Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

“I realized I was an adult,” he said, “like, a full, legit adult, the day I finally admitted I love Fleetwood Mac.”

You’re excessively inflecting, Mark says to her when she gets like this, Nice Guy for Calm the fuck down, Julia.

She wishes now that she had spent all the years she worried about other people thinking she was weird actually being weird.

Julia recognizes it, that edge-of-adulthood progression: tightly wound and hyperconscious teenage preferences—dictated for centuries, inevitably, by a tasteless few—giving way to the awareness that you’re allowed to like some of the things that you’re not supposed to like, that doing so may distinguish you, and that someone else might also like the forbidden thing, or simply witness you liking it and love you for it. Her daughter is piecing together her own interior rule book; this seems as marvelous a development as her learning how to crawl.