Piper

Piper was the product of two highschool sweethearts having a baby at too young an age. As a kid Piper had a lot of problems, she had an intense stutter and pretty bad dyslexia which made school hard for her. Her parents tried their best to keep her motivated and getting the help she needed for her problems but they were poor. They lived in a two bedroom apartment with her parents and five other siblings. All of the children besides her youngest brother lived in one room, there were 3 beds in the room and hardly enough room for them to play or have any fun.

Piper’s father worked at a factory full time on the night shift so he was rarely present in their lives besides the weekends and the vacation days he had earned. They mostly had their mother to rely on, but her mother had raging anxiety and depression and would frequently lock herself in her room to be away from the children.

Piper was the oldest so she had to make sure that her younger siblings were taken care of while her mother would go through these bouts of depression. She made sure to get all of her siblings on the bus to school and made sure her younger brother was bathed and fed before she left, since he slept in the same room as her mother she hoped that her mother would at least do the bare minimum when her father wasn’t around for the hour it was before she came home from school. Most of the time it was fine but other times she would come home to Luca crying out in the middle of the living room.

In her last year of middle school she came home to find that her belongings had been packed and her father was leaving her mother. He had had enough of her not getting help and being too selfish to even make sure the children were okay so he was divorcing her and moving Piper and her other siblings to the next town to a trailer. This was hard for Piper because she had been going to the same school since kindergarten and would miss her friends a lot, but she knew that this was a good thing and that maybe she and her siblings could be happy now that her mother was not going to be living with them full time. Her mother still had weekend visitations at their house, as long as her father was present. She mostly avoided her due to her always pointing out that Piper was putting on weight and needed to go on a diet.

In highschool Piper mostly focussed on school and didn’t really try to make many friends, it was hard for her to because everyone had known each other for years and she was new, so she didn’t see much of a point in it. She, surprisingly, excelled in English and thought she might pursue writing in her future, though it would be a long shot with her dyslexia. This was around the time she started to notice girls. She didn’t know what it meant to be gay really, she had never met a gay person in her life. Her dad wasn’t homophobic outwardly which made her more comfortable with coming to him for advice.

When she told him that she thought she might be gay, he laughed and hugged her. “Well that’s a relief, now I don’t have to worry about you ending up like your mother.” This made Piper so happy, but then he told her mother. She listened to them argue about how her mother didn’t want her to be queer and “Since you have so much money why don’t you send her off to gay camp.” Her father told her to leave and came inside to see Piper in tears, she couldn’t understand why her mother would say such mean things about her. She knew they didn’t get along but that was such an awful thing to say about her daughter. Her father comforted her and told her that she would get over it eventually and that things would go back to normal, or as normal as they could be with the circumstances.

This was around the time Piper made her blog, she blogged about her life and what she dreamt about. It was nothing special really, everyone was doing it, but she made tons of new friends online. It was such a nice outlet for a loner like her. She had her first girlfriend online as well.

In her junior year of highschool, tragedy struck her family. They hadn’t heard from her mother for over a month and they get a call from the police stating her mother overdosed on heroin in her living room. None of them had any idea she had been doing drugs until this happened. Piper was heartbroken and confused, she loved her mother but her mother hated her. At her funeral Piper couldn’t even muster up a tear. It made her feel like there was something wrong with her, even her father cried at the funeral.

Piper moved out of state to go to college and live in a dorm at the same college her girlfriend went to. Her girlfriend, Presley, was a computer science major and they met for the first time on campus. It was so weird to meet the girl she had been talking to for over a year in person, and it didn’t go as well as she had expected. They just didn’t have much chemistry at first, maybe it was just the nerves. But Presley seemed very different in real life, more cold and standoffish, like something was wrong. She gave Piper a half hearted hug and went back to her dorm room.

The next day they met up for lunch and she broke it to Piper, “You’re just not that attractive to me in real life.” Piper froze. Leaving the lunchroom, she sobbed and ran back to her room. She had never been so humiliated in her life. She blocked Piper on everything she could and tried not to think about it again. This is when she started to focus on school once more. Her journalism major was a lot harder than she had expected.

Three months into her first year at college Piper decided she wanted to get a degree in business instead, maybe she could open a small coffee shop some day. She really enjoyed her job as a barista and loved coming up with different flavor combinations for drinks. She was really good at it and became quite popular at her job at a chain coffee shop, people would just come in to see her and give her crazy large tips.

She still kept in contact with all of her siblings and her father. He was so proud of his oldest daughter and wanted to see her thrive. Her siblings were mostly indifferent toward her, but that didn’t bother her much. They were young and she was busy trying to make a life for herself. She became the manager at her store about a year into working there and her degree was going really well. At this point she decided to get an apartment by herself, this was the first time she really had a place of her own, she had always shared a room with her siblings and never got to decorate much.

Interior design was something she always enjoyed but never really got to do so she made her little one bedroom apartment exactly what she wanted it to be. Her landlord didn’t care if she painted so her room was painted a pastel pink and she put string lights all over the walls, along with floral decorations and posters of things she loved. Pink was her favorite color, and her room was her safe place away from the cold dark world.

One day at her job she met this girl, a tall hyena, she was buff and beautiful. This was it, she had to shoot her shot, she had been single ever since the Presley disaster. She smiled at the hyena, “What’s your name, cutie?” she said in a flirtatious tone.

“Vika, and you?” The girl had a thick accent and she couldn’t quite place it.

“I’m Piper! Nice to meet you Vika,” she said, handing her the coffee she had ordered. “Come see me again sometime.” Winking, she went to the next customer and began their order, but she could feel Vika’s eyes on her.