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Marty had always told people he named himself after his parents’ high school friend–Doc’s nephew–but that wasn’t entirely true.
Sometime when he was 11, his mom dragged him to JCPenney for new clothes. He was planning to spend as little time as possible on the mind-numbingly boring task: he would just grab whatever and leave.
His mom got side-tracked when she saw something that would be perfect for his cousin, and Marty easily slipped away; he was wandering towards an escalator when he walked directly into someone.
Marty stumbled backwards and mumbled an apology as he looked up at the person he had bumped into: it was a teenage boy, older than Marty, but not by much if his height was anything to go by, and he had short brown hair cropped just below his ears that stirred up a confusing jealousy in Marty.
The older teen was about to respond when his eyes grew wide and he took a slow, fearful step back.
‘’What?’’ Marty said, not appreciating the stranger’s gawking.
‘’Nothing,’’ he managed to say, ‘’you just look like someone I know.’’
Frowning, Marty started to walk away, thinking what a weirdo, when the teenager called out ‘’wait!’’. Marty turned around to look at him again.
‘’Have you seen a five year old boy with a hat that looks like a racoon?’’
‘’Uh, no?’’
The older teen relaxed. ‘’If you find him, don’t talk to him–he’s playing a prank where he tries to convince people he’s from the 1880s, and attention just encourages him.’’
‘’Okay…’’ Marty said. He assumed that was the end of the conversation, although he kind of hoped that it wasn’t; he felt inexplicably drawn to this person, and the strange story was making him more curious. ‘’You could ask a worker to call his name on the intercom.’’
‘’Yeah, that’s…not a great idea. There’s no need to make a big deal of it–it’s not like I’ve lost him.’’ He didn’t seem convinced of it himself.
‘’Marty!’’ someone shouted at him, prompting the two to stop their conversation and whip their heads around to see a small kid dragging along a smaller kid with a coonskin hat. ‘’Marty, I found him.’’ Noticing that the teen–Marty–was speaking to someone, he squinted his eyes, looking between the both of them before a realisation set in. ‘’Is that-?’’
The older teen grabbed his arm and ushered him away.
With that, Young Marty was left alone at the foot of the escalator, so stunned by the interaction that he totally forgot about his mission to explore the rest of the store and was soon found by his concerned (and irritated) mother. On the way home, he was silent, thinking about how the older kid seemed to know something that he didn’t. What was so shocking about his appearance that the boy reacted like he’d seen a ghost? His stillness disturbed his mom so much that she soon asked what was wrong.
‘’What would you have named me if I was a boy?’’ Marty blurted out.
His mom raised an eyebrow, caught off-guard by the question. ‘’Hmm, well, your father and I had always planned to name one of our sons after our old classmate, Calvin Marty, but he wanted to name Dave after his great uncle, and so we just gave him the middle name Calvin. I suppose we would have named you Marty.’’
Marty. It must have been destiny that he met a boy with that name the same day he discovered his parents’ old friend was called that. Simply saying the name filled him with a sense of excitement and joy at how perfectly it clicked with him. Of course, he was called Marty! It just made sense. This was what he thought of years later when he realised he was a boy and needed a new name.
After becoming friends with Doc, he told him the story and was met with a gasp of shock that wouldn’t make sense for years to come.