Excerpt 1

Still in Progress! Stay tuned!

Egon Schiele; ‘Still Life with Books’, 1916

*placeholder* had always been a good friend of mine, sitting next to me in homeroom as we would tune out the endless murmurings of our teacher, Mr. Jensen. As all male students at our school were at the time, *placeholder” and I were both hopeless addicts of video games. Both holding aspirations of becoming professional esports players, him and I would join several others in building an esports team, choosing to spend most of our evenings huddled away in our rooms, eyes glued to the dancing lights of these video games. I had visited him a couple times for sleepovers, with him having done the same, and we viewed ourselves with a familiar bond of trust that had been substantiated by our illicit video game marathons during homeroom, often to the dismay of Mr. Jensen. Even the night before, we had played for a few hours with several other guys that we share homeroom with. But then again, in retrospect, maybe I never knew who he truly was. I wasn’t his best friend, I knew that he had other, far more closer friends as well.

I’d imagine that for most of our readers, the arrival or departure of students is a rather mundane event, necessitated by the financial circumstances of their parents or by marked behavior of indiscipline. I believe that this warrants a proper explanation of the peculiarity of my school. In many ways, our school was a self-contained fishbowl, separated off from the rugged exteriors of the real world. I confess I have had little exposure or understanding of the process that most public-school students or even other private school students undertake as they transition from elementary to middle then high school. The average tuition for the school was well beyond the means of the “regular folk”, resulting in almost an almost skewed student body that in many ways bore little resemblance to the flashy and “diverse” images dotting the school welcoming brochure. You see, within the grounds of the school included facilities dedicated from kindergarten all the way to high school, meaning that someone could begin their enrollment as a kindergartner and then graduate a number of years later from the high school that was just a few minute’s walk from the kindergarten facilities. For the parents, especially those wishing to gain entrée into seemingly greater circles of influence, the school bore an attractive value proposition.

For the students, however, the school was a veritable pool of languishment and lethargy, offering no prospect of adventure nor reward. Even the most ambitious and determined of students would find their aspirations stunted and their efforts stymied by the louche laziness that by then was seemingly a pre-requisite to graduate the school. Politics and news were an afterthought, barged off by metaphorical safety nets and compounded by the endless fleet of shuttle buses that would bring us to-and-from the comforts of our home. For many of us, myself included, the school was a mindless hiatus from the so-called rigors of reality that we knew absolutely nothing about yet were chided carefully on by the weary glances of our fathers and the gentle admonishments of our parents.

While there were some students who would end up leaving for finishing or boarding school in the middle of the school year, student composition per class would remain relatively constant. Everything in the school was safe, almost too safe to the point of claustrophobia. My parents would know the addresses of my friends, the parents of my friends would know where my parents and I would typically vacation during the school breaks. The nature of the school itself with its impossibly high barriers of admission alongside the change-averse nature of the student body would effectively perpetrate in an incredibly stable yet disingenuous environment. As far as my parents were concerned, the closest thing to a scandal, or a fiasco was during second grade when an innocuous school trip to the zoo had resulted in fleas for half the class.

With so little to strive or “try” for, the prospect of a student joining or leaving was a major event, awaited with abated breaths and whispers. School departures were met with similar fanfare, students coagulating to send off the student to wherever he had planned on going. It was because of this sort of tradition that the news that “placeholder” had left the school in such bizarre fashion that had caught the school ablaze. Asking around for the whereabouts of *placeholder* was done to no avail, no one had an idea. Yet if anyone had had the idea to look online to the news that had been occurring the day before, they would possibly have had an inkling of what had transpired, linking the dots to arrive at what could have driven *placeholder* to vacate the school in such a blur. It was almost as if he had vanished off the face of the earth.