Here We Are Now

by Jasmine Warga

  “Yeah. But I’m sure she has her reasons. I trust your mom. What I don’t know is if we can trust him.”

  I grabbed the cupcake and took another bite. “It’s not like he’s going to ax-murder me or something.”

  “Right.” Harlow looked for a moment like she was actually considering the likelihood of that. “I’d sure hope not. But there are a million other dangers involved in going off on a trip with a strange man besides getting ax-murdered.”

  “Is he a strange man?”

  “Yes,” Harlow said emphatically. “I know you think he’s your—”

  “He’s already admitted he is!”

  “Yeah,” Harlow pointed out. “He’s admitted it, but your mom has never told you that.”

  “Exactly. And isn’t that fucked up? For fuck’s sake, she told me my dad was dead. Dead, Harlow. That’s a pretty traumatic thing to tell a little girl, especially if it isn’t true.”

  “Maybe,” Harlow said slowly.

  “Harlow. Come on.”

  “Okay. It’s pretty messed up. But only if he is, in fact, your father. And we don’t know that for sure.”

  “Should I demand we get a DNA test right now? Should I march in there and swab out some of his saliva?”

  She rolled her eyes, exasperated. “I wasn’t saying that.”

  “So what were you saying?”

  “That you should call your mom.”

  “But she’s going to tell me not to go.”

  “Exactly.”

  We stared at each other for a few moments.

  “So I have an idea,” I finally said.

  “Taliah,” she groaned. “Please. Not one of your ideas.”

  “Hear me out.”

  She licked frosting off her thumbnail.

  “Why don’t you and I both go with him to Oak Falls.”

  “Taliah,” she repeated sternly.

  “And that way, you’ll know I’m safe.”

  She frowned. “It doesn’t work like that. Plus, I made plans with Quinn tonight.”

  I matched her frown. “You can reschedule with Quinn.”

  Harlow gave me a helpless look. “I just don’t know, Tal.”

  “Okay. How about you think about it this way? Push everything else aside and focus on the fact that Julian Oliver, famous front man of an iconic rock band, is sitting in my living room asking us to take a road trip with him. Forget the other details. You’d say yes to that.”

  “Asking you.”

  “Semantics,” I said.

  “Road trip to Oak Falls, Indiana.”

  “So?” I said, and repeated, “Semantics.”

  “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”

  “Semantics,” I said, a big stupid grin spreading across my face. “Come on, Har. This summer has been so boring so far. Let’s do something fun.”

  She frowned again. “I don’t think it’s been boring.”

  I groaned. “That’s because you have a hot girlfriend. But me? Not so much action happening.”

  Harlow made a face.

  “I’m kidding. But seriously, come on. Let’s do something memorable. Me and you.”

  “And him,” Harlow said, glancing toward the living room.

  “Yeah. And him. The famous freaking rock star.”

  “That we don’t know.”

  “Right. Which is the point of the aforementioned trip,” I argued. “Plus,” I added, hoping to play to Harlow’s sentimental side, “it will give me a chance to meet my grandparents. I’ve never met any of my grandparents.”

  Harlow looked uncertain. “That’s because they still live in Jordan.”

  “Lived,” I corrected her. “Mom’s dad died before she even came to the US. Her mom died a few years later.”

  “Right.”

  “So this would be really special. It’s a chance to meet my grandfather before he passes.” I watched her facial features wrinkle in thought. “And to meet my grandma. Maybe she’s really cool. Maybe I could actually forge a relationship with one of my four grandparents. Twenty-five percent isn’t great, but it’s something.”

  Harlow took a deep breath, pulled out her phone, and texted something quickly. I could tell she was softening.

  “And,” I continued, piling it on, “this is my chance to really learn what went down with my parents, you know? This is my history, Harlow. Don’t you think I deserve to know it?”

  Her eyebrows knitted together, her eyes still glued to her phone screen.

  “Is that a yes?” I pressed.

  “Okay, fine. But when we get there, you call your mom.”

  I grinned. “Deal.”

  VI.

