The Music of What Happens Read online

  To Chuck, my love, my life, who sacrifices so much so that I can write these books and still eat food occasionally

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Max

  Chapter Two: Jordan

  Chapter Three: Max

  Chapter Four: Jordan

  Chapter Five: Max

  Chapter Six: Jordan

  Chapter Seven: Max

  Chapter Eight: Jordan

  Chapter Nine: Max

  Chapter Ten: Jordan

  Chapter Eleven: Max

  Chapter Twelve: Jordan

  Chapter Thirteen: Max

  Chapter Fourteen: Jordan

  Chapter Fifteen: Max

  Chapter Sixteen: Jordan

  Chapter Seventeen: Max

  Chapter Eighteen: Jordan

  Chapter Nineteen: Max

  Chapter Twenty: Jordan

  Chapter Twenty-One: Max

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Jordan

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Max

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Jordan

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Max

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Jordan

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Max

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Jordan

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Max

  Chapter Thirty: Jordan

  Chapter Thirty-One: Max

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Jordan

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Max

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Jordan

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Max

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Jordan

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Max

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Jordan

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Max

  Chapter Forty: Jordan

  Chapter Forty-One: Max

  Chapter Forty-Two: Jordan

  Chapter Forty-Three: Max

  Chapter Forty-Four: Jordan

  Chapter Forty-Five: Max

  Chapter Forty-Six: Jordan

  Openly Straight Teaser

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Bill Konigsberg

  Copyright

  There’s this thing my dad taught me when I was a kid. One time when I was eight, and he was swinging me around the living room by my ankles. Man I used to love that, flying free with that centrifugal force, knowing that if my dad let me go I’d go flying. He got a little wild this one time I guess, and my head thwacked against the armoire where we keep board games.

  The world went spinny and a sharp pain radiated across my skull. I was shocked too. Which I guess is why I didn’t cry right away. But then I did.

  “This is when you warrior up,” he said as my tears fell. “Pain doesn’t mean that much.”

  I sat on the floor crying and rubbing the spot on my forehead that would soon turn into a purple bruise in the shape of Texas just above my right eye. Kept wailing and waiting for my mom to come and make it all feel better. But I guess she was out buying groceries, because she didn’t come. For the longest time. And Dad turned on the TV and ignored me. He wasn’t the perfect dad while he lived with us, but he was right about this one thing. My tears dried, my headache went away, and I sat down next to him and watched the end of the Cardinals game, and when he cracked a joke about how Kurt Warner’s wife looked like a boy, I laughed a little. I came away realizing I had powers I didn’t know I had.

  I was a freakin’ warrior.

  That’s the lesson I’m thinking about, nine years later, as I stand here at the Gilbert Farmers’ Market with my mom, freaked out about whatever the hell last night was. I’m thinking about the shit show that went down when I skulked in at six in the morning to my mom standing there, arms crossed, brow furrowed fierce. As I look around the market, I’m realizing that I could freak the fuck out about everything, or I could warrior up. I force a smile, choosing the latter.

  And when my mom’s enthusiasm for grass-fed beef makes her start saying creepy things she probably doesn’t mean to the seller guy, I decide it’s time for this warrior to wander off on my own.

  “I can’t wait until I get your beef in my stew,” she says, and since she’s my mom and that’s disgusting, I say, “Uh, I’m gonna hit the food trucks.”

  She glances my way and says, “You watch yourself, Maximo. No more trouble, you hear?”

  Cumin. Creosote. The bleating of cicadas and my heartbeat, pounding. No. Nope.

  I nod, gulp, and hurry away. The fine people of the Gilbert Farmers’ Market do not need to know my business.

  I love the Saturday morning farmers’ market. I know it’s weird and I’d never tell Betts and Zay-Rod, but I dig the friendly people, the parade of cute dogs, the booths giving free samples.

