left to my own devices.

[swing]

Peter can't wait to go to college. That isn't such a strange sentiment, he supposes. Most kids his age are eager to leave high school. But they aren't looking forward to more schooling. In this way, Peter has always been strange, nerdy, whatever. But really, he can't wait. He loves everything about this place. No one cares how old or how tall he is, no one calls him a nerd or tries to stuff him in a locker, no one even knows his name. After years of bullying at Midtown, anonymity was the best that he could hope for at Darrow High. But at the community college, he doesn't feel like such a loser for sitting alone at lunch. Here, people will respect his space. Here, he's unafraid to raise his hand in class when he has the answer. Here, the fact that he's younger than most of the other students makes him envious and impressive. He can stretch his legs and breathe here. This is the place for him.

He would never dream of staying a second longer than necessary at Darrow High. But after class today, he hangs around the college, walking along the path until he finds a place to sit and get started on his homework. He's hard at work, scribbling in a notebook under the shade of a large tree, when the back of his neck begins to tingle. It isn't his Spidey Sense, thankfully. That's all he needs, for some d-bag villain to invade his only sanctuary. No, it's something else. A pair of eyes trained intently on him. He looks up and a woman he's never met is staring back at him, looking very sad. He doesn't know what to do or say.

"Uh, hi?"

Idiot.

Comments

[swing]

"I have," nodded Peter. He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth slightly on the balls of his feet. The idea of someone out there sharing his face would have made him uncomfortable enough on its own, he thinks. But it was made even more unsettling as it called to mind his past experiences with nefarious cloning experiments. He tries to put those thoughts out of his mind; he didn't want to deal with the nightmares later on. "This girl I met here, she looks just like my friend Gwen, only her hair is a different color."

[unseentides]

"I think it might be the cruelest trick this city plays on us," I pondered. It helped that he'd met some lookalikes himself, even if I wouldn't have wished it on him. It just made all the difference that he knew I wasn't crazy. Or, at least, crazy for thinking he so resembled someone departed. Someone so far away. Then again, maybe I was a bit mad, if I couldn't make myself leave. "Especially when the ones we encounter are... pictures of people long gone," I added.

[swing]

"Oh, I didn't realize your person was, uh..." Peter cut himself off with a shake of his head, his lips pressed together in a thin line. It was even weirder to think that he was walking around resembling a dead man, even though he was, technically, dead as well. Maybe there were a finite number of faces and after a while, different universes had to resort to borrowing from others. What did it say about him, and this place, that a concept like face recycling seemed almost plausible? It probably said that he needed to get out of his own head. "I'm sorry," he added in a soft voice.

[unseentides]

"No," I said, shaking my head, guilt growing. It wasn't his fault that he looked like him, after all, but it was my fault that I'd decided to project my pain onto him. At that point, I shouldn't have ached so much for Tommy, anyway. It's not as if the loss had been unexpected. Still, the heart could betray all logic, all rules of time. "I'm sorry for bringing it up."