  I didn’t pack anything. Only the clothes I was wearing—a long-sleeve striped T-shirt, my acid-wash jeans, and red Converses. In retrospect, packing nothing other than the clothes I was wearing was probably a poor choice, but I wanted to get on the road before Harlow had a chance to change her mind.

  Apparently all of my previous adolescent fantasies had been correct when I’d pictured Julian driving up to our house in a vintage Mustang convertible with a throaty, rumbling engine, because I presently found myself in the backseat of such a car. Though, in fairness, I bet that I’d read about his car in one of the zillions of articles on him I’d devoured when I became convinced he was my dad, and that tidbit must’ve wedged its way into my brain.

  Outside the car window, my neighborhood was a blur of brick houses, anemic newly planted trees, and perfectly manicured green lawns. My subdivision features four models of houses that alternate block by block in an almost eerily Stepfordish pattern. Seriously, I know Arcade Fire wrote The Suburbs about their neighborhood in Houston, but that record could definitely have been written about my town. To answer Win Butler’s question: It is impossible to escape the sprawl when it comes to Chester, Ohio.

  It’s a bummer, actually, because the area closer to Bellwether University, where Mom works, is much more hip. It’s full of slanted old Victorian houses that press right up against natural food markets and used-book stores. But Mom insisted on buying a home in the suburbs because of the way elementary school zoning worked.

  Before we’d fully exited the cookie-cutter streets of my subdivision, Julian requested that I put on some music. And much to his chagrin, I’d chosen the Hamilton soundtrack.

  “This is really what the kids are listening to these days?” he asked.

  “Yes!” I said, and Harlow added, “It actually is. I don’t even like Broadway musicals and I love Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda is a genius.”

  “What makes it so genius?” Julian asked, shouting so that we could hear him over Daveed Diggs’s rapping.

  “SO. MANY. THINGS,” Harlow and I said in unison.

  “Like?” he prompted.

  “Well, for starters, the diverse cast and the mixing of hip-hop music with more classical Broadway ballads help reclaim this central piece of American history for those of us who might not have previously felt like it was ours,” I explained. “I want to someday write a show like Hamilton. One that inspires brown girls to claim their due.”

  “Wow,” Julian said. “Very cool. Though I’m sure this won’t come as a big surprise to you or anything, I know jack shit about musicals.” I saw his face twist up in the rearview mirror, his lips puckered like he’d just bit into a fresh lemon. “But my God. My child wants to write musicals. Like we’re talking about the same thing, right? Singing-dancing plays?”

  “Yup,” I said cheerfully.

  “She’s kind of a nerd,” Harlow said, nudging her shoulder against mine. “But Tal, be honest. You don’t want to just write musicals. You also write songs.”

  Julian’s eyebrows shot up. “You write songs?”

  I was miffed. It wasn’t Harlow’s place to reveal that. I felt safe offering the tidbit about musicals because that was something I’d thought about wanting to do way far off in the future. The way I sometimes thought about wanting to hike the Inca trail or visit the Galapago
s Islands. It wasn’t concrete. It wasn’t yet personal to me the way that songs I wrote with Harlow were.

  I nodded silently, and Harlow added, “Yeah. She composes songs on the piano and the two of us come up with lyrics.” She looked at me eagerly, clearly oblivious to my irritation, and then exclaimed, “We should perform one of our songs for Julian!”

  I shook my head. “We don’t do that anymore.”

  Julian looked at us through the rearview mirror. “What do you mean?”

  I shrugged and stared down at my sneakers. “We don’t write songs anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  Neither Harlow nor I said anything.

  Julian cleared his throat, fully aware he’d waded into awkward territory. I thought he would press me more about my songwriting, but I was relieved when he let it go. “I don’t know what makes me feel weirder,” he joked. “That I’m old enough to have a sixteen-year-old daughter or that I’m relying on that daughter to let me know what the kids are listening to these days. I used to be the kid, ya know? Shit, I’m old.” Julian nervously glanced at us. “And I feel like a chaperone. An old-ass chaperone.”

