One Week in June | ONC2020

June 7th 2:35 PM

I wake up screaming. Mom wraps her arms around me and whispers that she's here and that everything is okay. But everything's not okay. I break into tears as the realization hits that everything in the last four hours did in fact happen, my friends are in fact dead - or at least missing  - and the police are proving themselves to be useless at their jobs. Sobs start to overwhelm my body completely and I have to sit up to keep from drowning in my own sadness.

"Honey, what happened? You were extremely vague on the phone. All you told me was that your friends were gone and you were hurt." She runs her fingers through my hair, soothing the knots that have started tangling my long red hair. I hiccup as I try to slow down my breathing.

"They're dead, Mom." I say and the look on her face reminds me of how serious this is. If I don't know for sure that they're dead then I shouldn't be claiming as such. Like the police woman said: no body, no crime.  "Or at least they're missing." I explain to Mom what happened when we got off the phone the first time. The gang had lunch, we started swimming again, once I dunked my head underwater the world turned into ice, and everyone but me was floating, unresponsive in the frozen lake. I told her how I managed to run across the frozen water and that's how I got all my injuries. 

I conveniently forgot to mention the shadowy figure I'd seen following me. When I told Officer Taylor about it she questioned if I had any history of delusions in my family. I didn't think bringing up the creepy figure to Mom would help her to understand how serious this all is. This story is crazy enough as is, I don't need her checking my into some psych ward and risk my chances of finding out what happened to my friends. 

"I'm so sorry, my love." She squeezes my hand for the hundredth time since I started talking. "You said you called the police? Were they able to help?" It feels like someone punched me in the gut at the way Mom's reaction would be the correct one in any other situation.

"The police are useless." I start and she makes a small noise letting me know she's not happy with my attitude towards the local authority. I roll my eyes as I continue, "It's true Mom, the woman that came here practically laughed in my face when I said my friends were dead and the only thing she can do is file a missing person's report in two days. Literally no one is looking for my friends right now." I lean back into the couch and throw my head into my hands.

"I probably was hallucinating the whole thing." I continue to ramble on, running my hand through my slightly less knotted hair. "Kellsie, Marcus, Riley, Marsha, and Keenan are probably going to walk through that door any minute now, say I had some psychotic break on the lake, and ran off through the woods causing me to get all scratched up." My voice catches at the end of my sentence. It would be so much easier to believe that I was losing my mind then think of the possibility of a world without my friends. I can feel hot tears threatening at the corner of my eyes, but I force them back, swallowing hard and taking a deep breath to try and calm myself down. It won't accomplish anything by sitting here and wallowing in worry and pity.

"Did you see anything odd while you were in the frozen lake?" She asks hesitantly. I didn't mention the shadowy figure to Mom, but her question is so out of the blue that the tiny gut feeling that thinks she knows more than she's letting on starts to stir up again.

"What aren't you telling me, Mom?" I ask a little harsher than I wanted, but my friends are dead - or at least missing and I've just had a really, really weird vision/psychotic break that ended up with me covered in cuts and burns - and Mom has was suspiciously and uncannily protective on the phone earlier. To top it off, she was very adamant that we should all come home, but refused to give a reason why. I instinctively glance over at the clock and it reads 2:35, meaning I was only asleep for fifteen minutes. "Did you leave before I called? Did you know something bad was going to happen?"

Mom stands up a little too fast and crashes into the coffee table. She lets out a quiet swear as she hobbles away from the couch. Her face looks clammy and she's paler than her usual tanned self. I've never seen my Mom act like this and it's beginning to stress me out even more.

"I warned you not to come." Mom paces around the living room, limping a little from her collision with the table. "But my mother, your stubborn grandmother, can't let traditions die with her."

"What are you talking about?" I ask. "What does Grandma have to do with my missing friends?"

Mom turns to me with sad eyes as she sits down on the chair next to me, "Reia, your friends aren't missing." She takes a deep breath before saying the words I've dreading hearing all day. "Your friends are dead, sweetie. They're not coming back."

I shake my head in disbelief, denying the facts that I know to be true. "Officer Taylor was probably right, they just went missing or better yet, they're playing some sort of elaborate prank on me and they'll be back any minute now." I can feel the tears threatening again, but this time I won't stop them from falling. I'm too tired and in too much pain to care about trying to hold it together right now.

"Sweetie, they're gone." Mom reiterates. She's shaking her head slowly and I can tell from the sincerity of her voice that she's serious. But how can she be so serious? There's no way she could have seen that shadowy figure from the lake, the same one that has been floating through the back of my mind since I woke up from my nap. There's no way that Mom could have seen my dead friends floating in the icy lake water. There's no way that she could have seen the weather change so drastically, because Officer Taylor sure as hell didn't when she visited earlier. There are so many things that Mom couldn't know, but the way she keeps acting makes me feel like she does know. How could she though?

"How do you know they're gone?" I ask, starting to get more frustrated with all the secrets and unknowns that are floating through my head, "How could you possibly know that my best friends in the whole world are dead and gone? You weren't even here to see it happen!"

"I was though," She sighs and my eyebrows shoot up in confusion. Mom sits down on the coffee table in front of me, patting my knee as she looks into my eyes, "I was here 20 years ago when the same thing happened to me and my friends."