Thus, the never ending week of all things going wrong continued. That wasn’t an entirely fair thought, but he was having it none the less. Kyle’s orchestrated interlude with Lia seemed to have gone well, but he couldn’t find much comfort in that. He had been counting on Will to negate its necessity. Instead, he found himself in the position of needing the forced friendship to move along faster than he knew it was possible for any reasonable non forced friendship to progress.
He hated that. He hated that Lia was involved. He hated that Kyle was involved. He hated that he was putting both of them in the middle of something that could cause either or both of them harm without either of them knowing or understanding what was happening. He had slipped and snorted when Kyle had referred to their conversation as a debriefing -- not because he was laughing or not taking Kyle seriously but because it was just so morbidly appropriate to his current train of thought.
One would think that he would feel better after his heart to heart with Anna, but he did not. He felt guilty that he had dropped the intensity of all of his concerns on her. This was his to handle. He shouldn’t try to push it off on others. Kyle was looking at him with an expression that implied concern. Anna wasn’t looking at him at all. He couldn’t bring himself to put any more effort into the play by play of the comic book store than he was already doing.
He was just so tired. He needed this day to be over. He needed to regroup. He needed to figure out the next step in the plan. He needed to follow through on it. He needed to be doing things that prevented the conversation with his father from being on replay in his head. It wasn’t like he hadn’t known. It wasn’t as if his parents had ever made an effort at shielding him from their disappointment. That didn’t make it any less of a blow to know that they had no concept of his character. The references made to Anna . . . he couldn’t think about them right now. He wasn’t going to think about them right now. He had more pressing matters to attend to at the moment -- like the fact that Lia Lawson was standing on Anna’s doorstep.
If Anna had thought that leaving Lia and him alone together was somehow going to make this easier, then she had been sorely mistaken. There was no way to defuse the awkwardness inherent in the exchange of words that was about to commence.
He was thinking maybe there would be yelling. That made him wish that Anna and Kyle had stuck around. He didn’t think that Lia would resort to yelling if there was an audience. He might be wrong about that. It had been a really long time since he had known Lia well. A really long time and the difference between a child and a teenager were not a good foundation for making predictions as to someone’s likely behavior.
He probably deserved a little yelling, but he was tired and had a headache. This was all around the awful week that just would not quit being awful. He had to figure out just what Lia knew, he had to figure out just what she had already offered up to Meredyth, and he had to figure out how to recalibrate and work around whatever damage was the result. Those had become the new immediate steps on his world saving checklist, and wasn’t he just so pleased to have added more to it? Was it normal to be sarcastic when talking to one’s self inside one’s own head?
He hadn’t even managed to muster up any shock over Lia’s appearance. It just seemed par for the course. It was a spectacularly brilliant example of a plan blowing up in his face to cap off all of the smaller plans blowing up in his face that had been occurring for what seemed like the duration of his currently accessible memory.
He had tried to do a little tension breaking with his reference to Lia’s apparent fangirlism. It had provided a small tension break between them (that being himself and Lia). It had created, somehow, tension between Anna and him. He wasn’t even sure why it bothered him so much to find out that she didn’t read his work. He was too tired and his head was pounding too hard for him to try for any level of introspection.
He focused back in on the girl in front of him. She looked nervous. She was twisting her necklace chain around her fingers. She used to do that when she was afraid to ask something. He would have thought that she would have outgrown the habit -- mostly because Meredyth had always berated her for displaying the tell.
Words -- he needed some of those. He just didn’t know where to start. He had the impression that Kyle had been feeling the same way earlier. It was interesting that someone as petite and unobtrusive as Lia managed to be so intimidating just by being present.