Titus Walker has always felt that he didn't fit in. There always seemed to be an invisible gulf between him and his peers. In his final year, he just wants to fly under the radar, graduate and get the hell out of his private, all-boys high school.
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"Fraser Hugh Sinclair, get out of bed this instant!"
There was a muffled yell from somewhere deeper in the house. The sound of something solid falling on carpet. Fraser's voice.
Titus stepped away from the front door. So that was why his first knock had gone unanswered.
It was just after two o'clock in the afternoon. The tops of the gum trees were dancing in the breeze. He was having one of those periodical light-headed moments when he felt the world was turning, where nothing felt certain. Then everything came back to normal again.
He had just assumed that this year would pass uneventfully, just like all the ones before. All conflicts would be either easily resolved or conveniently dissipate. Then all this had happened. It felt like the more he thought about it, the less everything made sense and seemed to blend into an amorphous blob.
This kind of thing had never really been an issue before. He had had many of these light-headed moments before. Doing nothing and letting things sort themselves out had worked with every other major crisis in the past seventeen and three-quarter years. If things didn't make sense, he would just wait until they made sense.
Now everything seemed to make less sense the further he delved into it. Letting go wasn't really an option, either. He couldn't just stop and hope that everything was ok. Suddenly the anxiety that he had felt in every single interaction became clear. He hadn't really felt it at the time, but now it became blindingly obvious. That was how it was a lot of the time. Thing didn't become clear until weeks or months after the fact, sometimes years. Everything had happened so suddenly.
How did you tell someone about that? How could you even begin to explain what was going on inside your head?
To be fair he had had some practice for that, albeit not very good practice. For as long as he could remember he had had spirited conversations with people who weren't there. The vast majority of of these conversations were overwhelmingly one-sided: the imaginary other never seemed to have much agency. At the most they might make a slight noise or a somewhat stilted question which would all too conveniently lead on to the next piece of information he wanted to parlay.
So far this had helped him out in more ways than he would ever admit to, but he felt it had also somewhat stunted his conversational skills. Which had never been brilliant in the first place.
Luckily, some things had managed to resolve themselves, for which he was grateful. It was now the school holidays, and he had some time to reconsider everything. He was also going on weekly running sessions with Fraser. Every Tuesday and Friday he would take the bus to his house and they would go to one of the parks nearby. On the days after they would do a simple recovery jog at home. It had become a neat little routine.
But some of the other threads of his life were still stubbornly refusing to come together. The search for the musical, which already felt surreal in many ways, had hit a dead end again. The other three were still proving elusive. From what he could gather from the news articles he had found online Winston had tried to fake his own death in some kind of weird life-insurance thing. Information on the other two was even more scant.
