple on our back Check our breath for rampant bacterial stench Straighten the family portrait, the one where Kim grimaces for some unknown reason Dream of a better street
Ignore the sewage below our feet —
Which shows that we are human, and that’s the worst — And soon there is a knock on Ms. Carter’s door She answers, her hair in its final bun, her smile pasted on Like a child playing with Elmer’s
And the man asks
Can I climb your palm tree
And knock off the dead fronds
And she nods, because he is saving her life
And she says, as if it’s nothing, ‘Sure.’ ”
People clap. Jordan blushes. I tear up.
He’s beautiful. My boyfriend is beautiful. I don’t understand the whole poem, but there were so many images, and I think I get it in general. The way we’re all connected, like he said when we were painting the truck. It tingles up my midsection, that I am truly connected to this guy. To my friends, even though they’re, you know.
Even though, yes, this bad thing happened to me. And Kevin is a bad person. A user and abuser, as my mom would say. But not everyone is bad. Jordan would never hurt me like that, and in that moment I realize we don’t have to go slow anymore. He’s not Kevin.
I stand and go over to the woman with the chalk. She’s stopped and listened, and she is beaming up at Jordan too.
“Can I borrow a navy blue?” I ask, and she searches for one and puts it proudly in my hand.
“Your boyfriend is a real poet,” she says, and I nod.