“I’m not trying to frustrate you ,” Lucas sighed into the receiver. Really now, Liesel didn’t have to react so severely to everything. It wouldn’t take more than five minutes to get to the roof could catch an elevator. Besides, the others were already there – it wasn’t as if his presence was completely necessary.
“Alright… Okay… I’ll go back right – ”
“Excuse me, coming through,” a man called from behind Lucas, catching the boy off guard. It seemed that while Liesel was ranting, the elevator had made a second trip up and back down again. The sole passenger was a man in blue uniform with his rather large cart of boxes – probably some kind of shipment for the department store.
“Sorry,” Lucas said, quickly stepping aside and out the elevator lobby to let the worker through. He vaguely wondered what could be in those boxes, but was interrupted by Liesel promptly trying to rush him to the roof. “I’m going right now,” he said before ending the call. Well, maybe hanging up like that was kind of rude, but it felt as if all he had been hearing that night were complaints or some semblance of scolding.
Slipping his phone into his pocket, he took one last look around the parking lot – pretty crammed with cars but surprisingly few people – but just as he turned to leave, someone caught his eye. Yet another familiar face, fortunately not bleeding this time. Suddenly alert, he grabbed the bloodstains across the front of his shirt. ‘Right… I hope Aki’s alright,’ Lucas thought as he tried to match a name with the figure. Of course – it was Kaden. Lucas wasn’t about to forget him after what he did to help just earlier that day.
‘Coraline wanted me to thank him…’ so perhaps it was a fortunate coincidence, but was it alright to approach? It seemed that he was preoccupied, sketching the scene of the basement. In the end, Lucas decided that a quick word of thanks wouldn’t hurt… although the bloodstains were a bit of a problem. Well, Lucas didn’t know when he’d see Kaden again – it was so hard to find people at school – so he tried his best to hide it with his hand. He would just have to hope that Kaden didn’t notice, or at least, didn’t bring it up.
“Kaden,” he called walking over, smiling as he would at school. “I didn’t expect to see you here as well. It looks like Sagaro is more popular with our school than I thought.” He’d have to make this brief if he didn’t want Liesel killing the rest of his mobile battery. “I just wanted to say thanks for earlier, you know, with Coraline. She wanted me to tell you she’s really grateful too,” Lucas said.