Doppelganger

"Margery?" Ellen yelled to her knew found friend. "Why do they talk to me that way?"

A pause follows as Ellen searches the air.

"Margery?" She speaks again, not deterred by the disappearing act her friend likes to play. "Why do they sit there so still?"

A man passes Ellen, sadness touches his eyes.

"Margery?" Ellen cries one more time. "Why must you play these games?"  Blank expression flows from Ellen's eyes.

"Happy Thanksgiving, Mom?  How are you feeling today?" A stranger whispers to Ellen.  She looks at him expectantly, knowing that this stranger bears some resemblance to her beloved Charlie.  She waits for Charlie to emerge from this kind man's eyes.  Charlie's doppelganger looks back at her with the same hope and expectation.  Each give up, pushing back the desire for a sweet reunion.

"Mom, its me, Phillip. Your Son."  Each word spoke, Phillip hopes will resonate in his mothers ears, bringing back all of those memories.

Ellen smiles remembering her little boy.  Confused, she wonders how her sweet little man could be this tall, broad shouldered, gentlemen in front of her.

Untitled, Chapter 1

Mary was your average teenager.  She had average looks, average intelligence, and average personality.  There was nothing about Mary that seemed to stand out to anyone other then her parents.  Mary spent her childhood and now high school career under the radar.  To many, Mary wasn’t even near the radar. 

Mary was OK with her status, for the most part.  In her school and community, to go unnoticed was a good thing.  There seemed to be two classes: the perfect and the unwanted.  There was the underground class of the invisibles.  Mary, fortunately, was in that group.  The perfects were the rich, talented, over-achievers who knew what they wanted, knew how to get it and nothing ever stopped them.  The Unwanteds were often the poor, marginalized, under-achievers.  They were often viewed as the dirt on the feet of the Perfects.  Something they stepped on, on their way to success. It was rare that the two ever mixed and even more rare when they switched places.  Being in the unclassifiable class wasn’t an issue for Mary and she planned to keep it that way.  That was until her invisibleness became not so invisible.

It all started the day that Mark Everstein moved into their classified town.  He was an instant Perfect but you’d never hear him call himself that.  Mark’s dad had been a New York City Defense Attorney but after a high profile case ended badly, Mark’s dad decided it was time to move his family to a less “high profile” town.  Little did he know that Lawrence, PA was a high profile community living in a low profile city.

Mark had an eye for the unnoticed.  The obvious and the cliché were like bright colors to a colorblind man.  He saw them but didn’t see what others saw.  What Mark did see was the blacks and whites and especially the grays.  He went out of his way to figure out what made them tick, what put them on the level they were at.  He found Mary pretty quickly.  To him, she was the brightest start.

The day they first met was forever stuck in Mary’s memory.  It would take her a while to figure out if this had become a good memory or a bad one.