Center Stage! (Center Stage! #1) by Caitlyn Duffy

Saturday morning with his lawn mower. Our roof was covered in Spanish tile, which was pretty much the norm for our neighborhood. A white bark alder tree in the corner of our front yard near the curb did little in the way of offering shade to keep our living room cool.
    “It’s alright,” I agreed. In fact, it was probably the nicest of all the rental houses we’d lived in since I’d been staying with Mom. I was compelled to add, “It’s a rental. We never stay anywhere long, so it makes more sense for us to rent.”
    Elliott shut off the engine of his car, and in the absence of its hum, my street seemed eerily quiet except for the chatter of birds. “Why? Are your parents, like, bank robbers or something?”
    “No. I live with my mom and she’s in the Air Force. We move around to the different bases,” I explained. In the past, when I described my unusual family situation, that was usually the end of it. But as we pulled our guitars and amplifiers out of the back seat of Elliott’s Fiesta (he’d brought his guitar in addition to his bass to school that day, revealing that he’d been thinking about asking me to video his audition since he got up that morning), I could tell I’d sparked his curiosity.  
    “Wow. Does your mom fly planes?”
    I explained as I led him up the little cement path to our front door that my mom used to fly planes, but she probably hadn’t climbed into the cockpit of a military aircraft in at least five years. She was brass now, a strategist, someone who’d most likely be in the Air Force professionally until she retired.
    The Boss met us, tail wagging, at the front door, clearly very excited to get to sniff someone new. “Sorry. He’s overly friendly,” I apologized as The Boss immediately began snorting around Elliott’s legs.
    “It’s cool. I like dogs,” Elliott said, squatting to let The Boss lick him on the face.
    We set our guitars down and I said I had to take the dog for a quick walk before we shot the audition because he’d been locked up by himself all afternoon. Fortunately, Elliott seemed excited about that and didn’t insist that we just put The Boss in the back yard for a while, since the dog hated being in the yard alone. We set out to circle the block once with The Boss on his leash, and Elliott continued interrogating me for details about my life. It was that hazy, golden time of afternoon, when bees were still busying themselves around flowering bushes and a lot of our retired neighbors were sitting on their porches just drinking iced tea because it was so hot outside.
    “What about your father? Where’s he?” Elliott asked.
    “Don’t know. Don’t even know who he is,” I admitted. It had been years since anyone had asked me about the identity or whereabouts of my father. Right around the time I was in first grade, when family structures were often a topic discussed during lessons or explored in stories read during class, I hounded my grandmother for information about my father relentlessly. The answer I received never varied: “You’ll have to ask your mother about that one day.” Thankfully, by middle-school, most kids had been informed by their parents that asking too many questions about someone’s home life was considered rude, but apparently Elliott hadn’t been similarly informed.
    “That’s crazy!” he replied, impressed. “I wish I didn’t know who my dad was. It makes it easier to stay angry at someone, I think, knowing where they are and what they’re doing.”
    It had never crossed my mind to be angry at my father, whoever he was, because in my mind he didn’t actually exist. I had no evidence that he’d known about me and bailed, or had offered my mother some kind of assistance and had been shot down. Who he was and the reason for his complete absence from my life was a mystery I didn’t care to investigate. “So, where is your father and what’s he doing?” I asked, wanting to show mutual interest in Elliott’s