Dear Dad

January 26th

January 26th,

            The day was crisp and cold.  The school was too cheap to put the heat up to a temperature that was tolerable.  So, until someone slapped some sense into those people with too much power in their heads, the school stayed at a frosty sixty degrees.  Students walked around school with their coats still zipped up.  They shuffled down the hallway encased in puff and fluff with their hands stuck in their pockets for warmth.

            I waited at my locker for Anabella.  She established a routine of meeting me at my locker at exactly seven thirty every morning.  I leaned against the lockers and as soon as my skin touched the metal I jumped away.  They felt like they were made of ice.  I stood awkwardly in front of it waiting.

            Anabella was late.  She was never late.  It was seven forty and there was no sign of her.  I was starting to worry.  Correction, I was starting to panic. 

            It was seven forty five when she walked around the corner of the hallway.  She looked like a mess.  She was still beautiful, but she looked bad.  She was dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans.  In all of the time I had known her the only sweatshirt I had seen Anabella wear was mine and she never wore pants.  Whenever she came to school she always had on either a dress or a skirt, I think this was the first time in school that I had ever seen her wear pants.  Her hair was pulled up into a ponytail, which was also something she never did.  Her hair was always either down or in some complicated fancy up-do.  She wore no makeup and the only piece of jewelry she had on was a ring on her right ring finger.  She wore converse style sneakers as appose to her usual ballet flats. 

            This was odd.  I had never seen her like this.  Something was wrong, I could tell by the look in her eyes.  It was a familiar look.  The same one I had seen the day I told her about my dad.  The same one I had seen last Christmas.  It was the exact same look that I had seen the day I was beat up.  Something was bothering her so bad it was to the point where she was about to cry.

            She stopped at the end of the hall and looked at me.  We had a cross hall exchange of emotions.  I knew that she was hurt and she knew that I knew something was wrong.  She bolted towards me with no regard for the people standing between us.  She just needed to get to me as soon as possible.  She ran into my arms and I held her close.  She started to cry.  Something was definitely wrong.  Something wasn’t just wrong; something was awfully, terrible, horribly, mistakenly wrong.  She cried in my arms for several minutes while I gently rubbed her back to try and calm her down.  When she finally settled she stepped back and signed to me, ‘She left.’

“Who left?”

‘My mom, she left last night and didn’t come back.  I think she’s gone for good.’  I knew now why she was upset.  Anabella’s parents had been fighting constantly for the past few months.  Anabella told me that she had even seen her dad hit her mom once and was told sternly to never tell anyone what she had seen.  She told me though.  She needed to tell someone.  It had been haunting her.  It was a scar in her memories that came back when she wasn’t preoccupied with something else to distract her mind from the constant replay of that night.  I guess that last night her mom had enough and just left.  I don’t blame her.  If I was her I would’ve walked out the day he hit her.

            Anabella seemed depressed the whole day.  I walked her home after school, but neither of us said anything.  We just held hand the whole way home.  When she waved goodbye I could see that she didn’t want to go inside.  She wanted so many other things.  She wanted to run far, far away.  She wanted to find her mother.  She wanted to bring her back.  She wanted to have a happy little magazine cover family again.  She wanted this, but yet she knew that that isn’t how life works.