Closing time

Anastasia laid her head on the desk right after she sat down next to me. Her hair covered her face. Not being a morning person, I understood and wanted to do the same. Who came up with the idea of starting classes at 7.30 A.M anyway? But Ana was not like me. Typically, she was fully awake at the crack of dawn, smiling, and oozing with energy. Today she was not her usual self, and that made me uneasy.

“You alright?” I asked in a whisper, trying not to draw any unwanted attention from our teacher, who was looking for an excuse to quiz us.

“My head hurts,” was what I thought Ana had said, though I could not be sure since she said it in a grumbled voice, without lifting her head off the desk or her hair off her face.

“Oh, it was that kind of night, huh?” I asked with a smirk, wondering whom she partied with the night before.

“No, it was not that kind of night,” she snapped at me. “I just didn’t sleep well,” she added as an afterthought.

Not getting enough quality sleep can definitely mess with a person’s mood, but to get mad at your best friend for no reason was not characteristic of Ana. Nonetheless, I decided to cut her some slack and not bother her for the remainder of the class.

As soon as the bell rang, Anastasia bolted, even though the teacher was still finishing his lesson. Something was definitely wrong. Was she pregnant? Nah, I would know if she was seeing someone.

The next time I saw my friend was during the next class.

“Allergies,” she spat out, noticing me looking at her red, puffy face.

That day, Ana avoided me and everyone else from our class entirely. She was snippy whenever someone tried to engage in conversation with her. Something was wrong, and it was something more significant than allergies or a single night of poor sleep. As a friend, I wanted to help her, but I could not do that without knowing what the problem was.

***

“What are all these bags doing in the hallway?” Anastasia asked her parents as she entered the kitchen, interrupting their shouting match.

“Your father is moving out,” her mother announced, bringing a lighter up to the cigarette hanging from her lips.

“Mom, you don’t smoke,” Ana said, unsure of what to focus her attention on. Everything seemed so bizarre.

“Well, I do now, sweetheart,” Ana’s mother replied after exhaling a large cloud of smoke into her husband’s face.

“Real mature of you,” Ana’s father said, waving the smoke away.

He took Ana’s hand and led her to the chair at the kitchen table. “Your mom and I are separating,” he said calmly, looking into his daughter’s eyes.

Ana wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Sympathy? Understanding? She looked from her father to her mother and back. She was hoping it was all a joke. A sick joke that they thought would be funny. “They have definitely miscalculated that,” Ana thought. She did not know what to say. Her mother smoked, looking out the window, and her father was now pacing across the kitchen, checking his phone.

Having taken one last look at her parents, Ana stood up and went to her room. She opened her books, but after not understanding a single sentence she read four times, she closed them and placed them back in her backpack.

She put on some reggae music and pulled out a piece of paper from her desk and a pencil. Sketching always made her feel better, but this time around, Ana felt like breaking the pencil in half and crumpling the paper, which she did. “How could they be so blasé about this?” she wondered. “When were they even going to tell me? How long has this been going on?” Questions plagued Ana. It wasn’t something she was expecting. She never imagined her family would fall apart. They all went on vacation only a couple of months ago. So many great memories were formed then. Why were they throwing all of that away?

Her mother was to blame. Ana just knew that. If asked, Ana would say that she loves both of her parents equally. However, the truth was she felt a special bond with her father. He taught her to fish and kayak. He was also the one who would always replenish her drawing supplies. Her mother, on the other hand, was a stickler for everything, always making a big deal out of nothing. It must have been so this time, too. She must have made a mountain out of a molehill, or Dad finally got tired of her nagging.

When Zach came back after his classes, Anastasia breathed a sigh of relief. Surely he would explain to her what was going on. Their parents must have told him Ana was in her room, because he came straight to her, still wearing his coat.

“What’s the whole thing about Dad moving out?” she asked her brother the second he entered the room and closed the door.

“He fucked his coworker,” Zach said and shrugged his shoulders.

Ana’s eyes widened. She shook her head. Surely that could not be true.

“Again,” Zach said as if to make sure Ana understood how dire the situation was.

“It can’t be,” Ana uttered, sitting down on her bed.

“Supposedly, she’s only a couple of years older than me.” Ana was 17, and her brother was a year her senior.

***

“I’m sorry for earlier,” Ana said to me during the third period.

Even though I wanted to tell her that she was unbearable earlier, I kept quiet, only nodding my head in acknowledgment.

“My head is pounding. I didn’t sleep much last night,” she said with her head in her hands.

“Tell me something you haven’t already told me,” I thought to myself, biting my tongue.

“My parents are getting divorced,” Ana said, now playing with her hair.

That was unexpected. Although, I wondered how I would have been able to predict that. My father knew Ana’s father from Parent-Teacher conferences, but that was as far as my knowledge into Ana’s home situation went.

“Oh,” I uttered, unable to think of a suitable response.

Divorce was something that I only heard of in the movies or in faraway cities. I never met anyone whose parents weren’t together.

“I’m going to have a brother or a sister soon,” Ana added.

My eyebrow went up. “Would her parents still split up if they had a baby on the way?” I wondered, and it must have shown because Ana explained almost immediately. “My father banged a girl barely older than me, and now she’s pregnant.”

No wonder Ana was distressed. How was one to deal with their family falling apart with no warning and then a new sibling from another mother on the way?