The Flight of the Bumblebee

My clarinet felt cold, but comforting beneath my fingers. Sitting at the edge of the seat, I studied the page carefully before placing the mouthpiece in my mouth and licking the reed. Carefully, I began to play out the song. The tempo was out of mind while I learned the notes. I’ll get this by the end of the year.

“What are you playing?” The high-pitched, drawling voice of my friend Jane brought me out of my focused stupor.

“Oh, uhm, I found a composition of The Flight of the Bumblebee online and I’m trying to learn it.”

“What about the marching pieces?”

“I have them memorized and down.”

“What about the audition piece?”

With a sigh, I carefully placed my clarinet on the seat next to me. “I can’t only play that,” I said with a scowl tainting my face. “Besides, I’ve got that mostly down too.”

“Okay.”

Jane then sat in a free chair next to me and began taking out her clarinet. I picked up mine again and went back to learning the song, mildly uncomfortable with the scrutinizing stare I was receiving as she placed the audition piece on the music stand in front of her. “Play it.”

I blinked a bit and took a look at her music, the writing all over it blurring together with the inked notes. I see she even wrote out the note names by each note, for security. “Okay, I guess.” I played the short piece of music quickly, my fingers expertly darting over the keys at an almost blurred rate. I finished the audition piece with only one minor mistake. “Wow, you’re really good. I wish I was that good.”

“You would be, if you practiced more.”

With a slight scowl, she went back to practicing and I went back to learning my song, losing myself in the ups and downs of the song. Chromatics, leaps, scales, and the repetition lead to the well-known song. The rate at which I was playing it though, left it hard to recognise.

The next day was a nice, cool day. The sky was grey and the clouds covered the sun. It was turning out to be a good day for marching band this evening. As I walked to the practice field with my younger friend, Sarah, Jane and Lauren walked past us. They both glanced at me with snobbish, “I’m mad at you, but I’m not going to tell you why because you should already know why” looks. I looked at Sarah for support and she shrugs, as confused as I am.

I quickly jog over the asphalt practice field to the clarinet water area. I hesitantly approached Jane, wondering what was wrong this time. “Hey, what’s up?” My question was received with a glare and she ignored it completely. With a sigh, I went through the practice with half of the section giving me looks like I had done something terrible.

At the end of the practice, I tried to ask Jane what was wrong, but she avoided me like the plague. I went to our mutual friend, Justine, next. “Hey, Justine.”

“Oh hey Hailey, what’s up?”

“Do you know why Jane is so upset with me?”

“She told me that you were bragging and showing off and ignored her when she asked for help. She also said that you were being annoying and following her around like a lost puppy.”

Unable to respond properly, I thanked her and went to pack my stuff up and go home. Seriously? When did I even do that? Annoyed, I was glad that I didn’t have any classes with her the next day.

After school the following day, I went home with my clarinet in tow. I setup my music and played away my stress. There was something about creating beautiful music that just made me forget everything. I played through the audition piece, then the marching band pieces, then the audition piece again before going to The Flight of the Bumblebee. I looked at it for a bit, thinking about what it could look like to others if they saw me playing it. “They’d probably think that I’m an overachiever trying to show off to everybody, huh?” I mumbled quietly to myself before I picked up that beautiful, old, plastic clarinet of mine and forgot everything again.

I played until my face hurt and the air kept escaping through my nose, making me unable to play on. I liked the freedom playing gave me. I didn’t have to think about how others were going to take things, I didn’t have to think about school, all I had to think about was my clarinet and the music on the page.

The next day at school, Jane was acting perfectly normal. As if nothing happened at all. It pissed me off to no end. This same thing went on for months and, before I knew it, we were in the second semester of our senior year.

I had been distancing myself slowly from people this whole time. I tried to focus on band and classes, not the other students. At this point, Jane had become unbearable. More often than not, she was angry at me for ridiculous things that weren’t true and had the snobby, popular half of the clarinet section on her side. As this continued to go on, I turned to my clarinet more and more.

I just wanted to forget everything and leave it all behind. My clarinet was my comfort, my friend who never let me down (until he got exhausted and loosened a screw or lost a pad). He helped me destress and not care about pointless things. My go-to song this whole year had been The Flight of the Bumblebee. I was getting a lot better at it. I could play it at half tempo now and was feeling proud of it. I would think of it whenever I became frustrated.

On another day of school, I felt singled out by Jane and her new posse. She was even taking Justine away from me. I went to my clarinet during study hall and played my heart out. I then decided to completely ignore them. “Who cares what they think? As long as I am proud of myself, it’s the only thing that matters. Me,” I said to the empty little practice room. With this new decision, I played louder, faster, and harder than before. I felt liberated. Later that day, I realised it wasn’t as easy as it sounded in the moment I said it. Jane had, after all, been my “friend” for 7 years. It’s not very easy to step down from that.

From then on, I gradually stopped going to our morning hangout sessions. I stopped going out of my way to talk to Jane, even though I felt like I should be still talking to her. I didn’t sit with her at lunch, only talked about necessary things in Biology and Band, and I stopped texting her altogether. I dropped a major part of my life so suddenly, I really didn’t know how to do it properly.

Sitting in the band room with my clarinet to my lips, I felt awkward and lonely. I could see Jane and Justine at the other end of the band room. They were laughing and practicing the audition pieces together. My heart sank and I sighed at the emptiness I was trying to ignore. I turned to my clarinet again, the comforting cold of the metal and the sweet taste of a new reed. I played some of the audition scales to warm up and messed around with some of the pieces in my folders. Sarah came up to me and sat next to me, setting up her clarinet as well. She and I talked and laughed.

“So, how is it going with the audition stuff?” I probed.

“Well, it’s going okay, I guess. I could use a little help here though, I am not sure how to make it work. The fingerings are just so weird.”

“Well, if you do this…” I show her a new fingering. “It will be basically the same note, just a little sharp. So, with this speed of a song, it doesn’t matter and helps with the awkwardness a bit.”

She thanked me and tried it out, repeating the jump between notes a few times before putting it into the whole piece. We worked next to each other and continued our playing. After a while, I realized that I didn’t care what Jane was doing anymore. Not for today, anyway. I was okay with the fact that I can have other friends, aside from those who are tied with Jane as well.

Things slowly started to become less stressful. She stopped being mad at me after a few months. Near the end of the year, She and I were acquaintances. It felt good. I couldn’t stand talking to her before, but now I was okay with her. We could coexist and not piss each other off.

After I graduated, I completely stopped talking to her. We had moved on, maybe even grown up. My clarinet had done its job. I stopped playing after a while, focusing on work and enjoying my summer before college started in the fall. Band just became a pleasant memory, senior year a blur of bad which morphed into good. I decided that I didn’t care about other people’s opinions and views of me. That was amazing, I changed. Honestly, I noticed people liked me more. I dropped all of my highschool friends aside from 3 girls that were a year older than me. I turned away and never really looked back at high school, not with longing or regret, anyway. My clarinet still sits, tucked away in its case, in my room. Sometimes I pick it up again to play away the stress. I’m still pretty good at playing The Flight of the Bumblebee.