  Organic cotton candy is like, really? I pass them up because sugar is sugar, organic or not. I like the hot sauce guys, Homeboys. Anything spicy is good to me, and they give you chips to sample the sauces, so. Double win. I’m a closet foodie. The Amigos don’t know, but at home I will sometimes cook dinner. Mom’s the tamale queen, but I like to cook Asian, Italian, French. It’s fun to experiment in the kitchen. Give me some garlic, soy, and sugar, and I can whip up some magic with just about any protein.

  I try a few samples and head to the food trucks, because everything tastes better coming off a truck. I’ve sampled them all. There’s a kettle corn truck, a waffle truck — my favorite — a burrito truck, and one that makes ceviche. And then there’s this new one at the end of the aisle.

  The exterior is dirty and faded white, and it says Coq Au Vinny across the top in bloodred Comic Sans lettering, which looks a little amateurish. There’s an angry-looking cartoon chicken standing there with its arms crossed and its eyebrows raised, like it’s about to peck someone’s head off. Above it is an upside-down fryer, held by a short, squat Mario Brothers kind of guy. He’s using the fryer as a chicken catcher, like he’s about to capture the angry bird.

  I walk closer to check out their menu. That’s when I see the skinny kid who sits in the back of my AP Language and Composition in the ordering window, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. My chest tightens.

  The kid is just — striking? It’s a weird word but I don’t know what else to call him. He’s rail-thin, super quiet, with a strong nose and a triangle mouth with narrow lips, all angularity and sinew. Sometimes in class I find myself staring at him and thinking about how he’s all simple lines, no extra anything. When he did his oral report a few weeks ago on “This I Believe,” he stood up and lazily ambled to the front of the class and it was almost like a dance, the way his long limbs moved. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I remember wondering what it would feel like to be that spare.

  And then he spoke. They were maybe the first words I ever heard him say, and apparently what he believed in was yogurt. The logic went something like this, as best I can remember:

  I believe in yogurt because it’s creamy and a good use of milk that would otherwise go sour. Think about it: Where does all the sour milk go? That goes for people too. Not that we ferment, though I guess we do lactate, but everyone has skills and desires that go unused and unmet, and they sour. How can we make yogurt of these soured attributes? How do we make something delicious, how do we salvage them?

  I was like, dude, how in the world did you manage to bring human lactation into your oral report? If I ever said anything half that creative, half that unusual, my best friends would divorce my ass. How can a guy be so comfortable with being weird?

  The kid is behind the ordering window, his chin on his hands like he’s uber bored, staring off into space. He’s wearing a maroon V-neck T-shirt that highlights his almost alabaster, toothpick-thin arms, which take up almost the entire windowsill. He has dark emo hair that covers his eyes.

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; I walk up to him, and he turns and sees me. I smile, and his eyes go wide like he’s shocked, like I’ve found him in his secret life as Food Truck Guy.

  “What up?” I ask. “You go to Mesa-Guadalupe, right?”

  He gulps and looks around nervously, and I immediately feel sorry I said anything. “Oh hey. Yeah.”

  Acne blemishes dot his cheeks, and his eyebrows look manscaped, raised up at the ends. It makes him look a little bit like the angry chicken, or maybe just like he’s questioning everything and everyone. Not sure if he’s gay or not, but anyway, he’s that kind of emo kid who hates jocks. I can just tell.

  “I’m Max,” I say.

  He looks behind him. There’s a large blond woman frantically scraping off the grill with the edge of a metal spatula. Maybe his mom?

  He turns back to me. “Jordan,” he says, kinda monotone.

  “Nice to meet you. And you work on a food truck. That’s cool.”

  “Is it?” he mumbles, raising an eyebrow, and I nod my head because, yeah. It totally is. I’m about to be sentenced to a summer at State Farm Insurance with my mom as punishment for a night I wish didn’t even happen, and I’d much rather do this than that.

  I point to the truck and read the name. “Coq au Vinny?” I ask.

  “Yup,” he says, like he thinks it’s embarrassing. “Coq au Vinny. Um. ‘We do Italian things with chicken.’ ”

  I laugh. There he goes again, saying shit I could never get away with. “Italian things, eh?”

