Eternal Flight

arsonist.

Chapter twenty two.

Carmen.

"I didn't fucking know," Kian yells, "I didn't know that he wouldn't be coming back, Carmen."

Both our chests are heaving and his face is red.

"Kian, Carmen," Wren tries to get between us, his hands extended between us to keep us separate. "Let's not-"

"He told me he was going to his aunt's house. That he had some business to get straight with."

"What the fuck?" I mutter, looking down at the floor, running a hand through my hair, "he doesn't even fucking talk to his family. Oh God"

I slump down on a chair, my heart trying to beat out of my chest.

What the fuck?

What the fuck is going on?

Perez is gone.

He has been gone for days. He isn't answering phone calls or text messages. He hasn't called. That dude used to call me once a day at least.

Whenever I texted him he would immediately answer just in case something was wrong. Very wrong. I thought that he was just a fast replier, but once a year ago when we were at this party, both drunk off our asses, he told me he does that because something might have happened to me. Emergency. My mom, her friends.

God.

"I thought he told you where he was going," Kian sits down across from me. "I thought you knew."

"He didn't"

Fuck you, Perez, for making us worry.

He's probably out with his friends getting a drink or something.

Just on the fucking other side of the country.

I think it's a grieving process waiting to happen. All fucking five stages. It isn't like Perez to disappear for more than a few days without a word. But I trust him. He'll call me.

He also wasn't at school at all even if he had come back from 'aunt's house'.

My phone vibrates with an incoming call before the caller's ID shows the culprit.

Francis Perez's goddamn father.

Are you shitting me right now?

I stand up with my phone in hand, looking at the expecting faces of Wren and Kian. We're in Wren's room and for some reason I feel the need to leave them and I walk to my room.

Sliding my thumb across the screen, accepting a call, I raise the device to my ear. For some reason the house is dead quiet and I hear my heartbeat echoing, blood buzzing in my ears. I stand in the middle of my room on a round beige carpet.

"Hello?"

"Carmen, is this you?" He asks.

No, it's your mom.

"Yes," I say.

If even a single atom in me was thinking, hoping or wishing that he was going to ask or notify me about my best friend, I was dumb to do so.

"Did you hear about the fire this Monday?"

Girl.

"Yes," I say again, "barely. Not much."

It was late into the night on Monday, my birthday, when we arrived back at Gamwell. I drove in Wren's car again while Alex went with Myles. We heard sirens and big dark clouds of smoke were over the town. There were talks this week. A house fire.