Chapter 1 Aanya

A Chapter by Selena Cane, Anne Hudson, Charlotte Jensen

Chapter 1 Aanya

“Where’ve you been?”

“Out.”

“Out? Out where?”

“I just had to work late that’s all.”

“You’ve had to work late everyday for the last month and a half.”

“I’ve got a new boss and he’s been piling a lot of work on me.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Are you aware of what day it is?”

“It’s January 25, what about it?”

“January 25. That doesn’t mean anything to you at all?”

“Just tell me what it is.”

“January 25, 2006. It’s your daughters seventh birthday.”

My parents have been fighting everyday for the past 4 weeks. After a few weeks of Dad coming home later and later everyday Mom has started asking questions. Since Dad’s been working all the time I never really see him anymore; I’m always in bed by the time he gets home. I lay in bed quietly trying to fall asleep but I can’t seem bring myself to close my eyes. Today is the day I turned seven-years old and I got one present from my mom and dad, a drawing notebook and a small package of pencils.

Mom has been unable to find a job since dropping out of college after having me; and Dad doesn’t make much money working at the office. We live on the eighteenth floor in a small apartment in New York City, New York with the worst plumbing imaginable and no heater, I think the apartment is slowly eating us all alive.

After listening to constant arguing for over a month I’ve grown accustomed to it and often fall asleep to it. I usually listen carefully trying to hear what Mom and Dad are yelling about just down the hallway. Tonight it was about him being late and missing my birthday, but as I continue to listen I don’t hear anything for several minutes.

“I’m going to bed now, and I don’t want to see you there,” Mom says.

“Eileen,” my dad shouts down the hallway .

I hear footsteps down the hallway and the sound of my mom closing her bedroom door, the last thing I hear before falling asleep.

Next thing I know it's tomorrow morning and I wake up and wrap three blankets around myself and walk out of my bedroom and to the kitchen. I sit on a stool at the bar in front of a plate of plain toast and a small glass of water.

“Where’s Daddy?” I ask. “Has he already gone to work?”

“No sweetie,” my mom answers. “Daddy left.”

“Where?”
“I don’t know, but he won’t be back for a while.”

“Why?”

“Because he won’t.”

“Why?”

“Aanya, Daddy isn’t coming home!” Mom exclaims sternly slamming the fork she was eating with down on the counter. “Now eat your breakfast you’re going to miss the bus.”

I pick up my toast and eat my breakfast quietly when the phone rings. My mom picks it up but it won’t stop ringing. She keeps trying to push buttons and say “Hello?” but it continues to ring endlessly.

My eyes pop open and I sit up in my bed, I look to my right to see my alarm clock beeping, and beeping, and beeping, it had been playing the part of the phone in my dream. I lie back down and shove my pillow on my face. I raise my right hand and slam the button to make the aggravating noise stop. I assemble myself back into an upward position and look around my long rectangular bedroom, the door closed directly across from me. I step out of bed, open the door and stretch on my way down the hall. I walk down the stairs to the kitchen where I sit down in front of a plate of chocolate chip pancakes and a tall glass of milk.

“Good morning Aanya,” my mom says, smiling big.

“Hi mom,” I answer.

I pick up my fork and begin to eat my pancakes as my mom stands at the counter putting folders into her laptop bag.

“I’ve got to go to work sweetie. I’ll be home late tonight so you’ll have to cook some macaroni and cheese for dinner and make sure you and your sister do homework. I’ll be home around nine,” she says kissing me on the head and leaving through the garage door.

I continue to eat my pancakes and begin thinking about my dream. It was April 30, 2014 which means that I have not seen my dad for approximately 8 years. I have never received a letter, a phone call, or even so much as a card or present on my birthday. I finish eating my breakfast, drink the remainder of my milk and place the dishes into the sink surrounded by granite counter tops. We have become somewhat better-off after Mom went back to school and graduated with a bachelor’s in education. Even though she teaches at the middle school she makes a lot more than we were making when it was just Dad supporting us. We live inside a small two story house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms within a little neighborhood in Portsmouth, Ohio.

I walk down the hallway and start to head back up the stairs until I bump into my little sister, Brooklyn.

“Please move to the other side of the stairs Brooklyn, I can’t get past,” I sigh.

“I don’t want to; I enjoy walking in the middle, I have more room this way.”

“Brooklyn, move your tiny 9-year-old butt out of my way,” I demand.

“Fine then,” she says rolling her eyes.

I continue to walk up the stairs go into my bedroom and put on a red flannel button up shirt with long sleeves rolled up to the elbows and a black undershirt. I put on my favorite blue jeans and a pair of red converse. Twenty minutes later I come back downstairs with my shoulder length brown hair in two braids and my green plaid backpack slung around my left shoulder.

