Harmony Read Free

idea. Miach raised an eyebrow at my silence and went on. “It’s so the kids won’t die. Kids used to die on jungle gyms a long time ago. You know that?”
    I shook my head. I was dumb. Both in the sense of being speechless and in the sense of being an idiot. I’d never heard of a kid dying by accident or even getting hurt on the jungle gym before. Miach talked like she was playing a flute, an entrancing tone that was as soft as it was cold and utterly devoid of emotion.
    “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, jungle gyms were made out of metal—geometric lattices made of crisscrossing pipes.”
    “Kids would fall off the top?”
    “They sure would. Jungle gyms back then didn’t catch them like the ones do now. Metal bars aren’t intelligent. They can’t change, and they aren’t even soft. Some kids hit their heads on the bars and died of skull fractures. And the sandboxes were breeding pools for viruses and bacteria. The park was a very dangerous place.”
    I hadn’t the faintest idea why this person, arguably the strangest girl in class, was giving me an archaeological lecture on the history of jungle gyms. At least by then I had regained enough presence of mind to play along.
    “So,” I ventured, “what we call parks nowadays are very different from what they used to be.”
    She shook her head. “Not really. The look of the park hasn’t changed for a century. There are trees and things to play on. There were kids back then who sat on benches reading books like I was just now. What’s different is that the sand in the sandbox and the jungle gym and the climbing ropes weren’t intelligent. They didn’t care what happened to the kids that played on them.”
    “Sorry, that thing you were looking at just now, that’s a book?” I asked.
    “That’s right, Tuan Kirie. I was reading a book. I always carry one around with me. I usually read it during breaks in class.”
    Miach pulled her book out of her bag and showed it to me. The cover read An Unremarkable Man .
    “Doesn’t sound that interesting.”
    Miach laughed at that. “As I thought! I know I have a tendency to fade into the woodwork, but still, I’m amazed you haven’t noticed me before—that girl always off on her own, always reading some strange thing . You don’t pay much attention to your surroundings, do you?”
    How hadn’t I noticed her? Practically the only girl who didn’t join in any of the class groups, reading some strange artifact during recess? I thought for a moment that maybe no one had noticed her but immediately dismissed that. With all the initial interest in making friends with Miach, the other kids must have seen her, wondered about her. I was the only one oblivious.
    “It’s because you don’t want to pay attention to people. You don’t want to try to be friends. That’s who you want to be, isn’t it? You run with the other girls in their little groups, and you go out to volunteer on the weekends, but the person you’re most concerned with is yourself. You don’t give a rat’s ass about harmony. That’s why you didn’t even bother to notice me and my book.”
    She was right.
    She was right, and I was sure no one else but she had ever noticed this about me. It took me a while to regain my footing as I considered how to respond. All I managed was a completely tangential, and ultimately stupid, observation.
    “Aren’t books kind of heavy and hard to carry around?”
    “Yes, they are heavy and hard to carry around, Miss Kirie. Being heavy and hard to carry around is downright antisocial behavior these days, don’t you think?” she said in a voice like a boy soprano’s. And then she began to walk, holding her bag in her hands behind her back. I’m not sure to this day why I followed her. I only remember that it seemed as if what she said, her every word, was cutting into the heart of something I’d been unable to express for so long, and hearing her say it felt good. Or maybe it was that she had