  “I think you mean chauffeur,” Harlow corrected, not looking up from her cell phone, where she was texting Quinn.

  The highway spit out in front of us. Flat and gray and framed by expanses of cornfields that stretched as far as the eye could see. The late midday light streamed into the car, a hazy pink, and it made me feel sentimental and foggy, like this moment was already a memory and I was just living inside it.

  Julian must’ve seen something on my face because he asked, “You okay, kid?”

  I pressed my lips together and nodded.

  “You don’t have to be nervous. My folks—” And then he corrected, “your folks. They’re your folks, too.” He shot me a worried look. I hadn’t been that nervous and now I suddenly was.

  “Don’t be nervous,” he repeated. “They’ll be ecstatic to meet you.”

  “Do they know we’re coming?” Harlow asked, not looking up from her phone.

  I was slightly annoyed that Harlow felt comfortable enough to take charge of the conversation. To ask questions and insert herself without any shred of discomfort. But that was Harlow. Her parents, like my mother, were professors at Bellwether University. While my mother was the reserved, serious type of professor who dressed mostly in all black and was constantly carrying a café latte, Harlow’s parents were the classic bohemian-style professors. They regularly served Tofurky and kombucha at dinner and always encouraged Harlow to speak her mind, teaching her that there wasn’t a single topic of conversation that was off-limits. This led to Harlow being the type of person who had never encountered a situation where she wasn’t immediately chatty and unguarded.

  I guess you could say Harlow and I were opposites in that way. And usually I was fine to let her do the talking, but this situation felt different.

  “Why? Who’s asking?” Julian joked.

  Harlow didn’t respond. She was completely sucked into her phone.

  Julian cleared his throat again with a cough. The action of someone who was not used to being ignored. “Who are you texting?” Julian’s tone was light, but it reeked of adult desperation. I was embarrassed for him and I squirmed in my seat. “Your boyfriend?” Julian continued to tease. I cringed and stared down at my ragged fingernails.

  “Girlfriend,” Harlow snapped.

  “Oh,” Julian said.

  “Oh?” Harlow looked up from her phone.

  “Nothing,” Julian said. “Good for you.”

  “Good for me?” Harlow let out a fake laugh. “You’re such the prototypical middle-aged white dude.”

  “Whoa!” He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. “Shots fired.”

  “I’m calling it how I see it,” she answered, and gazed pointedly out the window. The fading sunlight glinted against her nose ring, which was new. Quinn had talked her into it. And as much as I wanted to begrudge it because it was yet another New Thing That Came from Quinn, the piercing suited Harlow. It gave her a glamorous edge.

  But as I watched her, my feelings of affection slowly slipped to anger. It was strange—I’d felt totally fine ragging on him about his reaction to the Nina Simone song, silently judging his desperation vying for attention moments ago, but listening to Harlow lay into him made me irritated. He was my dad to judge and criticize. Not hers. Though I couldn’t really argue with her—he was pretty much the definition of a middle-aged white dude, albeit with the black skinny jeans.

  “Kids these days,” Julian said. “You guys are all language police.”

  “Just because we want the world to be more equitable and less oppressive doesn’t make us the ‘language police,’” Harlow said.

  “Yeah, but if you’re constantly outraged about everything, how will you ever know when to be really upset? How will you know when something is really worth fighting for?”

  “I think I’ll manage,” Harlow whispered in the way she only did when she was actually very pissed off.

  I pondered Julian’s question for a moment, and I wasn’t really sure. I was used to feeling lots of things, but I still hadn’t learned how to categorize and weigh them. That felt like a task I would master years later when I was forced to wear a tweed skirt and cream-colored pumps to my office job. As far as I was concerned, my job at sixteen was to feel things. To really feel them.

  And feeling seemed good enough for now.

  “I think you’d really like Harlow’s girlfriend’s band,” I said, trying to broker a peace offering between the two of them. But really maybe I was trying to broker a peace offering between Harlow and me. I wanted to fix whatever was broken between us, but the problem was I didn’t know how to fix something that neither of us had admitted was broken. “Really?” Julian said. “I’d like to hear it. But I’d also like to hear one of your songs.”

