Page 67 of Lost
Lysander stared back at Zack looking entirely unimpressed.
“Well?” he demanded. “What do we need to talk about?”
“I think you know. Let’s talk about those papers your English teacher showed us. Let’s talk about the things that you wrote.”
“Let’s not,” Lysander shot back. “It’s not important.”
“It’s not important that you feel like you’ve lost Dakota all over again?”
“Don’t,” the boy hissed. “Don’t say her name.”
Zack almost came back with something along the lines of, “I can do as I like,” but this was his son he was talking to, not one of his friends. He had to close his eyes and count to ten before he would let himself even think about speaking again.
“Why didn’t you say something?” he finally managed to ask.
“Like I said, it’s not important.”
“The hell it isn’t,” Zack said. “You start feeling this way, you tell somebody. You tellme. That’s what I’m here for.”
“What’s the point? Even if I told you, you wouldn’t understand.”
“You think I don’t know what it’s like? You think I’ve neve—”
“No,” Lysander cut him off. “Youdon’tknow what it’s like.” The boy was getting angry now. “You can pretend all you like, but you don’t even know the half of it. You’ve lost friends, sure. I lost mytwin. And mymother!The two people who meant the most to me in the world. Then I had my home taken from me and I had to leave all my friends behind to comehere, where I have people calling me a fraud and a liar, and your idiot fans telling me to get the hell out of town before theymakeme.”
“I…What?”
Even Georgia looked startled by this — and to Zack that was saying a lot, because he knew his wife got all sorts of hell from his fans. But threats were not something that they were known for. They might talk themselves up and talk others down, but the fans weren’t usually so stupid. Zack found it hard to believe that they would resort to such things.
“Why is this the first I’m hearing of this?”
“You didn’t need to know.”
Zack ran a hand through his hair. “When people start threatening you,thatis something that I should know about, Lysander.”
“What would be the point in telling you when you can’t do anything about it?”
Zack opened his mouth to say something, but Georgia beat him to it.
“The fans throwing hate at you is one thing,” she said gently, “but when they start tothreatenyou, that’s something else entirely. That’s something serious, and it needs to be stopped before it gets worse. You should have said something.”
Lysander shrugged.
“Marina was there. She didn’t seem to think it was a big deal.”
Zack would be having words with that girl. This was something that he should have been alerted to the moment it happened, not some time after the fact. He would have to get the full story and post a warning to the fans — one that would let them know that they weren’t to threaten his son, or his family, or any of the band’s relatives in any way. It simply would not be tolerated. It was unforgivable.
But there were more pressing issues right now. He would have to come back to that later.
“What you wrote about breaking up with your girlfriend,” he said instead. “Is it really that bad?”
“Dad...”
“Lysander. Please.”
For a long while Zack didn’t think the boy was going to answer. He kept both hands tightly fisted and rested against his knees while his eyes looked off somewhere to his left. But eventually, reluctantly, he nodded.
“You’re going to hate me for this,” Zack said, “but until it starts to get better, I don’t want you alone. If you’re home, you’re either with me or Georgia. If we both need to be out at the same time, you’ll be with one of us.” And before Lysander was able to open his mouth in protest he added, “Just to give me peace of mind, all right? Now. What happened at school?”
