Chapter Text
Todd was tired.
he hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep the night before, although he had tried to feverishly. To him it always seemed that when he needed sleep the most and actively tried to get as much of it as possible was when it evaded him.
He supposed it could have been nerves because of the move as well. He was sat in the car on the way to his new home and he was still nervous about it, a whole new house with a new neighborhood and worst of all a new school! He already dreaded school as it was (save for English class of course) without the worry of being the new kid with no friends.
He stared miserably at the fly buzzing against the inside of the window, trying to get out.
'that’s me'
he lamented, staring at the poor thing.
He cracked the window so that the wind gushed into the car and swept the fly away. Maybe he could be kinder to the fly than the world was to him.
When Todd and his parents arrived at the house, he stood outside for a moment, just taking it in. It was an old house, double story but not huge, with white walls and blue trimming. It was a nice enough neighborhood with a myriad of similar-looking houses lining the long, straight street.
“Start Bringing in your things, Todd!” barked his father.
Todd picked up a box from the moving van that had gotten there a little before they had.
‘Todd : Books’ it read, in choppy marker.
He walked up the stairs to where his mother told him his new room would be, struggling to make it up with the humongous box blocking his view. One of the steps creaked and he committed it to memory immediately.
His room was quite small, but he didn’t mind it. There was a lovely window that he slid up and peered out of. His room faced the upstairs bedroom of the neighbors house, but he could hardly look into it due to the tree between their windows. It looked to Todd like there was a tree house in that tree, he thought that if he wanted, he could climb out onto the shingles of the roof outside his window, along the branch, and right into it.
He thought of maybe turning the tree house into a reading nook if he could. He would take any privacy he could get around here.
Next, he carried up boxes titled:
Todd: Clothes #1
Todd: Clothes #2
Todd: Other
(That box mostly contained CDs and stationery)
That was all he had, apart from a backpack and his guitar in its case. It made him feel a little sad, that that his books and guitar were the only things that really mattered to him, he wished his other things meant more to him.
He wished that a lot of things meant more to him, but he also wished he wasn’t so affected by everything all the time. His brain never seemed to calm down, always thinking, always needing to know things that no one else even cared about, and yet he still felt detached from everyone no matter how much he thought about how to present himself. It frustrated him to no end; his hands were starting to shake.
'I’m spiraling, I need to get out of here.'
he walked outside with his guitar, skipping the step that he knew creaked and slipping out without a sound, he had gotten good at that over the years, not that his parents really cared where he was.
Sometimes when he was younger, he used to stop at the skate park on his way home from school to watch the people there do tricks. He had really wanted a skateboard at the time (and if he’s honest he still wanted one) but he knew his parents wouldn’t approve.
One day he had accidentally fallen asleep under a tree by the skate park and only woke up when it was dark. He had run back home as quickly as he could on the verge of tears and when he got back to his house, he expected his parents to be furious, but they didn’t even notice he was gone. He just walked straight past his father and up to his room and that was that.
Getting his first good look at the garden, Todd noticed that there was a small bench pressed up against the wall of the house, almost directly underneath his window, and the dappled shade from the tree made it just about the perfect spot.
'Sweet.'
Sitting down with his guitar, he began to pluck at the strings, He had a few chord progressions he had been working on recently, though he had no words for them yet. He supposed there was nothing that he particularly wanted to write about at the moment.
The shaking in his hands lessened and he watched as the sun began to set behind the rows of trees and white houses, the afternoon was still.
'Maybe living here won’t be too bad...'
he thought,
'at least the view isn’t. '