  I ignored his last comment and turned to Harlow. “Put on one of Quinn’s songs.”

  Harlow looked at me nervously. A few moments ago, she had been all bravado, triumphantly calling Julian out on all of his failings and microaggressions, and now the tips of her ears were turning red and she was nervously flipping her phone back and forth between her palms. “I don’t know. He probably isn’t interested in hearing it.”

  “Wait. Is it another Broadway tune?” Julian asked.

  “Hell no,” Harlow said quickly. And then she looked at me and added, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  “You guys are lame. Hamilton is a true masterpiece,” I groaned.

  “You’re right. And you know I like it, okay. But I’d still rather listen to ‘Kiss Off’ over and over again than hear George Washington rap,” Harlow said.

  I rolled my eyes as Julian exclaimed, “Yes!” and raised his hand and tapped the car’s ceiling excitedly. He craned his neck back to flash Harlow a grin. “The Violent Femmes are the very best.” He stuck his hand out to high-five her. “Now you’re giving me some hope for the future of the youth of this country.”

  “‘I hope you know this will go down on your permanent record,’” Harlow sneered-sang.

  “‘Oh, yeah? Well, don’t get so distressed/Did I happen to mention that I’m impressed?’” Julian sang back.

  I was already starting to feel like a third wheel on a date when Julian peered back at Harlow and said, “You sure things aren’t mixed up and you’re not actually the one who’s my daughter?”

  Harlow’s eyes shot straight to the floor mats. The whole car went silent. It was much too soon for that type of joke. Julian coughed awkwardly in what I assumed was an attempt to recover.

  “Sooooo,” he breathed out, “do you want to put on some of your girl’s jams or what?”

  Harlow glanced at me as if asking, Is that okay? Or do we hate him now? Should I ice him out? Loyalty. Despite everything that was broken between us, at least the two of us still had that.

  I gave her a slight nod.

  Harlow leane
d forward and grabbed the auxiliary cord. She plugged her phone in and soon Quinn’s tinny voice filled the car. I’d never found Quinn’s band to be anything to write home about (or perhaps more accurately, to write Julian about), but Harlow loved them, of course. I briefly wondered if it was the same for Mom when she listened to S.I.T.A.’s songs. The thought made me feel queasy and guilty and I tried to chase it away.

  Quinn’s band is all slamming drums and squealing guitar chords. It’s messy and capital-L Loud. I’ve gone with Harlow to a few shows, and I always stand out in the worst kind of way. I never know what to do with my hands or feet. Everyone else in their cheetah-print halter tops and red leather skirts seems to know exactly when to effortlessly move their hips or bob their head, and I end up feeling like I’m back in eighth grade at a bar mitzvah, fumbling my way through the Electric Slide. So yeah, I guess the polite way to put it is: I’m not the intended audience for Quinn’s music. Though I do love the one song that Quinn sings that I think is about Harlow—“Cupcakes for Dinner.”

  Julian enthusiastically clapped his hands against the steering wheel. I didn’t know him well enough to know if he genuinely was enjoying the music, or he just wanted to be kind. Regardless, I was glad he was kind. I sort of loved him for it. It was the first moment of the day where I felt something brew inside me, a recognition of something to admire about him that was deeper than his fame and celebrity.

  “This is pretty good,” he finally said.

  I watched Harlow let out a shallow breath of relief. Her bravado returned. “I know. They’re amazing.”

  In the rearview mirror, Julian flashed me a wry smile. A smile that had nothing to do with happiness, but everything to do with hope. A smile that said: We are here now. Together. We should be happy. Please be happy.

  A wish of a smile.

  I returned it, making a silent wish of my own, and then turned my eyes to the road unfurling before us.

  “So,” Harlow said after she’d turned off Quinn’s band and switched to a vintage punk rock station curated by Google Music. Julian nodded his head along to a song with a sloppy bass line and tangled drumbeat. “Are you gonna tell us the story of you and Dr. Abdallat?”