As early as six years old Ariana knew there was something wrong with her parents relationship. There were night’s she’d be woken up with yelling and the slamming of the front door. The next morning everything would be okay again. The older she got, the more frequent the fighting became and she tried her best to shield her younger siblings from it. Her parents weren’t happy and it was something she wished wasn’t true but no matter how much she stayed up in bed and hoped and prayed, it was something that wasn’t going to change much like her own lack of happiness. Due to her home life, Ariana kept to herself for the most part. Besides family there weren’t many people she talked to outside of school related things. It was easier to hide how miserable she felt on a day to day basis if she didn’t have many people to interact with.
Everything hit an all time low the night she heard her father yell at her mother how having a family with her was a mistake. Ariana didn’t know how else to take it besides her existence being the source for all the problems between them. The last thing she remembered was taking more than a handful of her mother’s sleeping pills. Next thing she knew she was waking up in the hospital and kept in psychiatric hold. A week later she was out and staying with her aunt Fiona. In her aunt’s words: until Debbie and Derek could get their shit together, she was staying with her. Her family was split up while her parents worked things out. While she sat on the couch watching TV with her little sister, the last thing she expected when her brother answered the door was to hear someone asking for her. Getting up she went to the door, instructing her brother to go back to the living room. Raising an eyebrow she looked at her classmate, “Chloe? What are you doing here? How’d you even know where to find me?”
As soon as Chloe heard her mother gossiping about Ariana’s family, her first instinct had been to visit the other girl. It had been two days since she’d first sat at the top of the stairs, listening to her mother laugh - she didn’t have a bone of sympathy in her, to say the last. But she’d hesitated, not wanting Ariana to think she was pitying her. She wasn’t, of course; growing up the way she did, in the house that she did, Chloe had never thought of herself as someone that could pity anyone else. It really didn’t work that way. While she’d finally mustered up the courage to visit Ariana’s current place of residence, she still shuffled her feet nervously on the front porch as she waited for someone to answer, hoping she’d made the right decision.
It was probably awkward, she realized, showing up at Ariana’s aunt’s house for no good reason. It wasn’t as though they were best friends, even if they had known each other since they were young. But she was almost positive that Ariana wasn’t going to let on to anyone what she was going through; and someone had to be there for her, right? “Hi,” Chloe waved when Ariana came to the door, giving her a sheepish smile. “My uh... my mom mentioned that you were here,” she explained, figuring that sounded better than my mom and her best friend were gossiping about your parent’s marital troubles. “I thought I’d stop by and see how you were doing. I brought ice cream,” she added, holding up the bag she’d picked up from the corner store on her way over.
