Here We Are Now by Jasmine Warga (1)

I.

There are people that you never expect to show up on your doorstep. For me, this list begins with the pope, the president, and my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Jenkins, because she absolutely hated me.

He would’ve been somewhere on my Most Unlikely List. Probably top ten. But there was a time, not so long ago, when he wouldn’t have been on that list. There was actually a time when I would camp out by the window, willing him to pull up into the driveway. I always imagined him driving a black Mustang with a loud, rumbling engine. I used to picture him in the driver’s seat, his sunglasses pushed up in his messy pale corn-colored hair, wearing his mint green plaid pajama pants that had become so iconic thanks to the Rolling Stone photo shoot.

But after three years of unanswered letter after unanswered letter, I’d finally accepted that it was never going to happen.

Until it did.

When I heard the first knock, I freaked out. We weren’t expecting any guests and I have the type of brain that always goes to the Absolute Worst-Case Scenario. And so I did what anyone would do when they believe someone is attempting to break into their house and hack them to death with a chainsaw—I called for help.

“Harlow?” I called out. She was in the kitchen whipping up a batch of her pistachio cupcakes with buttercream icing.

“Yes?” she answered over the noisy whirl of the electric mixer and the Dresden Dolls record that was turned on full blast. Amanda Palmer was crooning about jeeps and betrayal. Harlow was in a phase where she was both nursing a major crush on Amanda Palmer and wanting to be Amanda Palmer.

“I think there’s someone at the door.”

I heard the electric mixer switch off. “Yeah. I thought I heard a knock. Are you expecting anyone?”

I reclined farther into the couch and pressed pause on Netflix, frantically trying to remember the name of an artsy French movie that I could turn on. If Harlow and I were about to be savagely murdered by a serial killer, I wanted to be remembered for my unimpeachable taste in foreign cinema, not my penchant for reality cooking competitions. “No,” I answered, this time lowering my voice in case said murderer was eavesdropping on us. “Are you?”

Harlow walked into the living room. My mother’s paisley-patterned cooking apron was draped over Harlow’s tiny frame, sporting some fresh flour splotches. There was also a sliver of icing on the left side of her face. Harlow was a terrific baker, albeit not a neat one. “Nope. I told Quinn she could come over later for cupcakes and pizza, but she doesn’t get off work until six.” Harlow pulled her phone out of the back pocket of her frayed denim shorts, which she was wearing over polka-dotted tights. “What time is it, anyway?”

I glanced at the cable box. “Twelve thirty-one. Definitely not six.”

“Okay. So it isn’t Quinn. But that doesn’t mean it’s Charles Manson.”

Quinn was Harlow’s girlfriend. And while she wasn’t Charles Manson, she did sort of terrify me. They’d been together seven and a half months, and I still didn’t feel confident that Quinn liked me. I worried that Quinn didn’t find me edgy or interesting enough, or worse, thought I was a complete nutball. How I responded to situations like the one that was presently unfolding did not bode well for my score on the nutball scale.

“Tal,” Harlow said, using her knowing, level voice with me. “Why don’t you just go open the door and see who it is? I’ll be right here.”

I bit my bottom lip and stared at the frozen image of Gordon Ramsay on the television screen. I hadn’t yet switched over to the French new wave film whose title I couldn’t remember.

The doorbell rang again.

“Tal,” Harlow repeated. “Answer the door.”

“But we don’t know who it is.”

We’d entered our usual call-and-response pattern. I like to think that’s one of the hallmarks of Bestfrienddom—that comfortable circular conversation.

She sighed and I watched her flip her phone over in her hands. I had a sinking feeling that she was debating whether or not to text Quinn and tell her I was being a complete nutball. Great.

The only thing worse than my best friend being infinitely cooler than me was that now she had a girlfriend who was infinitely cooler than both of us. And I could feel Harlow slipping away—slowly, but still slipping. Being pulled into the orbit of Quinn and Quinn’s alluring pack of friends. It terrified me.

In the past few months, something had shifted between Harlow and me. It was difficult to put a finger on. It wasn’t like an earthquake or anything that dramatic, but there was a fissure. Before, I had been the first person Harlow told everything to. And of course, I told her everything first too. Really, there wasn’t anyone other than my mom who I confided in besides Harlow. Now that Harlow had Quinn, I was Harlow’s second person. But she was still my first. And that made me feel sad.

No one wants to be in second place.

When Harlow had first come over today, she pretended like everything was normal. But I knew it was a tactic. Harlow didn’t ever want to talk about what had changed between us. She wanted to keep on pretending like things were as they always had been, even though they clearly weren’t.

I wondered if Harlow was only here now because Mom had called Harlow and asked her to come. I could easily imagine the phone call: “Harlow, dear,” my mother would’ve said in her formal tone that she believed disguised her ever-present accent. “I’m going to be away for a few days in Paris, giving a lecture at the launch of a new gallery. Would you do me a huge favor and check in on Tal from time to time for me?”

“Yes. Of course, Dr. Abdallat,” Harlow would’ve said, because despite the frayed denim jean shorts and polka-dotted tights and chipped dark nail polish, Harlow at her core was still the authority-pleasing third grader who turned in every book report a week before it was due. She was also one of the few people I knew who referred to my mother as Dr. Abdallat. Yes, she had a degree in art history and theory, but she was a professor, not a medical doctor.

“Okay. Fine. Let’s just take a deep breath and behave like normal people,” Harlow insisted. She marched toward the window. She pulled back the thin lavender curtain and let out a gasp.

“What is it?” I whispered, my body stiffening.

“Taliah Sahar Abdallat, you’re going to want to see this.”

My throat went dry. “Seriously, what is it?”

“Taliah.” Her voice was rigid. “Come here.”

I pulled myself up from the couch. I walked to stand beside her and looked out the window. The mid-summer daylight was bouncing off the window in a blinding fashion and I had to blink a few times to make sure my eyes were really seeing what I thought they were seeing.

It was him.

Three years too late.

Or really sixteen years too late if we’re being honest.

But it was him.