Excerpt for Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day!
By special request, I'm sharing an excerpt from my current novel project, Villain. This is my mom's favorite scene that I've written so far, and she asked me to post it today.
Additionally, it's an appropriate post for today, since it centers around my MC and her mother-figure.
**Note: Ika's Aunt Meira is NOT based on my own mother, nor any other female relative, and is purely fictional**
Enjoy!

Something’s wrong.

Something’s wrong.

Something’s wrong.

The words loop themselves around inside my skull, twisting and turning and snaking through every thought like a streamer, winding them all together into an incomprehensible knot of worry.

Something. Is. Wrong.

The fear drives my feet faster, and my earbuds blare a numbing beat in my ears. It’s so much easier like that today, easier not to think when I let every note of the songs feel for me.

I knew something wasn’t right when 2:30 came and went, and Aunt Meira wasn’t at the school. No texts. No phone calls. She didn’t even email me.

So I’m walking home. I’m almost there, but my mind is going crazy.

She’s not late.

She’s never late.

She’s the last-call, be-there-or-be-square, designated door-closer member of the garden club. Because everyone knows, if you don’t text ahead with a suitable excuse (and it’d better be a darn good excuse), you might as well not bother showing up at all. Meira Charles will shut the door in your face, lean back in her chair, and tip up her chin at you with all the ethereal grace of a faerie queen.

She’s the picture of punctuality, and the last time she missed picking me up from school, she was in the hospital and still texted me until I answered.

I thought it was excessive at the time, but now I’d give anything for the familiar ping to interrupt my 20teens punk-rock-emo-something playlist. The notes wrap around me like armor, but I’d welcome the arrow in my side just to tell me she’s all right.

The house is in sight now. I’ve been on autopilot for the whole half-eternity of the walk.

Aunt Meira’s car is in the driveway.

The door will be unlocked.

Aunt Meira will be in the living room, or the bathroom, or the bedroom, or maybe getting her shoes on.

I’ll call out to her, and she’ll let slip a word I wouldn’t dare repeat in her presence and come running and wrap me in a hug and usually I wouldn’t let her but today I will and I’ll hug her back because she will be all right and that’s all I care about today.

I can already feel her arms around me as my shaking fingers slide the key into the (locked) doorknob.

The door swings open, and I stand in the doorway for a moment.

You’d think by now I’d know.

Daydreaming is nothing but a precursor to disappointment.

I stand still.

Silent.

Listening.

“Aunt Meira?”

Still.

Silent.

Listening.

Straining.

Curbing my breaths because they’re too loud for me to hear anything else in the terrifying void of this apartment.

“Aunt Meira?”

I check the whole house.

My mind is trapped, my thoughts muted, not by my music, but by the air in the room that is so still I can hear the wall charger, the one I hate with every breath in me, the one Aunt Meira hasn’t replaced because we’re still paying off the Institute, and I can’t bother her with another thing to fix when it’s still functional. The electric shrill pieces me through to the core, and I dig my palms against my neck, just beneath my ears.

Something’s wrong.

I’m drowning in an ocean of silence, and the space my aunt should occupy is like a black hole, grabbing my mind and pulling me in.

I am a ship, adrift without my anchor.

I am lost.