  He raises his eyebrows twice in quick succession. It just makes his face more angular, and it’s like I can’t look away. “This ain’t exactly Florence. Well, it’s almost Florence, Arizona, I guess.” His voice is soft, a little high.

  “Ha. So nothing too fancy, eh?”

  He looks back at the hefty woman for a moment and then turns toward me, rolling his eyes. “We fry chicken fingers in oil and put Italian seasoning on it. Or sometimes mozzarella cheese and marinara sauce.”

  “Man. That shit be Italian, yo,” I deadpan, and Jordan’s face animates for like a split second before he glances over his shoulder a second time, as if he’s afraid of hurting the woman’s feelings. When Jordan looks back at me, he’s grinning again and it’s nice, and then, like he’s not used to smiling, he drops it. It’s like he’s panicked about how to keep a conversation going.

  “I swear there’s years of soot caked onto this damn thing. We should be condemned,” the woman says, not turning around, way too loud given she’s trying to sell food from the very truck she’s condemning. “This is hopeless, Jordan. Hopeless.”

  Then she turns around, and she sees me, and she blushes.

  “Oh shit,” she says. “I was kidding. It’s plenty clean. I’m just. I’m hopeless. That’s all. Me. Hopeless mess.”

  “Mom,” Jordan says, very chill-like, like he’s used to calming her down. “This is Max. A kid from MG.”

  “Oh!” she says. “Hi. Lydia. Lydia Edwards. Worst chef ever. Nice to meet you.”

  “Hey,” I say.

  “We just took this thing out for the first time in a long time today, and it’s. It’s a lot.” She runs her hands through her hair and widens her eyes at me. They are lined like she hasn’t slept in a week. “Hey. You want to be our first customer?”

  “Um, no thanks,” I say.

  “Oh, I was just kidding about the — come on. On the house. I’ll eat one if you eat one. Okay? Come on.”

  It’s weird because I don’t owe Jordan or his mom anything. He’s a cute boy from my comp class who I don’t know that well. But I don’t exactly know how to walk away. I instinctively reach into my pocket for my phone, like I just got a text, but then I pull my hand back out. “Sure,” I say. “Okay. Thanks.”

  This gets Lydia Edwards to smile at me for the first time, and when she does her face energizes. There is something kind of — charismatic? — about her.

  “What can I get ya?” she asks.

  The menu is printed on a whiteboard with orange marker. The handwriting looks like a third grader’s, and I wonder which one of them wrote it. There are four items. “Can I try … the chicken parm hero?”

  Her eyes light up and she says, “Oh my God, you’re going to love it! Love it!” She rushes to the back of the truck and I look at Jordan and I almost laugh, because his expression is like — have you ever seen one of those TV shows about people behind bars in prison? He looks like he’s serving two to four years. Something about that miserable expression next to the freaky chicken drawing cracks me up, but he’s not laughing and I don’t want to piss him off.

  “So this is like a family thing?”

  He nods. “My dad. He used to run it. But he —”

  I wait for him to finish and when I realize he isn’t going to, I say, “Oh. Okay. My dad lives in Colorado Springs, so I get it. My folks divorced six years ago.”

  “Died, actually,” Jordan says, looking down at the stainless steel window counter.

  My throat catches. “Oh,” I say. “Sorry, dude.”

  He shrugs like it’s no big deal. “Four years ago. This was his, and today’s actually our first try without him.”

  “Oh, wow,” I say, and I feel bad for thinking of his mom as a mess.

  “Shit,” she yells from behind Jordan. “Ow!”

  Jordan turns around and his mother starts hopping up and down, holding her wrist. “Ow ow ow ow ow!”

  “What happened?” he asks.

  “Damn grill. I’m such a … I can’t do this, Jordan. I can’t. I can’t I can’t I can’t.” She’s still hopping, and Jordan looks quickly back at me like he’s mortified that I’m witnessing this, so I turn around and pretend to look at my phone.

  I hear the rest of the conversation, but I don’t see it. “It’s okay, Mom,” he says, his voice quiet and controlled. “We can do this.”

