rhapsody implies a work free in form and inspiration
In geometry class, Light smiles politely at a girl who's looking at him, and she stares for a moment longer before her lip trembles and she bursts into tears. The teacher pauses in his lecture, startled, as the girl's friends converge on her, petting and comforting and shooting glares in Light's direction.
At lunch, when he tries to explain an aspect of the geometry lesson to Takashi, Takashi scowls at him until he gives up, and then doesn't speak to him for the rest of the day.
At home, Sayu, only ten years old, is already starting to throw her own pre-adolescent tantrums. Today, it's over Sachiko's insistence that she do her homework before she watches television.
"I thought the stories were exaggerated," Sachiko says, bewildered, as Sayu stomps upstairs and slams the door to her bedroom.
"What stories?" Light asks.
"Oh, you know. Pubescent mood swings. You've never really had them, so I thought..."
Light shrugs. "Sayu's a girl. It's probably different with them."
"Not as different as you might want to think," Sachiko says wryly.
The next day, Sayu is cheerful, and Takashi apologizes, and the girl is back to staring, dreamy-eyed, as though nothing has happened. Light smiles and accepts it all with equanimity, and wonders what it would be like, being unable to control the whirling and pitching of one's own emotions. Like being caught in a storm in the ocean, he imagines, tossed back and forth by waves, battered by rain, with nothing to hold onto.
He's glad he himself doesn't experience such things.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Because a rhapsody goes through a lot of different moods, like a teenager. Or like most teenagers...