Tricking Death

Chapter 30 - Who Was There & Who Was Not

"Come on, pick up," I muttered as my phone buzzed away next to my ear, dreading the possibility of hearing Ryan's voicemail recording again.

"Hello-"

"Ryan, I-"

"-can't come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, I'll get back to you as soon as I can."

"Goddamnit," I pulled my phone away from my ear and glared down at it angrily, as if it was its fault that Ryan wasn't taking my calls. I was honestly still surprised that I even had it: when I had first seen my mom yesterday, I thought for sure that I was going to receive the grounding of a life time.  

Her face had completely overshot being red and gone straight to being white with rage. The effect was terrifying. I was too terrified to say a word, and it seemed as though she was afraid of her composure crumbling to pieces out in public, so she allowed me to sit in the most uncomfortable silence of my life before she finally decided to ream me out. My aunts were conspicuously absent, so I figured my mother had put her foot down so she could deal with me alone. I almost thought that she would let me sit in silence for the whole ride home as some kind of brutal torture tactic. 

"Tell me something, Em."

I shot a nervous glance her way, but I didn't know how else to respond to the question as she sat next to me, sitting ramrod straight in the driver's seat with a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. 

"You must get concerned about your friends if they stop replying to your text messages for a little while, right?"

"Yes," I said in a small voice, already having a very good idea where exactly she was going with this particular line of thought. 

"Mhm, I thought so. It gets scary, doesn't it, not knowing if that person is safe? Especially when they don't even tell you that they're going to be unavailable to even pick up their phone for, oh, I don't know, what feels like an entire week as you're going absolutely insane with worry?" 

I could feel myself shrinking down in the passenger seat, even though I knew that I deserved every hard-edged word. 

"Now, how about you just try to imagine what that must be like for a parent. I can guarantee you that it's about thirty times worse than any kind of worry that you would feel over a friend," she jerked the wheel hard, taking a corner a little too sharp. If there had been a car in the other lane, she definitely would have hit it head on. 

"Mom-" I was interrupted by her abruptly pulling the car up against the curb and throwing it into park. Her scarily-straight posture cracked, and she slumped against the steering wheel as her shoulders started to shake violently. 

"Do you have any idea at all how terrified I was that I would be getting a visit from the local police, telling me that they had found you dead in a ditch somewhere? Do you, Emily?" 

I tried to respond, my own tears starting to flow, but she held up a hand to stop me without even moving her head to look at me. 

"You've withdrawn into your own little world this past little while. You used to tell me everything, whenever you had a problem. I could always tell when something was up with you, and without fail, you would always come talk to me about it. And we would work it out, together, wouldn't we?" She grabbed one of my hands and held it so tight that I could feel all of the bones in each of our hands grinding, the blood flow slowly trickling into nothing under the pressure. 

"Just tell me what's going on, Emily. Just tell me, so we can work this out together. I want to help, but I can't if you don't tell me." 

My mother's tear stained face, looking as if it had aged almost a decade since the last time I saw her, filled my vision. I knew that for the rest of my life, I would never forget seeing her face filled with that much pain. My chest felt tight, and I could feel the mark burning. I wished that I could just throw myself into my mom's arms like when I was little and wait for her to make all of my problems disappear under the weight of her solutions. But I didn't even know where to begin with everything that had occurred, and there was another part of me that was terrified that she would only get even more hurt if she got anymore involved in this mess.