Imposter Syndrome: Chapter 4, Part 1
The Circle That Shouldn't Exist.
Imposter Syndrome is a spooky young adult mystery set in the weird town of Shady Springs, where nothing’s ever quite what it seems. Paid subscribers can read full segments of the story as they’re released (and help support my fiction writing in the process). Annual subscribers will also get a free physical copy of the novel when it’s published in full.
Previously…
The rest of the day went by in a haze for Theo.
He and Alex hung around the Oakwood home, tossing a football up and down the garden (Alex insisted she knew how to do it but missed almost every catch) while Aunt Noelle busied herself in the vegetable patch, tending to her green beans and summer squashes. When the heat became unbearable, they all retreated to the cool of the house; there was a brief squabble between Alex and Tiffany over whose turn it was to control the TV (“You’ve been in here all day, freako!”) before Aunt Noelle ordered Alex to find something else to do. Tiffany smirked as Alex stomped from the room.
“Come on, let’s go play a board game,” Alex snapped.
Theo didn’t think he knew much about girls, but he did know to keep his mouth shut right then and there.
They actually got pretty engrossed in a game of Settlers of Catan and didn’t notice the sun dipping lower and lower in the sky outside Alex’s bedroom window until Uncle Kurt arrived home from work with a cry of “Holy smokes, that’s a scorcher!” and they heard Tiffany immediately ask to borrow the car that night.
“Tiff,” Alex said, looking up from the board. “Of course! She can give us a ride to town later. Mom and Dad won’t know we went anywhere near the woods.”
Theo stretched, groaning like he was a hundred. “Where’re we going again?”
Alex threw a board piece at him, missed. “Don’t chicken out now.”
“I’m not,” he replied. “But I’ve been thinking, what happens when we get there? What’re we going to do exactly?”
Alex shrugged. “Look around, I guess?”
“Yeah, but what if there’s… you know…”
“What?” Theo motioned towards The Alex Files and she nodded. “Oh, right. The monsters and stuff.”
“Yeah, that.”
“We’ll just look,” she said. “We can bring torches, maybe take photos. Just enough to document it for the binder, and then we’ll go. We probably won’t see anything at all.”
Or we’ll see way too much, thought Theo nervously.