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.
