Wear different clothes and pretend to be a different person.
Charlatan, he would think, staring down the man in the picture. During science lab, he would study the man’s face with more concentration than he ever devoted to the lesson plans and pseudo-experiments. Colby flattened them between the pages of a dusty anatomy textbook before transferring them to a clear zippered folder that he kept in his school binder. He began collecting all of the print ads he encountered, tearing glossy pages from magazines and seizing windblown posters he found lying in the gutters along the street. As the man sipped from his colorful Smoovie drink on-screen, Colby held his own arm in the same way-bent at the elbow, his fingers and thumb circled around an imaginary cup-and tilted his chin up to mirror the older man. At home, he would spend hours in front of the TV, rewinding and playing the commercials back in slow motion, trying to catch the expressions on the man’s face that gave him away, subconsciously mimicking the man’s telltale mannerisms with his own body. In terms of style, he had made himself wholly unrecognizable. He had also traded his signature lavender suit for board shorts and a button-down shirt with a tropical island sunset printed on the synthetic fabric. He had shaved his upper lip clean and sprouted instead a pair of prominent sideburns, the twin patches of hair growing wider as they passed the earlobes on either side of his face, well on their way to becoming muttonchops. Colby Keiser was thirteen years old when he saw the man with the handlebar mustache again, re-emerged in the guise of a new person.
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