Free The Quiet Streets of Winslow by Judy Troy Page A

without experience.” But he was right about the jealousy, except that it could take a different form, which was that a girl might want to be the girl she was jealous of.I saw that, listening to girls and watching them, and it seemed strange to me, to want to give up your body and never go back, leave your whole self behind as if it didn’t count for much.
    N EXT TO ME , Harmony was eating her sandwich while Jason and Billy talked to each other instead of to me, as if I had broken some sacred rule by asking a girl to sit with us. Then Harmony said to Jason, “Didn’t somebody in your family fight in Iraq?”
    â€œHis uncle,” Billy said. “His uncle died in Iraq.”
    â€œI’m sorry,” Harmony said. “I didn’t know that part.”
    â€œYeah, well, he went there and didn’t come back,” Jason said.
    â€œWas he your dad’s brother?”
    â€œMy mom’s,” Jason said. “Her younger brother. Well, her only brother.”
    â€œWhat does she think about Afghanistan?”
    â€œShe’s not in favor of people killing each other.”
    â€œIt seems crazy to me, too,” Harmony said.
    â€œMy dad will argue the whole patriotic thing,” Jason said, “and on the Fourth of July he’ll put the flag up and my mom will take it down and they won’t talk to each other for a few days.”
    â€œAfter my brother left for Afghanistan,” Harmony said, “my mom burned the flag my dad came home with. Just set it on fire in the trash can, right in front of him, and said, ‘Don’t you dare,’ when he tried to rescue it.”
    â€œThe war comes to Black Canyon City,” Jason said.
    â€œExactly.”
    â€œIt never goes away.”
    â€œI know,” Harmony said. “My brother doesn’t want to see us.”
    â€œWhy is that?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Harmony said. “I’m not sure. It’s like we’ve done something wrong, only we can’t figure out what.”
    After that we talked about other things, like the empty house down the street from school, where kids went to get stoned; and how screwed up it was that the school secretary was getting fired for being pregnant without having a husband, when everybody knew that the father of the baby was the football coach, who was married, sort of; and why it was that being naked on the Internet was such a big deal, when everybody at every moment was naked under their clothes. But that was mostly just Billy, Jason, and me talking shit, as Billy’s father would have called it, fooling around the way we usually did, with Harmony watching us like she had come from another planet in order to check out the earthling males, and was maybe not sure the trip was worth it.
    I N E NGLISH CLASS that afternoon Mr. Drake read us a poem, and Harmony sat with one elbow on her desk and her chin in her hand, looking out the window, where clouds were forming shadows on the desert. She had a black headband in her hair, which you could hardly see against the black of her hair. After a few minutes she looked down and followed the poem along in our textbook:
    I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
    And on a day we meet to walk the line
    And set the wall between us once again .
    We keep the wall between us as we go .
    â€œWhat is Frost saying about walls?” Mr. Drake said. “Are they good things or bad things?”
    â€œThey suck,” said somebody.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œWell, the guy in the poem has apple trees, and his neighbor has pine trees,” somebody else said, “and trees don’t eat each other. So the wall is, like, useless.”
    â€œSomething there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Mr. Drake read. “What’s the something?” he asked.
    â€œGod,” said a girl in the front row.
    â€œNo, nature,” said Harmony. “It proves it by making gaps in the wall.”
    â€œWell, it was