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?”
In the rearview mirror, I watched Julian swallow. He stopped nodding his head along to the music. His face blanched.
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean,” Harlow continued. “How’d the two of you meet? Tell us all about your romantic courtship.”
Her voice unnerved me. But more so, what she was asking unnerved me. I, of course, desperately wanted to know everything. Every tiny detail that made up my family history and, in only a slightly hyperbolic sense, made up the fiber of my very being.
I elbowed Harlow, which I had meant as a signal to knock it off, but instead it made her push it further. “And why did the two of you break up? There’s got to be a juicy story there, right?”
I swallowed. That was the question that had been lurking in my brain since I’d discovered The Shoebox three years ago. The question that so much hinged on. Why had Julian left? Had he not wanted me? Was he cruel to my mother? Worse, maybe, was she cruel to him?
I desperately wanted my answer. Answers. But I also didn’t. Because sometimes there is freedom in not knowing. You are able to fill in the blanks with whatever whimsical explanations you wish. You are able to cast the characters how you want, mold their motivations to your liking. You are in control of the narrative. You’re not bound by cold and hard and possibly upsetting facts.
I expected Julian to shrug off Harlow. I didn’t expect him to crack open so easily. But to my surprise, he drew a hand through his messy hair and said, “Okay. I guess I should start with when Lena landed in America.”
Julian Oliver was going to fill in those blank spaces.
Oak Falls, 1994
America was not what Lena had expected. Sure, as the plane had hovered above the tarmac, about to touch down in New York City, she’d spotted the landmarks she’d been primed to watch for—the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the various skyscrapers that burst from the ground like overgrown teeth. She couldn’t stand looking at them for more than a few moments. They made her unreasonably nervous. And nauseous. The gravity-defying nature of the city unsettled her.
But her time in New York City had been a complete blur. A whirlwind through customs, where the shaggy-haired man had made her repeat everything at least three times. His hair color was one she’d never seen before—a bright orangish yellow. It reminded her of the sun back home in the late afternoon when it shone so brightly and whitened the whole sky.
“To study,” she’d said. “At Hampton University in Indiana.” She’d practiced saying “Indiana” many times before she’d boarded the flight from Amman, but now that the moment was here, the foreign, multisyllabic word stuck to her tongue like wax.
The customs officer had looked at her with confusion. She’d found this odd, as back in Jordan she’d been the top English student in her class. She’d been praised for her authentic accent, her perfect pronunciation.
“Study what?” the officer had asked. He’d run his hand through his curiously colored hair.
“Medicine,” she said. This is what she’d told her mother in their endless discussions of her plan to go to America to study. She’d known then that her only sliver of a chance of getting her mother to agree to her outrageous plan was to pledge an allegiance to a career as a doctor. That would be a source of family pride—her following in the footsteps of her father. As her father was dead, and he’d had no sons, this was a particularly compelling proposal.
And so her mother had finally acquiesced. But now, standing before the customs officer, Lena knew in her heart of hearts that she would never become a doctor. Something about that realization thrilled her. Something about that realization also terrified her and shamed her.
“And you have a student visa?”
Lena nodded, her tongue becoming waxier by the minute. She fumbled in her purse for the corresponding paperwork.
The whole ordeal was stilted and uncomfortable, but she’d made it past customs with her stamped passport and her single rolling suitcase with the ornery left wheel that always pulled to the right. And now she found herself riding in her cousin’s husband’s car, winding through grassy hills toward a town called Oak Falls. A place she couldn’t even imagine, no matter how many hours she’d spent poring over the glossy brochure that Hampton University had sent to her from across the Atlantic Ocean.
She remembered the day that brochure had arrived. She’d held it in her hands as if the paper itself were made of magic. Her golden ticket.
She glanced out the window and had two distinct thoughts:
I’ve never seen so much green in my whole life.
I miss home.
The ache for home was palpable. It wasn’t just a feeling. It was a physical thing that had taken up space in her stomach and was crawling its way up her chest.
“It’ll fade,” her cousin said, as if she’d read Lena’s mind. She briefly looked over at her. Her cousin was sitting in the backseat with her while her husband drove them. “It will get easier. The first year is the hardest. If you can make it the first year, you will make it. If not, you can always return to Jordan.”
She said the last sentence like it wasn’t really an option. And of course, Lena knew it wasn’t. She’d made her choice and now she had to make it a year.
She had to make it forever.