"What, are you kidding, that's a stupid idea!" Rebecca sat down next to me at the lunch table, with a greasy pizza.
"If I'd known you were going to put me down, I wouldn't have told you."
"Going to Hollywood is stupid." I thought you were going to go to Harvard or something and actually do something with your life.
"God, you sound like my mom right now. Besides, you've known I wanted to be a sitcom star since I was like, ten."
"Yeah, but no one in their right mind acts on their dreams." Rebecca was being so narrow-minded right now.
"Yeah, and have you ever met a teenage girl who was in their right mind here?" We looked around at the girls applying their lip gloss, then going to eat their lunch right afterwards.
"Whatever, I just think it's a bad idea."
"I thought of all people you would support me on this." I got up from the table to go dump my tray.

It's not like I was planning to go right now. I planned on finishing high school, of course. Then, when I'm eighteen and my parents have no control over my life, I'd leave from Fairfax, Virginia to Hollywood, California. I'd been thinking about that moment ever since I was thirteen. My sitcom was going to be a hit, like "That '70s Show" or something like that.
My parents were unsupportive of my dream. They hated the idea of my face on a tabloid saying that I'm in rehab or something of the sort. They would never understand I just wanted to act.
I was pretty much shunned at my school for my dream, too. Everyone else thought I was stupid like Rebecca did. The only person who ever understood me was now a 60-year old man, probably retired.
In the seventh grade, my language arts teacher had been my drama teacher as well, and for eighth grade too. At the time, he was about 56, 57. He was pretty cool for an old dude, though. One time, my friend who is in a private school came to visit me for my play, and she met him. She was surprised he knew the word "lingo", much less the fact he let her staple our classroom's ceiling. (Long story.)
Anyway, Mr. Jackson had been his name, and he was pretty much the one who inspired me to take acting seriously. I started rehearsing my favorite TV show characters when the show was playing by memory. I figured, maybe if I kept it up, I'd be a big star one day.
But I figured, there's gotta be something I can do in the mean time. But there were no local theatres and I had grown away from my old dance studio. (Again, long story.)
Drama at my high school had been cut due to a budget problem. Actually, it wasn't so much a budget problem as it was a "the principal's too obsessed with the mathletes and started to give them more funds than they deserve".
Maybe it was time to run away. I could enter classes online, maybe.
Maybe it was time.

By the time I got home, there was a butt-load of homework waiting for me. But I didn't care. Maybe I wouldn't do it.
"Don't you have homework to do, Tyler?"
Tyler. I hated that name. It was a boy name. When I was a star, I'd be able to change it to a name like Katrina or Andrea or something like that.
Homework. All of it was math. I'd been placed two years ahead of normal people, which my mom liked and I didn't. To my mom, it meant a greater chance of getting a scholarship, getting into college. For me, it meant more homework.
"Yeah." I answered. But I didn't reach for my homework. I went for the phone book, looking up, "acting coaches." It was time.