She starts to cry again, hiccupping and wheezing, and I know in my bones that this is Caroline, not the other one, the one without the beauty mark, the one who stands there with her eyes shining and her mouth all twisted up in a pretend frown. You can tell that whoever this is—the cousin, most likely—she’s enjoying the hell out of this. I want to say to her She’s your family. Have a little compassion. But that would be ridiculous coming from me, wouldn’t it?
So I do the only thing I can do. I walk over, shut off the music, and say to the entire room, “I have a rare neurological disorder called prosopagnosia, which means I can’t recognize faces. I can see your face, but as soon as I look away from it, I forget it. If I’m trying to think of what you look like, I can’t conjure an image, and the next time I see you it’ll be like I’ve never seen you before.”
The room has gone dead quiet. I try to find Caroline in the crowd, to read her expression. I try to find anyone I know, but every single person here is a stranger. Together they’re like a wall of stones, an embarrassment of pandas, one bleeding into the other. My heart is drumming away, and the sound of it fills my ears. I realize I’m shaking, so I jam my hands into my pockets, where no one will see. Say something. Anyone.
And then someone yells, “Fuck off, Mass, what the hell.” And people are laughing and falling all over themselves, and the music starts blasting again, and a girl comes up to me and slaps me across the face, but I have no idea who she is. They think it’s a joke. They think I’m a joke. And I can see them starting to turn on me.
The only movies I’ve ever really enjoyed watching are the old black-and-white horror flicks. I may have trouble telling the people apart, but I can recognize the Wolf Man, King Kong, Dracula, the Thing from Outer Space. Right now, I’m looking at a gang of villagers—faces identical—armed with clubs and torches, ready to chase Frankenstein’s monster off a cliff. Only I’m the monster.
I push my way through them because there’s nothing else to do. They crane around to stare at me as I carve a path to the front door, and someone trips me and somebody else goes, “Look at me, I can’t see faces,” and he’s walking like a mummy, arms out in front of him, bumping into walls and people. I throw myself at the door, wrench it open, and as I’m trying to move around the mountain of a guy standing on the front step, I’m suddenly hit with the force of a small meteor right between the shoulder blades, and I go flying. I land in the yard, on my knee, and it takes me a minute to shake off the surprise and the pain. A hand is extended and I take it without thinking. It pulls me to my feet, and it’s then I see that the hand belongs to the same mountain of a guy.
He goes, “Hey, Mass. You look like shit. Must be a bad night. It’s about to get worse.”
And then he takes a swing. His fists are coming at me too fast to duck, too fast to move. Over and over his fists make contact with bone, or maybe he’s not the only one swinging. At some point, I hear myself say, “More weight.”
And then the world goes black.
I’m rounding the corner of the house, into the front yard, when I see Moses Hunt punch Jack Masselin in the back. In slow motion, Jack falls, and as he hits the earth, I swear I can hear the impact. Now Moses Hunt is punching him in the face, and one of the other Hunt brothers, Malcolm maybe, is kicking him in the ribs.
I don’t even think. I must let out some sort of scream, because I can feel my own eardrums shatter and I see the faces of Moses and Malcolm and Reed Young and their friends turn and stare at me, mouths agape, as I go flying through the air.
I sock Moses right in the nose, and it sends him staggering backward. Then I shove everyone off Jack, and I’m not even thinking. I’m suddenly filled with all this superstrength, and I’m single-handedly fighting them all until Dave Kaminski and Seth Powell and Keshawn Price are there beside me, scaring the bad guys away.
I watch as the Hunts run off down the street, tails between their legs, and as Dave bends over Jack, trying to shake him back to consciousness.
The first face I see is Libby’s. For a minute, I don’t know where I am. I think maybe it’s a dream and that I’ve conjured her. I reach up and cover her face with my hand. She bats it away.
“He’s awake.”
But I have to touch her again to make sure she’s real. I tweak the end of her nose.
“Please stop doing that. I’m real, Jack.”
A guy with white, white hair appears beside her. “They were going to kill you, Mass.”
“I’m okay.” And now I’m feeling my chest, searching for my heartbeat, making sure it’s still ticking. Once I can feel it battering away in there, I say again, “I’m okay.”
A boy with a Mohawk pops up over Kam’s shoulder. “Dude, she totally saved your ass.” And then he starts laughing like a fool.
Libby says, “I’m going to drive you home.”
“You don’t have a license.”
“Seriously?”
“What? I can drive.” Even though I know I can’t won’t shouldn’t will not do so.
“YOU’VE BEEN DRINKING. Where’s your car?”
“Just down the street to the right. About three houses away.”
She brushes past so now she’s walking ahead of me, leading me away from the party, and I catch a whiff of something—sunshine.
At first we don’t talk. It’s as if the car is being powered by our minds, and the harder we concentrate, the faster we’ll get there. He is staring out the window, not doing anything except sitting, but I’m completely and fully aware of him. The way one hand rests on the seat, the other on the window. The way every now and then the streetlights catch the gold flecks in his dark hair. The way his legs are longer than mine, and the way he sits, like he’s perfectly at ease no matter where he is.
He must feel me thinking about him, because he says, “It feels good just to sit here. With one purpose. Knowing where we’re headed. Knowing what we’ll do when we get there. Cut and dried. Black and white.”
“I guess it does.” And I know what he means.
He looks at me. “Do you know who Herschel Walker is?”
“Football player?”
He whistles, then goes, “Ow.” He cradles his jaw.
“When you’re housebound, you watch a lot of TV.” Even things you’re not interested in, like ESPN documentaries and home improvement shows.
“Well, as you clearly already know, he was one of the most powerful running backs in football history, right? But when he was young, I guess he was afraid of the dark—like, terrified of the dark. And he was overweight and he stuttered, and all the other kids gave him hell for it. So what he does is he creates this Incredible Hulk inside him, someone who could stand up to people and never give up.”
I decide I like Herschel Walker, and that in many ways, I am Herschel Walker.
“He’d read aloud every day, and by doing that, he taught himself not to stutter. In middle school, he started working out hard, and by high school he was a beast. He graduated valedictorian and won the Heisman Trophy, three years into his college career at UGA. When he retired from the pros, he started noticing this shift in his behavior, and that’s when he found out he’s got this thing called DID, dissociative identity disorder. Multiple personalities.” He gestures like Mr. Dominguez in driver’s ed. “You want to get in your left lane.”
I change lanes and stop at the light.
“At the next light, you’re going to turn left onto Hillcrest.”
I see the map in my mind—my old neighborhood. I learned every street in it the year I got my first bike. I would take off and ride all over, my mom running alongside me, laughing, saying, “Libby, you’re too fast.” Even though I wasn’t. But I remember the way she made me feel—like I could go anywhere and do anything.
Jack says, “So after all those years of pushing himself and not giving up, it’s like the pressure did Herschel in. When he was asked about the DID, he compared it to hats—you know how we wear hats for all different situations? One for family. One for school. One for work. But with DID, it’s like the hats get mixed up. So you’re wearing the football hat at home, the family hat at work …”
“Too many hats.” I think, I know what this is like.
“After a while, it gets hard to keep them straight.”