She finished eating and she got up to go find the remote, but they had something they needed to talk about, they said, something important. She noticed the way her dad had started to tear the lip of his foam cup into little pieces, how her mom turned in her chair to face her. They said they knew this might be difficult to understand right now, but sometimes things don’t always go according to plan, they don’t always turn out the way you want them to, the way you expected they would; people change, life changes around you and all of a sudden you find that the things you knew in the past, or things you thought you knew, you don’t know them anymore. It’s not your fault they said; they really, really wanted her to know that, to remember that. And it’s not a divorce, it’s a separation, just more of a break, a chance to rethink and reevaluate, to think about the future. There would be changes, lots of things would stay the same, but some things would change. Some things needed to change. They wanted to know if she had questions, what she thought, but she didn’t know what to think, what kind of questions to ask. It was too much like an episode of a TV show, they were too prepared, they had brought home pizza and ginger ale, her mom had paper plates for easy cleanup. She had not had a chance to rehearse, to plan; she had been unable to decode the murmured conversations she had strained to hear while falling asleep at the top of the stairs, pushed up against the banister. She sat quietly at the table as the conversation trailed off, feeling slightly sick to her stomach from having eaten too much pizza too late in the evening. Her parents exchanged glances, each about to add something more, but deciding against it.

It was her dad who pointed out that they had missed the first ten minutes of the finale, and that it would be a shame not to see who finally won after watching all season, and they left their paper plates and the half-open pizza box on the table to go into the living room and watch the final moments of the choreographed song and dance routine all the contestants performed together. They sat together on the couch, her parents on opposite ends with her between them, staring without speaking, like strangers in a movie theater. They watched a female contestant in a sparkling purple gown belt out a ballad with tears in her eyes; they refused to look at one another as they watched the commercials for instantly whiter teeth and zero percent financing on the latest models.

She left before the program was finished and the winner was chosen and went upstairs to her room, mumbling that she was tired. She heard the murmur of the TV downstairs click off after she closed her bedroom door. She climbed up onto her bed to where she could lean against the wall and see out through the window into the darkened street. It had begun to snow earlier in the evening and she watched the flakes flutter through the pools of streetlight and vanish into the darkness. She held her hand against the icy windowpane until her palm started to burn with the cold, leaving the faint trace of her hand on the glass, wanting to cry, wanting to sleep, wanting to wake up in the morning, a new morning with her bedroom floor checkered in sunlight and the clatter of breakfast dishes in the kitchen.