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Betty Brant is a very good actor. The complete inability to remember faces would do that to you. Prosopagnosia. Faceblindness. She’s always looking for the spark of recognition in someone’s eyes, is overly friendly in case she is talking to someone she should know, and most importantly, she lies. Little white lies to not offend.
So, when a boy with brown hair and a nerdy t-shirt looks up at her as he grabs his coffee, she sees his eyes linger and says, “Hey, Peter, how have you been?” And of course she just wrote his name on the cup, but he doesn’t need to know that. His face is already splitting into an absolutely ridiculous grin. “You remember me!”
Oh shit.
Yep, she knows exactly where she messed up. It was using his name. Now he’s going to assume she knows where they met when really she could have gotten away with just having him reintroduce himself. Dumb.
Okay, she can do this. He’s her age, so high school? If he thinks she wouldn’t remember him, they might not have been close. Maybe another school year? Or he didn’t get blipped. No he definitely got blipped if he’s this age. Shit.
“Of course!” She says. “What have you been up to? I just got this job for the summer before I start at UCLA.”
Perfect. Now he has to trade her some information. She pours the next customer’s coffee.
He looks tentative. “That’s awesome. A writing degree, right? I hear MJ and Ned got into MIT. How are they?”
OMG, yeah she should definitely know who he is. Was he in the same year as her at school? That’s straight up embarrassing and highly probable.
“Yeah! I was pretty excited. I’m sure you know MJ’s working at the donut shop.”
Peter pauses. “Yeah, as long as MJ doesn’t burn those donuts like that one time I completely destroyed Mr. Harrington’s equipment while making… polymers.”
Betty could still smell that burnt air in the lab. It had lingered for weeks. That was who he was! The boy that kept burning stuff in chem. He was faceless in her memories, but to be honest, so was everyone else.
“That was horrible!” She laughs. “Even Ned was pissed at you for that one. What did you have in your desk?”
Peter blushes. “Nothing!”
Betty needs this dude’s last name so she can ask Ned about him. She spots his phone. Perfect. “Hey, add me on insta,” she says, “I’ll put you in the Middletown chat we made for college.”
He hands over his phone and looks a bit surprised when she types in her account. Still, she’s pretty impressed at how well she handled this one.
As he walks away, she ponders how many conversations they’d had. How many times she hadn’t connected who he was. But then the next customer is coming and this happens all the time. Peter Parker. Interesting.