Day 10: Face-to-face with my doppelganger

Last month, the BBC published an article entitled, “You are surprisingly likely to have a living doppelganger.” To discuss that likelihood, the author looked at what exactly we mean by “look alike” and how human pattern matching differs from the algorithms that facial recognition systems use.

I can’t imagine that this subject is anything more than a mild curiosity for most people, something they would approach with the same detached amusement they feel at a late-night-TV “separated at birth” segment with celebrities.

I had a little more interest. I found my doppelganger in seventh grade. It’s an eerie feeling, especially when you see your doppelganger every day.

In the middle of that school year, my family moved from Gainesville, Georgia to Jackson, Georgia. Prior to the move, we paid a visit to the Butts County Board of Education (insert middle school joke here) where my mom was interviewing or filling out paperwork.

While she was busy there, I took a walk around the town square (which you can see, pretty much as it looked then, in the delightful Netflix original Stranger Things). I went in a small mom-and-pop clothing store. They were all mom-and-pop stores. When the Jackson Hardee’s opened that year, it was big deal.

After I spent a few minutes walking around the store, a lady (I think she was the store owner) came up to me: “Rivers, how’s your mom?”

Huh? It probably took me a second to realize that she was talking to me and thought that I was someone named Rivers. I explained that I was not.

“Funny, you look just like him.” She called someone over. “Doesn’t he look just like Rivers?”

A couple other times that afternoon, strangers started talking to me as if they knew me. Weird.

A few weeks later, I start school at Henderson Middle School. As I walk down the hall, someone behind me shouts “Rivers,” and it’s clear he is trying to get my attention.

It turns out that not only does my doppelganger live in the same small town, we go to the same school. Of 750 students. Across four grades. We’re the same age, and we have all the same classes. We would have almost all the same classes, and be in one or two of the same clubs, until high school graduation.

I don’t think either Rivers or I thought we looked that much alike. We never tried any Parent Trap shenanigans at school—although in retrospect, that seems like a real missed opportunity.

Here we are in the yearbook for our junior year:

I don’t see it, but I’ve been told we looked more alike in middle school. I suspect that short, blond-haired white guys who wear glasses (we’d both switched to contacts by the time of that photo) must look alike to others. Also, no, I don’t know what Boys Oral Interpretation was.

After watching Stranger Things, I’m also realizing that not playing D&D was a real missed opportunity.