The Big Brother's Mission (#3)

Chapter 29

I pulled up at the spot where I dropped Casey off earlier and got out of the car. I jogged to the front door where Casey stood, one of her friends hanging a few feet behind her with what looked like my sister's purse in her hands.

I locked eyes with Casey and she started walking. I couldn't read her expression as she looked straight ahead and power walked towards me. I slowed down, ready to spread my arms to give her a hug, but she stepped past me and walked towards the car instead. I turned to look at her back as she continued walking before turning back to her friend, handing me Casey's stuff.

Casey's friend gave me a look and shook her head, tipping me off on how bad it went. As I took Casey's bag from her and ran after my little sister who was already walking towards the car, I watched the drag in her steps, as if they were the heaviest things she had to carry. That was when I realized she was barefoot.

She wasn't bringing her heels and it didn't look like her friends had them. It only made my concerns grow.

I was itching to ask her what really happened in there but I knew better than to get her to open up when she doesn't feel like it.

Once in the car, I put her purse in the backseat and paused for a moment to lay my eyes on her, to make sure that she wasn't going to start breaking down soon. When she didn't make a move to make eye contact with me, I buckled my seatbelt and took it as her silent way of telling me to just drive.

Casey kept her eyes glued to either the road before her or out the window, at the scenery zipping past us and doesn't say anything.

I bit my tongue and quelled the urge to speak, settling with simply glancing at her once in a while to make sure that she was still put together, if you can even say that. She was more like a ticking time bomb with no fuse. No one knows when she's going to blow up.

It took me a few more glances to notice that the make up that she had worn earlier that day before she went to the party had been wiped off clean.

She didn't show traces of anger or sadness. She was just quiet.

After a while, she just slid down on her seat, squirming out of the seatbelt's strap that went across her torso and rested her head on the bottom of the car window.

I was sure that there were more comfortable positions that she can adopt than that but made no comment as her eyes fluttered close. It was then that I noticed another thing about my little sister that night. For some reason, she looked like she had aged within the few hours that she was in that party. She looked exhausted, almost done, resigned.

With what, I wasn't sure. I wasn't keen to know the answer either.

I let her sleep in silence, not being able to bear how emotionally drained she looked. She hasn't been looking so good ever since the day she had told me that she was going to go to this party. I was sure that she hated the fact that we had an argument because of it too. Especially since I was sure she didn't really want to go in the first place.

I made a mental note to stop by the store to get some more ice cream. I don't think the one that we have left in the freezer was going to be enough to nurse my little sister back to life.

There were surprisingly not that many cars on the road tonight, I applied more pressure on the gas pedal with my foot and the car started accelerating down the empty road. We weren't too far away from home.

Suddenly, the balls of light in the distance came into view. They looked like headlights, but what puzzled me was where they were on the road. From the position of the headlights, it seemed like the vehicle was on the middle of the road, taking up half of both lanes, which couldn't be right.

I squinted to make sure that they weren't two motorcycles' headlights instead of a single vehicle's.

No. Definitely not bikes, the headlights were growing too big for them to be a bike's headlights and the distance between them stayed constant.

As the headlights grew bigger and bigger as we neared it, I realized what it was that was accelerating towards us in an alarming speed. I could feel my eyes widen and I could feel my heart starting to race in my chest. There was a bad feeling that was building up in my gut that told me something bad was going to happen.

The speed that the truck was zooming towards us from the opposite direction was one of the reasons and the way that it wasn't moving even after I beeped my horn a few times was another. It took up both lanes, leaving us no space to avoid it.

"What the fuck.." I muttered, honking at the truck to let them know we were coming from the opposite direction so that they would go back to their lane and give us some way to pass through.

But the truck didn't even move an inch to the side. There were no signs of it slowing down or moving away and when I realized that the distance between us will be covered in a few seconds, my hand shot out to shake Casey awake.

I shook her knee frantically, "Case! Wake up!" I shouted at her, unable to control the panic in my voice. I was already decreasing our speed as much as I can but the truck seemed to be increasing our speed instead.

I didn't stop shaking Casey's knee, not taking my eyes off the road, until I felt her quickly fixing her seatbelt and tucking her knees into her body to curl up and protect herself as much as she could.

I gripped the steering wheel tightly to try and keep my hands from shaking. My heart hammered against my chest to an almost painful extent. There was a lump lodged in my throat that grew bigger at the same rate that the headlights in front of me were growing bigger.

Have you ever heard of the saying that the best seat you can take as a passenger in a car is the one right behind the driver's seat? Because in an accident, the driver's first instincts would be to swerve the side of the car they are on away from the collision to minimize the impact on them.

Sitting behind them in a car would mean that, if the driver has control over which side collides with another vehicle or object, you're sitting on the safer side of the car.

I gripped the wheel tightly and at the few last seconds, I unfastened my seat belt and slammed the wheel to the left, to the direction Casey was sitting before launching myself to Casey's side of the car, covering her body with mine as I used my upper body to protect my little sister. I felt the force of the collision before the world around me tipped and started to whirl. I kept my eyes squeezed shut in complete horror as we fell under gravity's mercy.

The sounds of Casey's screams as well as mine along with the screech of the car scraping against the paved road were the only things that I could hear until the loud ringing replaced it.