I slammed through the front door, half-chewing a piece of toast, my hair still slightly damped from the five-second rinse I'd called a shower.
"Bye, Mom! Love you! Geometry awaits its inevitable doom!" I shrieked, already halfway down the porch steps.
"Don't forget your lunch!" she called, but I was gone.
My school was only four blocks away, a merciful distance on a late morning. I ran past Mrs. Henderson's prize - winning rose bushes, past the corner, where the high schoolers always loitered, and was about to take the final sharp turn when something stopped me dead.
It wasn't a sound. It wasn't a sudden memory of a forgotten textbook. It was a flash of color so vivid and out of place that my frantic, exam-addled brain actually registered a full-system error.
Stuck to a thick pillar of old stone fence that marked the edge of the school property was a small, square photograph. It was old - the edges were faded, the paper thin and yellowing. But what made me stop running, what made the Algebra II exam completely vanish from my mind, was the person in the photo.
It was a man, and he was smiling, but it wasn't the flawless, sculptural, terrifying emptiness of my dream-man. This man was real, wearing a heavy, oddly tailored coat. He looked serious, maybe even a little sad, but undeniably kind. Yet, despite the differences, a shocking wave of familiarity washed over me. He had the same incredibly green eyes. Not the vibrant, unnatural emerald, but a rich, deep forest green that was instantly recognizable.
Then I saw the other detail. Pinned to the man's label was a tiny metal pin shaped like a wreath of twisted metal, a design so strange and unique I'd never seen anything like it. Except... I had.
The memory was foggy, a relic from the bottom of my mind. An old photo album. My grandmother's house. I was about seven, digging through a dusty wooden chest when I found a similar picture. A picture of her, young and beautiful, and standing beside her was a man with those same eyes, and he was wearing a similar pin.
My breath hitched. My grandma, who passed away five years ago, rarely spoke about her life before she met my grandpa. She always said, with a cryptic smile, that some stories were better left as whispers.
I stumbled forward and yanked the photo from the fence. It was brittle in my hands. On the back, written in looping, elegant script that I recognized immediately as my grandmother's, were three words, "The Observer, 1947."
I wasn't looking at a handsome stranger anymore. I was looking at a piece of my family history, a secret connecting my dead grandmother's generation to a terrifyingly vivid dream I'd had only hours ago. The "handsome man" from my dream hadn't been an invention of my mind; he was a reflection, an echo of someone - or something - my family knew a lifetime ago.
And those green, vacant eyes in my dream? They suddenly felt like a coded message.
I missed the algebra exam. I missed first period, and second, I just stood there, photo in hand, the cool morning air suddenly feeling electric. The mystery of the handsome stranger was gone, replaced by the much more chilling mystery of The Observer, my grandmother's past, and why this old, forgotten secret was finding its way back to me now.