Peter the Shapeshifter: Part One (special preview)

You were used to people not believing you. Starting early in your childhood, you realized that, without proof, people weren’t going to either. You had learned to cover up your truth in order to make it palatable for others, in order to at least be heard and taken seriously.

Luckily, you weren’t the only one. Even now, on the anniversary of the ‘kidnappings,’ no one believed you. No one believed a single one of you about what really happened all those years ago.

The lights on the stage were blaring and white hot just like you remembered. As children, you and your friends had gone on interviews when you had been ‘saved’ from your kidnapper. The stage was smaller, the crowd was closer, but everything was still the same. You all sat lined up together, answering all the asinine questions you had back then, plus a couple more sprinkled in to try and show how much you’ve grown since then.

How was growing up?

What was college like?

Do you have anyone special in your life?

Are you married?

Do you have kids?

If so, how do you treat them after having gone through what you did?

Of course, the interviewer already knows the answer to all these questions for all of you. She’s just putting her own sparkle on them to draw in the audience, to make them feel something. But all you and your friends feel is aggravation.

“Can you believe it?” Willow asked while laughing. “All these years and they still ask the same stupid questions?”

You’re sitting at a bar after the interview, catching up and destressing in person rather than over the group chat.

“It never fails,” Eric scoffed. “I bet I’ve done the same interview at least ten times.”

“Even when we were kids we knew it was bullshit,” you sighed. You rolled yours and looked around the bar. “At least no one recognizes us now.”

“Thank god!” Mari blurted. “It’s bad enough rehashing it in that studio. Out here people get weird.”

You sipped your drink and then choked as you laughed. “And it’s not even that. It’s that we have to lie the whole time.”

The group nodded and rolled their eyes in consensus.

“If we kept trying to tell the truth, they’d slap us in a box of fruit loops,” Eric murmured.

Willow looked distant for a moment. “Sometimes I think maybe I am crazy. I keep…remembering everything that happened to us and sometimes even I think it was just my wild imagination as a kid.”

“That place was real,” Mari insisted. “That…thing took us there to kill us.”

Old Lady Potter, once a beloved fixture in your neighborhood, had been your kidnapper as a child. Turns out, she was some sort of creature from another world. She kidnapped you, Mari, Willow, Eric, and your best friend Peter, along with many other kids, and took you into that strange, weird world. The four of you had been lucky enough to escape from Potter and survive in that world for several days before you found a way to get home. Peter hadn’t been so lucky.

“How could it not be real?” Eric added. “I still have nightmares. That wolf thing that chased us…” He froze up and all of you got worried expressions.

“We barely talk about Peter,” you murmured.

“It’s hard to,” Willow replied.

Eric sighed heavily and took his drink, downing the rest of it with one go. “We should though, right? After what he did for us. We’re not kids anymore, we should be able to bring him up.”

Mari nodded, but remained quiet.

It was quiet for a long time after that, up until you all decided to leave and head back to the hotel. There, you all went into you separate rooms, saying you wanted to get to bed so you could all leave for the airport early.