It's 10:03 AM and I feel like I'm going to throw up. Not 'cause I'm sick--though I am--but because of this morning. This crazy, hectic, twisted morning.

She said let's get going, we've got time.

7:15. I'm in the backseat and my mom's driving me the hour-long trip to school. Normally I'm dozing at this point, giving my heavy eyelids what they want, while my brain drifts off, planning the fictional stories I write and don't finish on Wattpad. But a mixture of Claritin and fate keep me awake. 

Of course, being awake doesn't mean that I'm paying attention, so I'm not really sure why the car veers to the left, across the traffic that headed in the opposite direction, and pulls over on the left side of the road, facing oncoming traffic. That is, until seatbelts start flying off and somehow I hear that someone hit a cat.

I don't really care. The last time I wrote about death, heavy-gray death, I came to terms with the fact that I'm a sociopath and only really have empathy for those I care about.

But soon I'm leaning forward, directing my sister, who's in the passenger seat, to the location of the hazard lights, and then I'm watching Mom trek down that lonesome, gray stretch of road. She's jogging, the middle-aged version of sprinting and falling to your knees. 

I check the road ahead. The traffic in the other lane is heavy as ever, but some gods or something have kept this lane clear.

She's almost to the cat. She bends down on the side of the road, a concerned comrade lamenting a fallen warrior. 

I check the road again and see headlights. That's when I start panicking. Verbally. Because that car's going to come at us. It's going to chip the passenger side of the car and I'll have to watch my sister die.

She's taking her time to pick up the cat. It's 7:18 and we're on track to be late to school.

The headlights are down the first hill and coming up to the second.

She's returning. Slowly. the cat cradled in both arms, limp, head dangling to the side. It's too far to see her expression.

The headlights are ascending the hill.

She's close enough that I can see her expression. It's that same one, from less than two years ago. The one where her face is all red and her eyes are swollen and you can see the wrinkles around her mouth more clearly because her mouth is scrunched up, the corners turned downward, warping her face like the neck of a turkey.

I can see that look inside her eyes.

She comes up to the side of the car and I open the door. She yells, "Get the towel," in a tear-stained, broken voice. 

The headlights arrive and pass us. They don't hit me. I'm back in the car, with the towel, and offer it to the cat.

Oh, gods, the cat.

It's limp, lifeless body hangs down between her arms, as if the bones in its body have been liquified. My eyes are drawn to the head. Its mouth is open, white little cat teeth surrounded by the blood. 

The blood.

It's that sticky animal blood. It's burned into my vision. Like drool, hanging from its mouth, except it's bright, bright red, like that pink-red crayon that nobody likes because they're trying to draw bricks. Blood's coming out of other places, too, and its head is splattered all over with that sticky red blood. 

Mom shifts her position and I see the cat's eye. It's looking far to the left, and it's popping out a little, and it looks like a dead fish, enough that I can smell the ghost scent of decaying fish. Gray-blue, bigger than it should be, pulled out of the head like a brain out of a mummy's nose. My stomach turns.

My sister's there, and I don't know when she started crying, but she's crying too, those youthful tears of pain beyond her years, face red, once-smooth features ravaged like that bloody head.

The blood, the cat, it's so bright, such a bright red, and everything else is gray, except that bright, bright red.

"He's dead," my sister says. 

"I'm driving," I declare, as my mother shakes and lays the fallen warrior on the grass.

I don't even start the timer to record it for my 50 practice hours before I get my license. I just adjust the mirrors, and once everyone's seatbelts are back on, I turn on the engine.

The lane is filled with cars, and so is the opposite lane. It's going to be impossible to get out of here, as Mom points out to me with a shaky voice. She demands that I let her drive.

"No," I tell her. "You are in no state to drive." Mom's hands are speckled with splattery, spiky patterns of sticky blood. She lets me drive, pulling out a wet wipe as I wait for a chance.

"I'm going to need your help getting out," I tell her. I'm working on my license, and I'm not the best at risky maneuvers.

I wait until a chance opens up, and verify with my mother that I can indeed get out.

"Let me drive," she insists, weakly.

I go.

And to my surprise / it was all green lights.

I notice how jittery I am, how my heart flutters and flip-flops, but I know I need to hold it together. Both of my fellow driving-age passengers are crying their eyes out, and they need a hero to get them to school on time.

7:28. I'm going to need to hurry.

As I soon find out, the hero they need is not me. I'm best at being a villain.

The first time I drove in a car, ever, it was a crappy drivers-ed car, that I'm not entirely sure was legal. The brakes were held up by bungee cable, and, according to someone driving behind us, my partner was riding her brakes up an entire road, even though she wasn't. But that first day, when I was struggling to not fluctuate between 25 and 45 miles per hour, and that road where the speed limit was 50 miles per hour scared the shit out of me...on that first day, I drove better than I drove now.

