Nine Eleven (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 8

"He couldn't still be here," Cesar says. His burly eyes fixed on the open street. The pitch of night covers his tired truck, he drives on. The tires crush pebbles of the school parking lot loudly, rudely, breaking the 10:30pm silence.

Arriving at Bryan's high school he grunts again, "he can't still be here!" He chokes the steering wheel. The frown on his face had etches of permanency.

"Why does he do this to me? Why? Why doesn't this damn boy care!?," he starts to slow down his truck arriving at the front of the school. He rolls slowly. His headlights prick vaguely through the night. A cold darkness. The campus is empty. Dark. There isn't a student to be seen, nor a sound to be sound heard.

His cellphone rings inside the truck. He doesn't answer. Neither does he do anything to impede the ringing. The light from the phone illuminates dully the bearded side of his time-weathered face. He was looking for his son through the skeleton of the high school. Like a man digging through the earth to open a coffin of a chest of bones and brine, he looks throughout the hollow school. Searching. Trying. Looking angrily for Bryan his son.

But Bryan hadn't gone to school, neither had he told his dad where he would be. It was 10:30 p.m. If Bryan had been a normal boy, Cesar, his father, wouldn't be out looking for him. Maybe he would have called the cops, put a "missing persons report," called his mom, his wife's mom, some friends. But he didn't. And he wasn't going to.

He'd done this before. Gone out looking for Bryan. In the dead of night. Without a clue where he actually was. Yet the other times weren't entirely the same-not entirely.

Bryan was lost. And certainly not at the campus. He was lost though. Far from the school. Lost-not physically, for in the physical sense he knew exactly where he was-though no one else did. But mentally-mentally he was lost. Forgotten. Dead in a sense. The passing of his old, normal, mundane walk of life was broken and buried and what was reborn was foreign to this world. Passing. He was like a ghost without a home, in a world of discomfort and unrest. In his mind he thought of only God. And in his heart circled only a pulseless flame. A holy flame for God. In his soul was the emblem of his new identity. God's. And his Spirit was his sole slave-master.

He had skipped school to go preach in downtown. Was it a bad thing? For Cesar: "I can't do this anymore! I'm going to kill that kid!," it was.

Cesar's phone starts to ring again. It frustrates him. He doesn't answer it the first time. It frustrated him. It all did. The night, the school, the fact that he

didn't have a clue where his son was-and worst off, the fact that his son couldn't care less that his parents were going crazy thinking he could be dead.

Cesar grabs his phone shining in his cup holder and answered it.

"I haven't found him!," he grunts. It was his wife. "Where do you think he is?," she responded.

"I have no damn clue! Stupid kid! I can't stand him!"

"Honey, just come home. He's eighteen, he'll be fine. He doesn't care enough to tell us where he is, than we shouldn't worry about where he's at."

"What if he's hurt, or getting hurt. Or if he's lying in a ditch somewhere? What do I just leave him there? He didn't tell us where he went, but how am I supposed to sleep not knowing where he's at?"