All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 63: Receipts

My phone buzzed multiple times with messages from my friends as I sat down in the car. I flicked the notifications away with my thumb and turned my phone on mute.

I just couldn't deal with this right now.

If Mom noticed that I was in a sour mood, she didn't say anything to me about it. I fiddled with my phone as we made the ten-minute drive home in silence. The only noise was Emilia babbling to herself in the car carrier in the backseat.

Why did all my friends have to be so freaking nosy? It all started with Lisa. What was her deal anyway? Spying on other students to try and find someone who also wore pull-ups until she came across me. Of course, now her condition was magically getting better, leaving me as the odd one out.

And why did everyone have to care so much about what I was wearing under my pants? All three of my friends had been checking on my toilet training status practically every day for the past month. And now Lisa wanted to talk directly with Mom about my issues. Why couldn't anyone respect my privacy?

I couldn't find any satisfactory way to explain to my friends that they needed to keep my mom out of this. And the longer my incontinence persisted, the more chances there would be for all my carefully planned deceptions to be revealed to Mom.

I opened my phone one last time and muted all of my friends' numbers. They weren't going to be able to help me now. I was going to need to deal with potty training on my own for the next two weeks.

I grabbed the keys from Mom and unlocked the door to the house while she got Emilia out of her car seat. I left the front door ajar and raced inside to my bedroom. I needed some time alone, which I hopefully would get until it was time to put Emilia down for bed.

I sat at my computer desk and turned on Fortnite, I manually set my status to away, in case Lisa were to log in again once she got home. I didn't need her to try and message me.

I hadn't looked at my phone since getting in the car to leave Samantha's place. I didn't even want to guess how many messages were probably on there.

But the video game didn't prove to be the distraction that I needed. I had maybe an hour or so before it was time for Emilia to get ready for bed and that is when the gaming would need to stop.

I had finally gotten used to the new mouse I'd purchased a month back, but even finishing third out of a hundred players didn't make me feel any better. I clicked the button to start one final round before calling it a night when Mom called out to me from the living room.

"Sarah, you come here right now," she yelled.

It wasn't Mom's request that worried me the most, but her tone. I couldn't recall the last time that she had sounded so angry with me.

As I stepped from my bedroom into the hallway, I was racking my brain to try and figure out what I possibly could have done wrong to deserve that type of response from Mom. I couldn't imagine that I had failed any recent assignments at school. The only grade that was even slightly in question was the history test, but there wasn't any way that had been graded and posted online already.

There had been that extra diaper I had taken on Black Friday, but that had been a month ago already. There wasn't any way she had noticed that the number of diapers in the closet was off by just one.

Maybe I hadn't done anything wrong after all. Maybe there had just been some sort of misunderstanding. Or maybe there was some urgent task that she needed my assistance with.

I turned the corner to where I could see Mom standing in the living room from where I was in the hallway. Mom was staring at me from the other end of the hallway. One of her hands was raised up, holding a thin slip of paper.