Page 18 of Lost
Lysander sat stunned for a moment. Then, deciding not to press his luck, he grabbed his bag and all but darted out of the office.
At some point during their conversation, the bell must have rung to signal the end of class. There were students rushing through the halls, making their way from one class to the next, talking over each other so loudly it was a miracle anyone could understand a thing. Lysander hoisted his bag up further on his shoulder and joined in the rush, heading towards his next lesson. He was halfway there when Jack found him and stopped him in his tracks.
For a moment they only stared at each other, two statues in a raging river. Lysander didn’t know what to say, and he could see that Jack was trying very hard to piece the words on the tip of his tongue together. After several failed attempts at speaking, the boy only shook his head and said, “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” Lysander said. “Somebody had to do it.”
“Yeah, but you’ve just put a target on your own back. They’re not going to let you walk away from this unscathed.” Jack frowned. “You get into trouble with Randall?”
“Just a warning. I thought I was gone for sure.”
Jack let out a relieved sigh. Lysander smiled at his new friend.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said, gesturing for Jack to lead the way to their next class. “I’m pretty good at taking care of myself.”
They stepped into Physics together, and Lysander did a quick sweep of the room. He found those students who had been in his U.S. History class staring at him with looks of awe, disapproval, or pity, and it quickly became apparent that word had spread to a couple of those who hadn’t been there. He wondered how fast the story would travel, and what it would become.
The last person he locked eyes with was one of the idiots that he’d confronted back in their previous lesson. Lysander recognised him at once as the one he had mentally declared the leader of the little posse — the only one who hadn’t seemed thrilled to have him approach their table. He narrowed his eyes at Lysander now, keeping as quiet as he had before, but he was making himself perfectly clear. The threat lingered in the air between them.
Jack was right. Lysander had painted a target on his own back.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Why don’t you get the fans involved?”
Zack felt like an idiot. For two weeks he’d been sitting on his ass, twiddling his thumbs, thinking the best he could do was call Maria and make sure she was keeping on top of things. It had been two weeks of “no news yet”, of Lysander growing increasingly frustrated every time he asked for a shred of it, all for Brendan to walk in and throw the most obvious answer in Zack’s face.
That show-off always had the best ideas.
It was such an obvious thing that he was kicking himself for not having thought of it himself. Of course they should get the fans involved! It didn’t matter that his mind had been elsewhere, that he’d had more important things to be dealing with. It still should have been the first thing to come to mind when his son had come to him asking for help.
Because the band’s fans were everywhere: every country, every major city, and every place in between. They had hundreds of thousands of people reading their online updates. Something like this, the opportunity to help find a missing girl who was the long lost daughter of one of their favourite guitarists, was exactly the sort of thing the fans would be good at.
Why hadn’t he done this earlier?
That was how Zack found himself at the computer, a word document open in front of him and his hands poised over the keyboard. When it came to communicating with the fans, he and Pat were always the ones left to do the writing. He’d always found talking to them to be easy, the words always coming naturally. And yet now, when it was most important he get his message across, he found himself at a complete loss. Where was he supposed to start? How was he supposed to ask his fans for help in finding a girl that he knew nothing about? He didn’t even know what she looked like.
“Maybe she has aFaceSpacepage or whatever,” Brendan suggested. He had his chair turned backwards, his arms slung over the back-rest. Wanted to look like the cool kids, but didn’t know the first thing about social media. “You can get pictures from that, right?”
It was worth a shot.
He logged into the band’s page and pulled up a search. He typed inDakota Maverick, hit enter, and waited.
The search came up with multiple profiles. Most of them had no photograph attached; of those that did, Zack discounted most for being the wrong age and the rest for looking nothing like the image in his head.
“Maybe you’re not spelling it right,” Brendan said, though he sounded doubtful. His fingers tapped thoughtfully on the backrest of his chair. “Maybe lose the k on Maverick?”
“What are you doing?”
Both men turned at the sound of the voice. There in the doorway, golden hair framed in the warm afternoon light that filtered down the hall, stood Lysander. Zack glanced at the clock — how hadn’t he noticed that school was out? It was his job to know that now — and then back at his son. He cleared his throat.
“We were looking for your sister,” he said.
Lysander made his way across the room tentatively. In the month they’d been looking, he’d maintained that he was never going to lose hope in finding his sister — but every time he heard there was no news, Zack could have sworn he saw that hope dwindle. But he stood at Zack’s side now, looking over his shoulder to see what was on the computer screen, and a tiny smile lifted up the corners of his mouth as he read the name in the search bar.
“Close,” he mused, “but not quite.”
He took the keyboard from Zack and made his corrections quickly before hitting the search key. Zack’s heart fluttered. The name in the search bar now readDakota Bennett.
