Seeking Haven // s.m.

Three

Wren

The world is like a big game of 'telephone'. By the time a message makes its way to a fifteen year old, it's far from the way it was first interpreted. It was kind of that way when the news about Haven reached me.

She disappeared that night, when I was on the phone with Dace, her third night back in Chicago for Easter. Like I told Kohler, running away wasn't a rarity for someone like Haven. She craved adventure, in a way that I couldn't even prosper. I was too afraid to even crave too many calories.

Saying Haven was a diva was an understatement. She was swamped with a passion for anything that would eventually bite her in the ass. Rules didn't apply to her. In the same way that telling a six year old not to eat a cookie before dinner only makes the dessert more desirable, Haven didn't listen to anything people told her to do.

She snuck out so much that it was actually more of a surprise when she was home for the night. When she started going out with Shawn, none of that changed. In fact, she actually had an excuse to escape the quiet prison of her bedroom after that. Someone to share the teenage experience with.

Me, on the other hand; I had no interest in getting myself into hazardous activity, especially during my freshman year. I didn't like leaving the comfort of home. I didn't like doing things that were in any way considered transgressions. And I mostly didn't enjoy running around downtown Chicago late at night, or whatever the hell Haven did when she climbed out her window and shimmied down the oak tree in our front yard.

I just covered for her. Every time.

And it's not like she kept her reckless personality or endangered habits a secret. Everyone that knew Haven-- which was a lot --knew that she would die young. People like her were a rare breed. She had so much knowledge of the world; not by staying in and reading about it or watching it on Netflix dramas, like I did, but by getting out there and living it.

And she really didn't care who she was hurting. She was just being Haven. At the end of the day, she had quite the number of insane stories to be told. It makes me wonder how many she kept to herself.

I wish I could remember them all.

Anyways, she disappeared that night, and the whole town awaited her arrival back home. Not that stories like missing person investigations weren't common in Chicago, but everyone knew Haven; everyone either adored her or hated her guts, but they all knew her.

After she had been gone for two weeks, people at my school started making up stories about where she could be. Some people thought that she was in a town over, watching all the commotion rise and rise, Haven-- who craved that attention more than anything-- finally getting the recognition she's been waiting for.

Ones who didn't agree with that theory thought that maybe she'd been kidnapped, and was being held hostage in a basement somewhere. That one died down soon. Haven wasn't the type of person to allow being "held hostage".

I didn't care where she was, at the time. I knew that I was probably wrong anyway. I didn't worry about her at all-- it was typical of her to disappear. I knew she was fine.

It was only after she'd been gone for two months that I worried. I assumed that if Haven was okay, she would text me a selfie of her with a homeless man she spotted in Mexico, or a snapchat of her dripping with diamonds from the top of the Statue of Liberty. But no one had heard from her since the night she went missing-- not even me.

Not even Shawn.

Actually, no one had heard from him either. He never came back to Chicago. He had moved to San Francisco with Haven that summer, and had been completely MIA since he heard about her disappearance.