In case trying and failing to save a dying cat was enough for my saintly mother. Now she had to deal with me almost killing her four times. Like the first time, when I tried to turn left but forgot my turn signal and turned very sharply, and didn't check behind me, and cut off a car that braked suddenly and laid on its horn. I'm so grateful that the car was watching, because I almost added three to the morning's death toll. Later, the car honked at me again when I hesitated to turn left, because someone illegally turned right, and I would have hit them had I gone. My mom got angry at the person, calling him a douche bag and dick and awful driver, even though the person's careful attention saved our lives, and I sure as fuck didn't deserve any patience from the person behind me.

I found out that the person was a teen, when I turned right, suddenly, and almost killed us yet again by forgetting to signal, yet again.

Someone was turning left, so I tried to use the other lane to get around them. I forgot to signal (I haven't forgotten to signal in six months, before today) and almost missed the light. Then someone whipped around me and cut me off in the same way that I cut that poor car off earlier, and my mom got really angry, which is confusing, because at this point, it's just karma.

Then, I tried to merge left, because I forgot that I merge left on the ride home, not the ride to school, and my mom got mad, and I had to swerve to the right. At this point, I'm convinced that this is legit CAR-ma. Get it? Like the car? Because I did something bad and then almost got rekt--that is, in a wreck--three times afterward.

Life's a crazy ride / So get in the car and drive.

We pulled over for the second time that day, and my now-furious mother kicked me out of the driver seat and drove the rest of the way. I didn't mean to be a villain. But I tried to help and made everything a million times worse, like I always do. Did I keep us from getting into a hysteria-induced, tear-blurred crash? Or did I almost get us into something far worse?

Once my mother was behind the wheel, all her bad driving habits increased tenfold. She tailgated. She stopped dangerously late, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if we brushed bumpers with a few cars. She sped and didn't realize it. While exiting on the freeway, she got so close to the car in front of her that, had the exit been a couple yards later, she would have rear-ended it. She took turns sharply. After being terrified for my life in the passenger seat, I'm starting to understand why she bites my head off whenever I make a tiny mistake.

Driving up to the school, my mother warns me not to take this out on the test I have today. I hadn't even thought of sabotaging a test like I did that one time in seventh grade when someone bullied me and called me cruel for not saying bless you when he sneezed, and I took it to heart, deciding that a monster like me didn't deserve a good grade, and purposefully bombed the test that I had studied so hard for.

I get to school at 7:53, which gives me two minutes to get to class before my test. I planned to hit myself in the head with the sharp edge of my phone enough times to knock some sense into me, but I don't have enough time to disappear into the bathroom and self-harm, and also get to class on time, so I lock up all the emotions in a metaphorical suitcase and sit on them.

The test is English. The teacher has a reputation for giving ridiculously hard tests. This one is on The Death of Ivan Ilych, a Russian piece about the inevitability of death and the importance of living an authentic life. I would have done well, if it weren't for the fact that it was all about death.

The theme: Death is inevitable and the authentic, good response is to accept it and embrace it. And I have to prove it. But instead of proving it, I see what could have happened behind my eyes. I see my mother bending down to rescue the cat, and then a car plows her down, and her head shoots into the air like that one deer that I saw get hit on the way to a robotics competition. The one where the image of the cross-section of the head, with its cleanly-cut, concentric layers of white bone and red muscle look like a cartoon, and that sticky blood traces an arc into the sky. I see the headlights coming closer and smashing into the passenger side, and my sister getting thrust against the seat, while I watch, horrified. And I wonder, how can I write about accepting this? How can I say that this is normal and everyone will come to it? How can anyone accept something so...so...so gray? 

I write it, apathetically, and I have no clue how it's going to go. By the end of first hour, I feel sick. Sure, I might get a good grade, but I lied. And my family almost died five times this morning. Also, I have a legitimate cold, so I'm double-sick.

Second hour consists of me pretending to be cheerful in mock job interviews. And it's great, and I push everything down, until one of my answers is called out, in front of the entire class, as wrong. And the teacher goes into a long description of what I should have done. It should be super helpful, but instead it opens up the box of shaky fear, and I can feel the emotion pushing at the rims of my eyes, and I have to blink and swallow hard.

I hate that I have "Drive" by the Jonas Brothers stuck in my head because it's such a cheerful song. But the lyrics fit perfectly into this gray and red situation, and I don't know if I can listen to it ever again without thinking about that sticky-gray cat blood, or seeing my mother with the same blood and the same bulgy eyes, strewn on the side of the road, and seeing my sister collapse, and having to call 911 and race to get her off the road before another car came and finished the job.

It's 10:57. A cat got hit and my mother tried to save it, so I drove to school and almost killed us all. And soon I'll have to go back to people, and face their happy lives, and try to support them through their hardships, and study for the second test I have today, about the lead-up to the mass killing of WWI. And then I won't drive home, because I'm a lousy driver. Instead, I'll be sitting in the passenger seat, where my mother sat with her hands covered in blood, terrified for what comes next.

As for now, I have to pretend I'm okay and pretend to know how to do my Calculus II homework. And you'll pretend that this story doesn't switch between past and present tense like a game of ping-pong. 

Here's the inevitable end. I hope I can accept it.