Garrison Academy

Chapter 11

Lance

Lance was in the library that evening working on a paper while his phone was frantically going off. At first thought he thought it was his family; so he made a habit to check it every time it went off. He glanced down at it to only find it was Hunk. He would have put his phone down and on silent to focus, but it had him a bit worried. Hunk never texted this frantically.

It was hard to decipher what his texts were about – something about Pidge running out of the room as soon as he got back to the dorm. If there was anything that Lance knew well, it was that Hunk was a worrier; he worried about almost everything. About his mom being happy in her life, about Shay when she had things going on, about Lance and his family situation, especially about going away and leaving his mom behind when he came here. If there was anything that was clear – it's that Hunk was worried about Pidge, and why exactly he left the room.

Lance had no idea why Pidge would just run out. Something really bad must have happened, but it wasn't his place to ask any more about the situation than what Hunk was telling him already. But his focus shouldn't be on Pidge right now; he should be focused on Hunk.

There was a slim chance of him picking up, but Lance thought he would give calling Hunk a try anyways.

The phone rang, then rang again. Then oddly, Lance got sent to voicemail before the ringing ended. He tried Hunk again, but the same thing happened again. Hunk must really not want to talk out loud about what happened. A lot of thoughts swirled around in Lance's head – and that made it hard to focus on what exactly he was working on beforehand. He was so worried about his friends that it was hard to even remember what he was doing. First his family and now his friends; at this moment for Lance school was the least of his worries. But he needed to struggle through this stupid paper.

Leaving his phone on a vibrate just in case Hunk tried to reach him again, Lance slipped his phone into his pocket before once again starting to type words. Staring at his computer screen, it was really difficult to come up with the right words to put out onto the paper. This was foreign to Lance, who was always so used to being the best one possible when it came to writing. He ran his hand through his hair, letting out a sigh. Looking around, he saw so many students dedicated to their work. Lance had never been the hardest of workers in school, but he still got fairly good grades. He greatly envied the people who could just go ahead and get stuff done. He was never like that.

It was then Lance decided instead, that he was going to distract himself. He hadn't been able to let himself loose and create separate imaginary worlds for a while now since he came up with a concept for his novel; so Lance decided instead of writing his paper he would write some stories to jog his brain. He could add these to the blog too, something extra to add as his part between posts from the others.

The blog has been really coming along lately. He wasn't sure who kept track of it after they posted something, but Lance likes to sometimes go on there just to scroll through and stall some time before doing other things. Pidge definitely seemed like a master of posting, it was almost like he had run some kind of blog before. He posted about some science-y space things, something that Pidge seemed to talk about a lot. Figures, since that was the type of stuff his brother was doing. They must be close. Besides him, there are a couple posts from Hunk about some weird skinny pig care (Lance didn't understand his fascination on skinny pigs, even if Hunk owned one once in his lifetime) and one or two posts from Keith which Lance was even surprised that he had even done anything.

Lance hadn't attempted to talk to Keith in actual weeks. Since he walked in on Lance dancing around the room, he has been avoiding any contact of his roommate due to his partial embarrassment. That was most of the reason that Lance was in the library, hiding away. Even though Keith didn't care for him at all, Lance was trying to figure out why he still wanted to make a good impression. He also still doesn't know why he cares so much about what Keith thinks about him. It's a mystery. He could probably write a book on himself at this point: "The Unsolved Mystery of the Mind of Lance McClain".