Sidechick Syndrome

Chapter 5

          I lay down in my queen sized bed, my body wrapped in my entire blanket. My phone buzzes next to my head, the homepage coming up to show me I had a notification on the Instagram app on my phone. But I only look at it to read the time, which read 10:27AM. It was a Thursday morning, a school day but I didn't feel like going. I went the day before but just couldn't make it today.

           I'm sure a lot of people thought I just skipped school because I didn't feel like it or was too tired from a party to go. That was true, but I also got sick a lot as well. Like right now I had a sore throat and I felt nauseous. I've been having these on and off since my first year of High school. Probably from all the drinking and partying. Hell, I sometimes even felt like this when I wasn't partying. I guess it was just a permanent side effect for me now.

           I take my arm and knock my phone off the bed when another notification chimes, making the phone light up again. I was pretty popular on social networking sites and stayed up to date, but right now I could care less about who was hitting me up or the drama that was going on. I felt like shit.

           Instead I reach a hand behind me and feel for the little pink remote, and turn the volume up on the small pink princess TV showing the old 2005 video, from across the room on my gray TV stand.

           The video was of my mom and I baking a chocolate cake for my dad on his birthday. My dad was the one filming us while my mother and I goofed around on camera, baking the cake. This video was taken nine years ago when I was six and when my mom was still alive. She died four years later in a car accident on July 16th, 2009 on her way to the grocery store. She was headed to the market to go get something as simple as yogurt and animal crackers, just for me. I was the one who asked her for it.

            I stayed home with my dad that day, I remember clearly. I was ten at that time and it was a hot afternoon in the summer. I wanted some snacks and there was a local corner store down the road but my mother didn't want me going there. She said I was too much of a friendly person and very naïve. Which I believed since I've had times where I've reflected on my younger self. She said the stores around our neighborhood weren't that great. That the store clerks were perverts and a lot of criminals hung out around there. So instead of sending me, she got all the way in her car, to go down to the supermarket thirty minutes away just to get me some yogurt and animal crackers. But she never made it. An eighteen wheel truck crushed her car on the highway, splitting her and the car in half.

           I didn't know what was more hurtful, being at her funeral and not being able to see her one last time because she wasn't even in one full piece; or wanting to die because if I hadn't asked for the stupid animal crackers and yogurt, she would still be here. The driver of the truck was originally charged with manslaughter but the charges were dropped when further investigation was done. Since my mom's black Toyota at the time was low to the ground and an eighteen wheeler truck was seventy feet in the air, it was said that it was impossible to see my mother on the road at the time, deeming it an accident.