Free Strange Sweet Song by Adi Rule Page A

“Bck, bck, bck-AWW!”
    The teacher laughs with the students. “While that wasn’t quite a silver-eared laughingthrush, it was brave of you to try. You are definitely not a chicken.” The other students chuckle. They’re warming up to Mrs. Bigelow, even as Sing’s heart grows colder.
    “So imagine you are a juvenile silver-eared laughingthrush, instead of a juvenile human being.” Mrs. Bigelow shoots Sideburns a lighthearted glance. “You need to communicate with others of your species. You need to be able to say things like ‘I’m in danger!’ or ‘I’m looking for a mate!’ or just ‘I’m here!’ How do you learn to do it?”
    The pale girl raises her hand. “Instinct?”
    “Not as much as you may think,” Mrs. Bigelow says. “Anyone else?”
    “Listen to your parents?” Goatee says.
    “Exactly! Most songbirds learn their songs from their parents, the way you and I learn language—and, for many of us here, music.”
    Was that a glance in Sing’s direction? It better not have been.
    Mrs. Bigelow presses “play” again, and more birdsong hisses through. It is the same song … almost, Sing thinks. Something’s not right.
    She realizes what the strange, many-lined staves are just before Mrs. Bigelow says, “Here are sonograms of the two different songs I just played you. Left to right represents time, and low to high is frequency. The smudgy lines that look like notes are the sounds the birds are making. As you can see, the second song—which is the juvenile—is just slightly different from the first. He hasn’t quite learned it yet.”
    Pencils scribble things in notebooks. Sing wonders what everyone’s writing. She looks at her doodle. A shepherdess in a flouncy dress.
    “We don’t have any silver-eared laughingthrushes here,” the teacher says. “But I brought a couple of field guides to help you. You’re each going to choose a common local bird—nothing too hard to find, please, since you’ll have to study it—and learn its songs. Birdsongs can be quite lovely and inspiring; several famous composers, like Olivier Messiaen, have even tried to imitate them in their works. I’ll give you until the end of class to choose your species.”
    Mrs. Bigelow hands a book to the best friends and another to the athletes. The curly-haired boy moves over to the best friends, but Sing stays put, adding a crook and bow to her shepherdess. Mrs. Bigelow doesn’t say anything.
    What am I doing? Sing thinks. Do I think my life will be better if I get bad grades? If I get kicked out of the conservatory? She imagines telling her father she’s coming home, going back to her old school. That she couldn’t cut it here. She can see his placid face, hear his disappointment.
    Yet she continues to doodle. She draws the Felix now, Durand’s “great beast.” A big cat with oversize teeth and small, mean eyes. She has never understood why the beast is always portrayed as a cat—doesn’t felix mean “happy,” not “cat”? She has a feeling Marta would know.
    Marta.
    Sing draws the Queen of the Tree Maidens, tall and skinny and knobby, with lots of freckles, tangled hair, and enormous, vapid eyes. She’s just putting leaves around her face like a foliage beard when Mrs. Bigelow says, “Okay, we just have a few moments left, and I’d like to hear from each of you which species you chose.” She writes the students’ choices: grosbeaks, mourning doves, tufted titmice (Goatee and Sideburns snicker), chickadees.
    “Cardinals,” Laura says, and Mrs. Bigelow looks up.
    “Hmm … I think I have seen some this year, yes?”
    “I saw one on the way over.” Laura points to the small, open windows. Mrs. Bigelow nods and writes it down. Sing looks; she can see the fading green of the quad, the turning leaves. A lone, massive tree sits across the way, bulbous and smooth, like molasses that’s oozing from the ground into the sky. A pair of crows sit on one of the middle branches.
    “Sing? What species