When Jade was younger she used to stay with a neighbor when her parents were at work and her brother was too busy to watch her.
Ms Pyle never married and never had kids. Though she was only in her early thirties, to a young Jade, she seemed much older. In the beginning, she hated having to spend time with the older woman. It meant that her family couldn't be bothered with her and she couldn't be in her room with her books. That was until Ms Pyle started to teach Jade how to play the piano.
Even though Jade was just seven, she loved the sound of music. She loved the feeling she had when the sorrowful tones of the piano filled the room. She picked it up quickly, though she had a rough start. She couldn't understand how dots and squiggles on a page could be the beautiful, melancholy music that she loved to hear. Jade was a smart girl, though, and reading music became second nature to her, especially after she figured out that she could remember the notes better if she used her voice. She knew that her brother liked it when she sang, and that sometimes her mother would even smile, but it wasn't until Ms Pyle had sat down and really worked with her that she started to believe that she was a really good singer. The informal music lessons got a lot more fun for the girl when Ms Pyle mixed her piano exercises with singing. Some days, Ms Pyle would even record Jade singing so that she could hear what everyone else heard, so she could hear for herself how amazing her voice was.
For two years Jade was taught in the living room of Ms Pyle. In those two years, Jade fell further in love with performing and with music. Just after her ninth birthday though, was their last lesson together, Ms Pyle had taken a job teaching music in Berkeley. She gave Jade a book of sheet music as a going away present, as if a packet of paper made up for the abandonment. Jade ripped several of the pages to shreds when she got home, only to tape them together again later that night.
For a while, Jade tried to forget about music. It was easy in the beginning because she really had no real means to practice. She did find herself singing more often; never where anyone could hear her, but still singing. Sometimes she would even catch herself practicing her scales unconsciously on her leg during school or on counter tops. Her parents were practical people, however, people who thought creativity was a wasted endeavor and that dreams of anything other than a doctor or a lawyer or something like that weren't even worth entertaining.
Jade is ten when she saves up enough allowances for a second hand keyboard. It's not the same as the baby grand piano she learned to play on. It felt strange at first, the electronic notes somehow shallower than the resonating tone of a real piano, but she cherished it anyway. She practiced in secret, a borrowed pair of her brother's headphones plugged in. She stored it under her bed so that no one can see; it makes its home next to the box of sheet music and recordings of her singing and playing.