Chapter 41: Crowded Cafe

Days flew by after that. Or rather, they walked past Lucus who was too numb to care. Every day seemed exactly the same as the last, that Lucus soon began to believe he was stuck in a never ending dream. He thought that if this was a dream, he never wanted to wake up. Not because he loved this new world he had made up or anything, but because he hated the old. It was easier to forget about his problems and become numb than face them. What a coward I am, Lucus thought. His grades fell. He was hardly above the class average, which was bad because the rest of the class got in on money alone. A poor genius surrounded by idiotic wealth should only be expected to excel at one thing. The thing Lucus soon dropped too. Every day new classmates would come up to him to ask to play. Each held no response. Ben dragged Lucus around class to class, yet he still seemed just as numb. Lucus wanted to say thanks to him every day, but nothing could come out. Only a few words a week. At first, his siblings at the orphanage would be sent in one by one to make their attempts at helping, but soon that stream trickled down to just Nate, who seemed almost as numb. He functioned enough to hide his despair, but not enough to trick others. Perhaps Lucus was the only one oblivious to it. Like his siblings, classmate visits too became less frequent. At one point, a month had flown by, yet Lucus had missed it all.