“It was … surprising. At that coffee shop Cartel on University? Not the best punch ever, but it misaligned the guy’s jaw.”
Both guys are looking at me, shocked, and then Betts imitates a guy with his jaw misaligned. “Hi, I’m a rapist whose jaw doesn’t shut right,” he says in a silly voice.
Zay-Rod looks at me, holding in a laugh. I have to laugh myself, and that allows him to do the same.
“Too soon?” Betts says, pleased at the reaction.
“Uh, yeah, too soon,” I say.
We wind up in my bedroom for hours, basking in the AC and talking. It’s freakin’ awesome. We never talked like this, ever. It’s like my traumatic thing opened this door, and out poured all this stuff.
I tell the guys about how serious I am about this foodie stuff. That I love to cook more than maybe anything else. They’re cool about it. I don’t know why I’ve been afraid all this time to tell them. I mean, I guess this is a first, us talking for real. But the point is it could have happened much sooner if any of us had had the balls to try it.
And I think that’s thanks to Jordan. I would never have done any of this if I hadn’t met him, and if he hadn’t showed me how to be real and serious with another guy.
Betts talks about what it feels like when his mom calls his dad an idiot in front of him, and how it scares him because he’s a lot like his dad. And then he talks about how his dad probably deserves it, because he’s so mean to his mom.
“I don’t want to be that guy,” he says.
I nod and nod, and Zay-Rod says he gets that, and all I can think of is how it must totally suck to have that in the back of his brain and then hear from us, his best buddies, about how stupid he is all the time. That never even occurred to me, that he had feelings.
Zay-Rod talks about how he’s not over Hailie Thompson, who he dated sophomore year and was his first girlfriend. Also his first time.
“She was special. She’s the one I’ll always compare every girl to,” he says, and Betts says that’s like Shaundra Timmons for him.
All this time, I thought Zay-Rod was cool and emotionless about all girl stuff. Betts too.
They weren’t. Not even close. All this time.
“That’s why with Pam, I just … I don’t know.”
“What?” I ask. We haven’t asked what was up with Pam, and he sure didn’t tell. That’s more Betts’s thing.
“I like her, you know? She’s smart and funny and sexy. She could be, I don’t know. I don’t want to jinx it.”
“Sure,” I say.
“And what about you and Jordan?” Betts asks, and it actually takes me a second to put down the wall that comes up without me even trying. Like part of me is programmed to say, “Mind your business.”
“We’re taking it slow,” I say. “I mean. Not in terms of hanging out, but in terms of the other stuff.”
“Sex,” Zay-Rod says, and again, it’s like I flinch. I don’t want to flinch. So I swallow that response down and say, “Yeah. Sex.”
“You think you’ll be able to at some point?” Betts asks.
“I hope so,” I say, and I get this shiver in my arms. What if I never can? What if Kevin ruined me forever? I can’t think about that. I swallow it down.
“What do you think it would be like if I told the team? That I was gay? That I was dating Jordan?”
Zay-Rod says, “I don’t know. Everyone likes you. Why would that make it different?”
“Yeah,” Betts says. “It’s like, it shouldn’t matter. But with those guys, if you’re a dick they’d probably give you shit about it. But you’re the opposite of a dick.”
“A vagina?” Zay-Rod asks. We all laugh.
My mom knocks on the door. “What are you boys up to?” she asks.
“Just hangin’ out,” I say.
She smiles. “Up to no good if you ask me,” she says.
“I told them about what happened,” I say lightly.
She smiles again and she sits down on the floor. She’s still in her work clothes, and she crosses her legs. “Good,” she says. “Secrets are bad for the soul.”
Zay-Rod says, “We’re working on telling each other our secrets.”
“Good,” she says again. “Teach this boy how to talk, please. He’s just like his dad.”
“Mom,” I say.
She leans over and musses my hair. “Not in all ways. Just the talking one. And you’re getting better.”
We’re ready to go, with our DBA form and a working truck, by Friday morning. We pick it up from the repair shop on Baseline, and it’s still a steaming pile of crap, but at least now it drives when you put it into drive, and reverses when you want without so much shaking. And they put in a side window that we can see through, so we no longer have to drive with the side door open.
It puts us back a couple thousand, and after we pick up supplies at Safeway and head toward ASU for the lunch rush, Jordan tells me where we stand. We have about $1,200 in profits put away toward the $5,000 he owes. The deadline is next Friday.
“If all goes well and the truck holds up, we’ll make it. But we really have to push,” he says.
“Challenge accepted,” I say, and I mean it. We’re gonna make this happen.
We’re like a well-oiled machine once we get going. I flip chicken breasts like a pro, and Jordan has probably picked up his pace on lemonades and on the ordering situation by 100 percent since we started. The line just goes on and on for at least two hours, and I lose count of how much we’ve sold pretty quickly and get in that work zone where I’m loving the heat of the grill and the challenge of what we’re up against. Also I love that I’m doing it with Jordan. It’s amazing how we’ve known each other only a month, and I already feel like meeting him has changed everything for me. I can’t imagine my life without him.
“Two cayenne, one no tomatoes,” he calls back, and with my nongrilling, still-slightly-sore-from-punching hand, I reach back and fondle his thighs below the window, so no one can see.
“What’s that for?” he asks, smirking.
“Stuff,” I say, and his smirk grows.
“Don’t start what you can’t finish,” he says, and he flicks me on the upper thigh so I know he’s joking.
“I think you might be surprised what I can finish,” I say.
His smirk grows yet again.
We work both East Valley farmers’ markets on the weekend, we do lunches at ASU, and it’s about three in the afternoon on Wednesday, at the ASU lunch area, when Jordan takes an order, thanks the woman whose card he’s charged, and then pulls me toward the back of the truck.
His eyes are so unlike the eyes I remember when I first met him, when he was so miserable and his mom was struggling so much.
“We did it,” he says, and he jumps up and down.
“We did?”
“Taking out taxes, taking out your pay, even taking out the next shopping we’ll need to do? We have it. The back-mortgage payment. We did it!”
I hug him tight. “I’m proud of you, dude.”
“Me too!” he says. “Of us.”
“So what are we gonna do with all this cheddar?” I ask Max, as the Friday lunch crush dies down and we start our cleanup. I flash him the bills in my hand — maybe eight hundred more today. Every day has been at least solid in terms of profit, and this time it won’t go to back mortgage, since I handed my mom that money on Wednesday night, which felt amazing.
“I told you already. Don’t do that. Cheddar shit. That’s not you, and that’s not cute,” Max says, and I laugh, because, yeah. Not so cute.
“We should like take a vacation. Take off without the truck for a few days. We’ve earned it. Ever been to Rocky Point?”
He snorts. “That’s white people Mexico.”
“All I know is they have good shrimp there. Fresh right out of the ocean. Back when my mom was normal and my dad was breathing, he used to take us down there some weekends. All I remember is shrimp and tomato juice out of the can. That’s weird, right?”
Max rubs the middle of my back with his palms. “I still remember the first time I tried cream cheese. It was this time my dad and mom took me to Yuma, and we went to a bagel place, and Dad ordered me an everything bagel with cream cheese. I thought it was the best thing ever, and I thought it was only in Yuma.”