The Music of What Happens - Bill Konigsberg Page 0,1
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.
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,