Her mother stepped around the corner, wearing a patchwork apron. The bangs of her bobbed, sandy hair were perfectly curled. She was wearing a scowl on her face. “I got a call today from your school,” she said in an exasperated tone. “You can’t keep doing this.”

She paused and then continued, “I called your new case worker. She said we should take you to see one of the counselors. Is that what you want?”

Aria stared at the carpet and said nothing. Irritated by the silence, her mother went on. “Your father and I have told you again and again that you have to set a good example for the littler ones.”

Aria looked up from the carpet. She wanted to yell. She wanted to scream but nothing came out. Despite the fury that burned its way through her veins, all she could say was, “Sorry.”

Her mother fidgeted, a pair of plastic tongs still in her hands. “Don’t do it again,” she said. “If you keep sloughing school you’re not gonna graduate.” Aria granted her nothing but more silence. So her mother ended the one-sided conversation with, “Your father will decide what to do about this later. Do your homework before you watch TV.”

Aria sprang out from beneath the tension like a racehorse out of the gate. She ran upstairs and closed the door to her room. She could still hear the sound of her younger siblings in the background. She reached below her bed and felt around until her fingers found the texture of her journal. Pulling it up onto her bed, she grabbed a pen from her backpack and began to write her frustrations down between the lines on the paper. She is not my mother. He is not my father. Who the hell does she think she is? I hate her. She underlined the word hate with three straight lines for emphasis.

The woman who was downstairs cooking was not her mother. The man who would be coming home soon was not her father. The children whose noises she could hear beyond the door were not her siblings. The omnipresent dust of the past covered Aria’s world with grief. There is something about the shock and groundlessness that comes with grief that makes the world around you stand still. Aria’s world had been standing still for quite some time now.