Gregory:
I frowned. Her tone rang with unattractive self-importance. She’d done the things I’d asked, true. But she’d also included nearly five pages of completely irrelevant material. “Hardly. Miss Marshall, the assignment was a comparison of the music and its elements. Not a biography. You have more than three pages in this paper abouthis wife. What possible relevance does she have to the assignment?”
Savannah shouted, her brown eyes nearly popping out of their sockets. “She shot herself in the chest days after he announced he was divorcing her! How could that not be relevant? How could that not affect his music?” The color in her cheeks deepened the louder her voice got.
I sat forward in my chair and against my better judgment, found myself arguing back, “It’s completely irrelevant! The assignment was to compare the musical composition, not delve into the composer’s personal life!”
She flipped the pages of the report and stabbed it with her index finger, leaning over my desk as she did so. “I did do that, if you’d actually bothered to read the paper. Yes, the music was changed, and I illustrated that in the paper. But his music was changed by his life. His music was changed by his experiences. But, this isn’t about me at all, is it? This is about my mother! Are you simply punishing me because of her?”
At that, I stood. Her chain of logic made no sense at all. What did her mother have to do with anything? Of course, Savannah came from good musical stock, and that had to be respected on some level. But punishing her? No, I was pushing her. Pushing her to do better than the paper she’d turned in.
I did something I have never done in my entire career as an instructor. I shouted at a student, leaning forward over my desk, which had the effect of bringing us nearly face to face. “Miss Marshall, I don’t care if your mother is a harlot selling herself in the street! This isn’t about that. It’s about you and your talent. You are too good for this!”
Her face went slack, reflecting shock at my words. I continued, inching closer to her face until we were almost nose-to-nose. “You have the ability to be one of the premier musicians this school has ever graduated. And yet you waste it. You waste it on your pointless musical experiments. You waste it on your weekends spent …dancing … and drinking … when you should be perfecting your craft. You waste it on the time you spend with that boyfriend of yours.”

Author Bios:

Andrea Randall:

I started writing poetry long before writing fiction. I firmly believe Poetry is a solid foundation for all other forms of writing. It taught me that a single word can make or break the world.
I write fiction because my characters have a story and they want me to tell it.
I hope you enjoy the pieces of my soul that I share with you.

Charles Sheehan-Miles

Sheehan-Miles has been a soldier, computer programmer, short-order cook and non-profit executive, and is the author of several fiction and non-fiction books, including the indie bestsellers Just Remember to Breathe and Republic: A Novel of America’s Future.

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