Little Bird Read Online Free PDF Page A

who do come, the screening will go into lunchtime, so bring something to eat. As you watch the film and read the play – and yes, I expect you all to read the play – I want you to think about Romeo and Juliet’s love and where it leads them. Is it the greatest love story of all time? Maybe. But to answer that question, first you need to ask yourselves this.’ Ms Betts tapped the board. ‘What is love?’

    I wandered down the hallway. Tegan was still cranky with me about Saturday night and she didn’t seem to care that she’d got me into trouble in class.
    â€˜Wasn’t my fault,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have to read what I wrote.’
    â€˜What about that stuff about how I’m failing and she’s going to deduct marks? She didn’t say that to you.’
    Tegan shrugged. ‘Sucks to be you, doesn’t it?’
    I dawdled, allowing Tegan and Blake to get further ahead. They were going to Blake’s house after school, so I’d be catching the bus home alone. Again.
    As I walked up the hall, sighing miserably, I almost bumped into Mick Spencer, the music teacher. Our eyes met. He smiled as I blushed and stepped aside. I glanced back and watched him saunter down the hall.
    As usual he was surrounded by a group of music students: boys with rock’n’roll haircuts and T-shirts emblazoned with the names of obscure bands; girls with short skirts, flashing eyes, black eyeliner and a rhythmic way of walking, as though they were about to break into some High School Musical number.
    Spence, as everyone called him, was not only their god. He was a legend in the whole school. He might have been a teacher, but he had total street cred. Spence went to live music venues, and when he bumped into underage students, he was always cool about it (or so I’d heard, the only pub I’d ever been to was the Dawnvale hotel for a counter lunch, with my mum and Stefan). Spence let bands rehearse in his own home on weekends. Spence had petitioned the college council to fund the development of a professional sound studio, which was now considered the best in the state and real bands used it, even bands that were played on Triple J and stuff. Spence composed music for a Tasmanian advertising company. Spence played bass in some of the students’ bands.
    And, of course, Spence had had an affair with Colette, six months after she’d finished Year 12. Spence was Maisy’s father.
    Tegan had pointed Spence out at the beginning of the year; some of Blake’s Year 12 friends had told her who he was. I’d been disappointed by how ordinary he was. A pleasant enough face, sandy blondish-brown hair, a few grooves already worn into his face as if he’d grimaced into the stage lights a few too many times. I didn’t get what the big deal was, why all the girls were so in love with him.
    After a while though, Spence kind of grew on me. I didn’t tell Tegan. He had fiercely blue eyes that crinkled up when he smiled, which he did often. He always leaned in to listen to whoever he was talking to, as if they were telling him some important secret. He could look at you like, in the midst of all the noise and crowding of the school hall, you were lit up like a beacon, you were the star of the show. That look tickled me deep in my belly, made me feel warm and gooey. I couldn’t believe I’d once found him ordinary – he was the sexiest man I’d ever seen in real life.
    I shook the feeling off. Spence was a bastard; that was the fact of it. Shandra claimed something had been going on between Spence and Colette when Colette was still Spence’s star music student, though they both swore that it had been a whirlwind romance (which was a polite way of saying one night stand, Tegan reckoned) that began after Colette had finished school. Spence had left Colette ‘high and dry’, my mum said. Colette’s promising music career was over