“I get that,” I tell her.
“You do?”
“Hell yeah. I don’t sleep unless I have some other noise going. TV, music, audiobooks.”
“So your mind can focus on something trivial and you don’t mentally spiral yourself into an adrenaline rush that keeps you awake …”
I raise a skeptical brow and her accuracy. “Exactly.”
“Do you want to walk?” She nods at the path that leads deeper into the oasis.
We fall into step at a nice lazy pace. It’s more palm trees, more ferns, a smattering of flamingoes. The pond becomes a stream that flows alongside us.
She clears her throat. “Which audiobooks do you like best?”
“A little-known fact, I’m kind of a lit nerd, so, usually just the classics”—I took a lot of English lit classes on the way to my journalism degree, but I don’t mention that at the moment—“plus they’re longwinded and slow, which definitely helps with trying to fall asleep. Right now I’m in the middle ofThe Island of Doctor Moreau.” When her eyes widen a bit, I ask, “You know it?”
“Yes! Although, full disclosure, I only read it because of something else I wanted to read that was based on it. Have you read any Silvia Moreno-Garcia?”
“No, but I think I know what you’re referring to. Is itThe Daughter of Doctor Moreau?” I remember seeing it recommended to me on Audible, probably because of my listening history.
She nods. “It’s a retelling of the H.G. Wells story, only it’s set in nineteenth-century Mexico. Moreau is French, of course, but he’s disgraced for his questionable experiments—“
“Naturally.”
Frankensteining human-animal hybrids would never go over well in the scientific community. Or anywhere.
“—so he’s forced to do his work at a remote hacienda, financed by wealthy patrons who hope to one day use the hybrids for slave labor.”
“Damn.”
“Right? It highlights the issues of the time period and location—colonization, Mayan rebels trying to fight back, being a child of two worlds.”
Thinking of Harmony’s ethnic background, her special interest in the book makes a lot of sense: Hispanic (Mexican?) father, Caucasian mother. I think that’s what she said during one of herLucky Starsinterviews, but also it’s been almost ten years since I saw that.
I ask her about it and she tells me that her grandfather is from Chiapas, Mexico, and that he came to L.A. as a young man (with his wife) and got a job at Universal Studios as a tour guide for Spanish-speaking tourists. Harmony’s father was born in California, grew up in Lincoln Heights, and went on to study engineering at USC, where he met Harmony’s mother, who majored in music.
Then Harmony asks me about my family, so I tell her how my grandparents were citrus farmers, hence my Ventura County background, and how my parents wanted to travel when they were first married and so didn’t have kids until they were thirty. Me being the youngest of three, my mom was forty when I was born, so I have a deep love for old music (hermusic, because whenever I listen to Jim Croce or Dan Fogelberg, it reminds me of her).
We walk and talk for at least an hour, skating across random topics, from family dynamics to food preferences to the rapid degradation of the Marvel movie franchise, and I realize how much I’ve been craving a real conversation that isn’t about the music industry. She must have been too, because not once do we discuss recording contracts or shows or social media presence or collaborative projects or any artists we might mutually know.
That path we’ve taken loops back around to the resort, and the music is audible again. The bass thumps gently. I can just make out the melody and the words.
Track twelve, “Vibe Check.” It’s the only ballad on the album.
Harmony and I both listen to it for a minute.
It’s a wild thing to do, but somehow it feels right, so I clear my throat and say, “I know this is really cheesy but … would you maybe want to … dance?”
“Dance?” Harmony repeats. ”You mean the way they do in movies when there’s no music?”
“Except there is music.”
“Sort of …”
“Well, I’d like to say I would have asked you inside, if we’d seen each other in there, but … I doubt I would have had the courage. So since it’s just us …”
She smiles a little. “Okay.”