  “Can we, though? Do novices just jump in and excel at food truckery?”

  “We’ll make it work. I promise.”

  “Four months of back mortgage by July fifth? We’re gonna be homeless, Jordan. Homeless because I’m an idiot and —”

  “Mom. Stop. Please. There’s people.”

  “Oh!” she says, suddenly realizing that her mini-meltdown is being watched. Not just by me — I turned around, I had to — but by a handful of other people who have come to witness the crazy. People are terrible. I’m a little terrible too, I guess. It’s like how traffic slows around an accident, and you kinda know everyone is hoping to see a dead body.

  Jordan’s mom buries her head into his bony shoulder, and Jordan turns his head to see all of us watching. He catches my eye, his jaw hardens, and he turns back away from us. He tries to speak softly, but somehow I can still hear him.

  “We’re gonna be fine. I’ll take care of it. I promise.”

  “Oh Jordan,” she says. “Here I am, screwing everything up, and I don’t deserve you. I really, really don’t. What would I do without you?”

  I blush for Jordan just as he says, “Mom!” and she launches into this kind of funny, mock-official voice: “Sorry. Sorry. Ignore, fine people of the Gilbert Farmers’ Market. Ignore. Nothing to see here.” Then she hugs Jordan and drops the voice. She says to him, “Oh God. Public meltdown. Sorry, sweetheart. I know this is not cute. The worst. Ugh.”

  Things get quiet, and most of the dozen onlookers go on their ways. I should too. I know it. Mom is probably wondering where I wandered off to. But I stay, because, well, I feel for Jordan. Tough draw in the mom department.

  He and his mom end their embrace, and she sees me standing there. “Sorry. No sample. I’m hopeless on the grill. Vinny used to —” She covers her face with her hands and I’m like, Please don’t. Please don’t pull me more into this. I’m just trying to be a good dude.

  And I am a good dude. Obviously. Because I say, without thinking too much, “Can I help?”

  She looks up from her tears. “Can you grill?”

  I laugh. “Um. Yeah. I’m all right.”


  She wipes her tears away. “Need a job? If you know anything about food, you’ve got it.”

  I’m like, Um. I wish you hit me up an hour ago, because that’s when Mom gave me the news. The Summer of Max was over before it began, she explained. Full-time at State Farm until senior year starts up. Doing data entry. Which will kill my soul.

  But then I think: Maybe Mom would let me go if I actually got another job? So I ask, “Are you serious?”

  “Am I serious,” she deadpans. “Have you seen me in action? I’m a YouTube viral video waiting to happen. This is clearly not happening with me in charge.”

  “What would I do?” I ask. I look to Jordan, and I can’t quite tell from his expression if this is good or not. And then I remember the homeless comment, so I figure it’s probably not a bad thing I’m doing from his way of thinking.

  “I mean … run the truck. You and Jordan. Figure out how to make this thing work.”

  Hearing it put like that is all I need. Because, hell yeah. I almost don’t care what they pay me. It’s like the perfect job. Take a food truck, make it work, save a family and their home. Failure not an option, which is when I’m at my best. I’d be like a superhero, really.

  In a world where a family’s last hope is a food truck with a limited menu, Max Morrison isn’t just a Good Samaritan, he’s a Great one. He’ll save the day, as he always does.

  And a superhero not working at State Farm, so. Yeah.

  “I’m in,” I say, and Jordan doesn’t react, and his mom lets out a dramatic sigh.

  “Thank God!” she says, and we make plans for me and Jordan to meet up the next day, as I have to get back to my mom and tell her the news.

  “You’re my savior,” Lydia says, and I think, How hard can this be? To save a food truck?

  When we get home Mom goes back out almost immediately, thank Goddess, and I head straight for my notebook.

  I sit at my desk, push aside a lava lamp, and start writing whatever comes to me.

  I shut my journal, amble over to my waterbed, flop down on my stomach, and as the waves undulate, I wonder what would happen if I stuffed my face into my pillow until I couldn’t breathe anymore. Would I stop myself?