Free Strange Sweet Song by Adi Rule

rolling eye of the spirit of the Forest himself. He was so taken with this lovely, sad light that he left his sleeping bear caves and diligent worms and shivering nests and, for a time, thought of himself as a great cat instead.

 
    Eighteen
     
    S ING STEPS THROUGH THE ORANGE door with the chipped paint into a cold, damp classroom filled with old chair-desk hybrids.
    This is a mistake.
    She should have listened to her father when he suggested she take The Artist’s Life as her arts elective. It is common knowledge that Anybody Who is Anybody takes The Artist’s Life. But she couldn’t stand a semester learning the elusive rules of making it in the professional world. She’s already had seventeen years of that.
    So she chose The Nature of Music. An easy A, right?
    But she is shocked to find strange, ten-lined staves covered with spiky, shaky notes on the whiteboard. The walls are hung with scientific-looking diagrams of what appear to be upside-down larynxes and tracheas and lungs. Has she stumbled into a science-fiction movie?
    The teacher looks like someone’s cookie-distributing grandma. Her white hair puffs as she takes papers and books from her tote bag and arranges them on the desk at the front of the classroom. The lenses in her silver glasses look like bubbles.
    Sing, not fooled by the teacher’s benign appearance, scowls at the strange staves—this class is going to be weird and technical, not philosophical. Something else for her to fail at.
    She finds a seat by herself, which isn’t difficult; there are only four other students in the room. She sits two chair-desks behind a small boy with curly brown hair and three chair-desks over from a pair of older girls—one large and dark, one small and fair—who seem to be best friends. The only other student is an athletic-looking guy with a goatee. As Sing grudgingly gets out her notebook, he is joined by another athletic guy with unappealing sideburns.
    “All here, I think?” the teacher says. “Great! Welcome to The Nature of Music. I’m Mrs. Bigelow.” Sing flips open her notebook and starts to doodle.
    Mrs. Bigelow begins with, “What is music?” and Sing begins to drift. She knows the discussion will turn to alternative instruments, unfettered dissonance, string quartets in helicopters—all the crazy stuff students are supposed to be impressed by. She’s never been able to get her head around most of it. It feels like pretend.
    But a few minutes into the lecture, Mrs. Bigelow hefts an ancient tape player onto her desk and presses “play.” Sing hears the rustle of a breeze through leaves, then a birdcall. It starts as a little growl, then shoots up high and back down. Grrrrrlll, grrEEEEEEooo. Grrrllll, grrEEEEEEooo.
    Mrs. Bigelow lets the call play five or six times. “I’ll be impressed if any of you can identify that bird.”
    The large girl says, “Sparrow?”
    “Nope.”
    The curly-haired boy says, “Grosbeak?”
    Mrs. Bigelow smiles. “Nope. It’s a little bird from Southeast Asia called the silver-eared laughingthrush. Here’s a picture.” She holds up a large book, open to a page with a color photograph of a grayish bird. The bird has dull yellow patches on its wings and a funny red pattern on its head that looks like a hat. Sing’s gaze lingers on the picture for a moment before she goes back to doodling.
    “Did you catch the song?” Mrs. Bigelow asks. “It’s a fairly simple one. Can anyone sing it back to me? Sing?”
    Sing looks up. Why are all the teachers calling on her today? She keeps her expression neutral: not hostile enough to be considered insolent, but definitely not engaged.
    “No?” Mrs. Bigelow says. “Laura?”
    The pale girl looks around nervously, then tries, “Um, grrrrll, cheeEEE!”
    The other students laugh, not unkindly, and the girl looks at her best friend and giggles. Mrs. Bigelow says, “That was pretty good. Tom? How about you? Want to try?”
    Sideburns exchanges a look with Goatee and says,