“Ready to go?” I ask.

“I guess so,” says Brooklyn sighing. “I don’t really want to go to school though.”

“Come on let’s go.”

Brooklyn and I leave the house and walk towards the two different bus stops. As we turn the corner I go and stand in line with the other high school kids while Brooklyn walks across the street and stands next to the rest of her elementary school buddies, her long brown ponytail flopping behind her. I look down the road and see the large yellow school bus coming down the street. It stops in front of the side I am on, the door swings open and Mr. Jones, the bus driver is there to greet us. I walk onto the bus and sit down in one of the seats in the very back swinging my backpack around off my shoulder and onto my lap as the other students take their seats and wait for the bus to continue moving.

Ten minutes later the bus arrives at the next stop and another group of students begin boarding. Three people get on and I see the top of my best friend’s short dark brown hair approach just under the front seat. I wave my hand in the air to signal him and he comes and sits next to me.

“Why hello Miss Aanya Tanner,” he says in a facetious tone.

“Mr. Harry Jacobs, sit down and stop using my first and last name when you greet me,” I reply with a smile.

“Okay, okay, but in my defense you used my first and last name too.”

“Touché.”

“So did you get the answer to number five on Mr. Lee’s homework,” he asks.

“I don’t know I’d have to look,” I say as I unzip the largest pocket of my backpack. I pull out my green three-ring binder with all my papers inside and pull out last night’s science homework. “I got C. Positive. I think that’s right, I mean I looked it up in the textbook.”

“Thank you,” he says as he writes the answer on his paper.

“I had an interesting dream last night,” I whisper looking at Harry’s brown eyes.

“What kind of dream?”

“It was about the night my dad left us.”

“That’s random.”

“I suppose. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately though, not sure why.”

“That’s probably it then. I heard you tend to dream about the things you think of often.”

“I suppose that makes sense.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard the story of when your dad left you, I just know he did.”

“Basically my parents just fought every night for a few months because my dad started coming home super late and one of those days was my birthday and he forgot about it. The day after that I woke up and he was gone.”

“That sucks,” he replies. “Did you guys ever find out why he was always home so late?”

“A few years later I overheard my mom talking to someone on the phone about how he had been arrested for something. It turns out he had been making plans for something all those nights; I’m not exactly sure for what though.”

“What about Brooklyn? Does she ever think about it?”

“She was only a year old. She doesn’t really care about it since she never actually knew him.”

“I see.”

The bus pulls up in front of the sign reading Scioto River High School next to the administration office. Harry and I get in line and wander down the aisle and get off the bus. I walk along the sidewalk that leads to a side door right next to my first class while Harry goes in the opposite direction. I go into the building and enter the geometry classroom where I head to my seat in the back left corner of the room and pull out last night’s homework ready to correct it. I look over my homework making sure I did all the problems correctly when Brian, the boy that sits in front of me, comes in and whispers,

“Hi Aanya.” Without saying a word I look up and nod. “So, did you understand last night’s homework? For some reason I don’t quite understand how to find the geometrical probability of things.”

I pick up my homework and hand it to him.

“Thanks Aanya, you’re the best,” he says taking it to transfer answers over. I open my backpack and pull out a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and read until class starts.

“Here’s your paper back, thanks for helping me out.” He tosses the paper behind him onto my desk where it lands right in front of my face right over the page of the book I happen to be on. Frustrated and without looking up I brush it off my book and into the top right corner of my desk.

The bell rings and I put the book away as my teacher stands up and says, “Alright class get out last night’s homework so we can go over it. For number one you should have gotten 1/7 for the probability of the line. Number two should be 5/6. Number three…” as she continues to read off the answers to our homework I begin to drift off, thinking of the dream I had last night. Why would Dad leave? What did he do to get arrested? I went over the dream over and over again in my mind.

I will never fail to remember the day that not only did my own father forget my birthday but that he also forgot about Mom, Brooklyn, and I all together. None of us have ever heard from him since that night. I have gotten used to not having a dad around but I still wonder what it would be like to be like everybody else. I know it sounds a little cliché but it’s a real feeling I have and wonder about but at the same time I’m glad he’s gone. He caused trouble for my mom and tore my family apart; my mom probably would never have gone back to school if they were still together, which means we would still be practically homeless.

I snapped back into reality at the same moment Miss Carson finishes going over the answers.

“Any questions?” she asks, the classroom is dead silent, “No? Okay. Today we will be building on what we did yesterday making this a bit more difficult…”