Despite all I had done today, feeling better about her helped me regain some energy. When we returned, we went about setting up her room and putting away and hanging up her clothes, during which she told me more about herself.
Like me, she had performed in shows throughout her high school years and claimed she was so encouraged by her music teacher that she had decided to pursue dancing as a career. I wondered if that was true. After many things I said I didn’t like and liked, she said, “Me, too.”
However, unlike me, she came from a broken family. Her parents had gotten a divorce when she was twelve. She said she favored her father more, although, like mine, he wasn’t enthusiastic about her trying to make a living in show business. In fact, between the lines, I thought she was saying he wasn’t in favor of her making a living at all. He was in favor of her getting married. She called him old-fashioned, stuck in the past. I thought I could say the same for my father, but I didn’t. I sensed there were differences between our fathers that would stretch for miles.
Anyway, once Piper started to talk about herself, she didn’t want to stop or ask me more about myself. She reminded me of a girl in my class, Violet Murphy, who was said to be interested in only one subject: herself. I was tired, but I didn’t want to be impolite the first day we were together.
“I was supposed to go to college,” she said, “but I wasn’t much of a student. My mother was on my back all the time because I had barely passing grades. Hated homework. There should be a law against assigning students homework over the weekend. Think about it. Most people who work five days a week get the weekend off from that work. Why aren’t we off from schoolwork? I got into trouble more than once groaning too loudly when a teacher assigned something over the weekend. Well, maybe it was more than a groan. I think I said something like ‘Fuck no,’ and it was like I had set off a firecracker.”
She paused. I was never good at hiding surprise or shock.
“I bet you’ve never been suspended from school, huh?”
“Suspended? No. I was more afraid of my father’s reaction to my misbehaving than I was of my teachers. No matter what you do, you have to come home, right?”
“I didn’t. Once, anyway. After I got suspended for smoking in the girls’ room, I ran away for a week with this guy who worked at a garage. He left school when he was sixteen and got a job as a mechanic.”
“Ran away? Where did you go?”
She laughed. “Not far. To his grandmother’s house. She had a bit of dementia and didn’t even realize we were there nearly a week. I got into more trouble, and he almost lost his job because of it, but that’s the way he was.”
“Do you still see him?”
“No. Not long after, he was arrested for something and moved on. It was then that my mother decided to take my dancing seriously. Everyone raved about me at the dance clubs, and I guess she thought it was easier than fighting me all the time. It looked like that was all I cared about, anyway. For her, anything that would get me out of the house was gold. In fact, she bought me the bus ticket to New York City. She said, ‘I would call it a graduation present, but you didn’t graduate.’ ”
“You didn’t graduate?”
“Missed too many classes. No big deal. They don’t ask for your graduation certificate at auditions.”
I listened as she rattled on about her parents and helped make her bed, even though I thought her sheets could use a wash. The more she told me about herself, the more amazed I was that she had gotten even this far. Mr. Wollard once told me that people start from all different places to get themselves onstage. Sometimes, he said, the harder they struggle to do it, the better they are when they do. I knew he meant that as some form of encouragement, but listening to Piper, I realized I couldn’t claim any other struggle to get here besides my father’s disapproval. I had so much encouragement from strangers and my teacher. I had earned my compliments. Ironically, after listening to Piper, I wondered if I was really tough enough for the pursuit. She