Cooper and I looked at each other again, amazed. Harmony—Harmony—spent her free time “dabbling in biosemiotics.”
She went on, “Like flocks of birds, for example—how they signal their formations to each other. And of course humans use biosemiotics all the time in social signaling. What we wear, how we carry ourselves, what facial expressions we use—it’s all signaling, all the time. And I’ve had a problem in my life with seeming a bit… aloof. Like I guess I have a resting shrew face.”
Cooper and I tilted our heads at each other, likeDoes she know that’s not the phrase?
Grandma Dodie wrote that down, too.
Harmony went on, “I’d just started a new job in a new city, and I was having trouble making friends. As usual. And so I started taking a deep dive into human social signaling, and comparing it to my own behavior, and trying to take some lessons from it—you know, like how smiling a lot will make people more likely to approach you.”
Not sure we neededthe science of semioticsto know that, but okay.
“And that’s when a crazy thing happened to me,” Harmony finished.
She had our attention now. We all leaned in.
“I randomly hooked up with this guy from Brazil,” Harmony began.
Oh, god. Where was this going? There were elderly people at the table!
“And he was a very enthusiastic person, if you know what I mean.”
I looked around the table. All the older women were nodding.
“Long story short: I woke up at his place late for work, had to do a sprint of shame back to the office, and I didn’t even notice until I got home after work that I’d had a massive bruise on my neck the whole time.”
“At work?” Mrs. Dunn asked, in a tone likeOh, dear.
Harmony nodded. “But guess what? I’m not always good at what they call ‘playing well with others.’ It’s never been easy for me to make friends…”
“What about your Brazilian?” Grandma Dodie countered.
Harmony winked. “I don’t have trouble makingthosekinds offriends. But real friends? That’s harder for me. Lots of days, I just go into the office, do my thing, and accidentally never talk to anybody. But on that day?Everybodytalked to me. In the halls. At the water cooler. Stopping by my doorway. I was the belle of the office park. And I thought: Maybe it was the signaling. Maybe everybody had a certain idea about me, and who I was, and then this unexpected sign broke that idea—and let them see me differently.”
“Verydifferently,” Mr. Dunn agreed.
“Sometimes,” Harmony said, “anythingdifferent is good.”
The table couldn’t argue with that.
“The thing is,” Harmony went on, “it worked. I got invited to happy hours after that. Someone asked me to join the softball team, and then a cooking class, and then an axe-throwing night. It absolutely changed my life.”
The adults were baffled. “It really worked?” Mrs. Dunn asked.
“Like a charm,” Harmony said with a wink. “It’s working right now.”
At that, Harmony’s pancakes arrived. She poured syrup all over them in a spiral while the adults just stared at her. Finally, just before stabbing a pie-slice-sized bite with her fork, Harmony looked around the table, smiled, shrugged, and said, “Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.”
I WASN’T HAPPY.Things were going off the rails. We were losing focus. This breakfast was supposed to be about Finn Turner—and Finn Turner only.
Next, in a bad-to-worse move that felt almost like deliberate sabotage, Brody announced broadly to the table, “I hear JoJo was a real rascal as a kid.”
And then the grown-ups were off to the races.
Wasn’t Brody supposed to behelping? Not sure why Ashley assumed he would do that.
AndwasI a rascal?
No!
