Disclaimer: Sorry to get your hopes up, but I don't own friends. I'm trying to persuade my mom to buy me the DVDs though.
She's sitting on the couch in front of the TV, watching some game show that she doesn't even understand. If her mom wasn't in the room she'd have the English subtitles on, but she doesn't want her mother to know that she can't understand the language. You'd think a girl born and raised in Paris would know how to speak French, but she can't. It's just too complicated. She rarely speaks to her parents because of this. It's the only language they want her to speak. She's failing all of her classes except for English and Math, she can't make sense of anything else. Her parents are unaware of this fact, they're too tuned out from her life to know.
This is not what a little girl named Emma wants her life to be. She wants both her parents to be happy, not for her father to come home late, with lipstick smeared across his face, not for her mother to be so down all the time. She wants to be able to make friends, to be able to communicate with people. But it's just too hard, she doesn't know why, but she has serious problems.
Her father's just stepped into the house and once again he looks like he's definitely been up to something. He doesn't even bother to hide it anymore, that he's seeing another woman. The tall man sets his belongings on the kitchen table, grunts at his wife, and walks down the hallway to his bedroom, where nobody knows what he does. Nobody wants to know, it's probably something so sick and perverted that even the world's biggest pervert would find it disgusting. Soon after he leaves, Emma's mom announces that she's going to go to bed now. She walks down the hallway to her room, which is across from her husband's room because she won't dare sleep in the same room as him. It's only 10:36, Emma decides its time to take a trip to the attic.
The attic. Its Emma's place that she spends all of her time. Really it's only a small room above her house filled with boxes. But the boxes are filled with artefacts from a time when she was little and her family was happy, when everything was all right. There are pictures of her parents smiling and pictures of her playing. It's artefacts from a time Emma wishes she could remember, but unfortunately it all had to fall apart when she was just a small child.
Today, Emma has hit the jackpot, a new box with a label on it that doesn't make any sense to her at all. She has no idea what it means and why it is there. The box only says two words on it, two little words that she has no clue as to why her mother would write them on a box of crap.
The box says New York on it.
Slowly the eleven year old opens the box, and inside she finds pictures. It's just a bunch of pictures. She lifts one up to her face and stares at it. The picture is of a man. He's tall, has black hair, and is holding up a model dinosaur. He looks slightly familiar, and Emma wonders who he is. She turns the picture over to see if there's anything written on the back, and sure enough there is.
And in Emma's mother's messy handwriting it reads:
This is Ross.
Ross is an asshole.
It's all his fault that I'm never going to have contact with my family and friends again
It's all his fault that I'm never going to return to New York again.
Everything is his fault.
I hate him.
But I love him at the same time.
Is that even possible?
We have such a huge history together its not even funny.
Like, we dated
Then he slept with some other woman.
WE WERE NOT ON A BREAK PEOPLE!
Then a few years later one drunken night gets me pregnant.
That's the one thing that I thank him for.
Without him little Emma would not be in this world today.
But now she's never going to know her father.
Because he screwed things up.
I hope he goes to hell.
Emma looked at this piece of writing for what seemed for ages.
Her father wasn't really her father, this man was her father.
She wasn't born in Paris, she was born in New York.
Her mother had kept important secrets from her.
Her life was spiralling down at only eleven years of age.
Emma was now crying, what could this man – her father, do something worse enough to push her mother away from the people she loved. Why didn't her mom keep this from her? Was this why her mother was so zoned out all of the time?
Emma paused to notice that she wasn't the only one crying in the room. The sobs were faint, but quite noticeable.
Emma turned around to find her mother looking over her shoulder, tears rolling down her face.
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