If I recognized a person, great. If I didn’t, that was okay, too.
That was triumphant in its own quiet way.
Before the party, I’d come up with a throwdown phrase in case I started to panic, and it went like this: “Help me out here. I have a facial recognition problem. Have we met before?”
Want to know what the hardest part of that phrase was? The word help.”
Which, as we know, had never been my thing.
But I wasn’t asking anyone for anything hard, I told myself. I wasn’t asking for help with trigonometry, or climbing El Capitan, or storming the beaches of Normandy. All anyone had to do was answer one easy little question.
This, I reminded myself, like all hard things in life, was an opportunity.
A chance for me to practice asking for help.
And: Have we met before? You couldn’t buy a better starter phrase for that. A person could fulfill that request with one syllable.
That’s what I told myself. No big deal.
I practiced it over and over while I was getting dressed, and then I’d walked across the roof—as ready as I’d ever be—while arguing with the nervousness in my chest in a way that would make Dr. Nicole very proud. This was doable. No dry heaving out behind the mechanical room necessary.
I could just … breathe.
And admire Mrs. Kim’s magazine-worthy tables. And feel the rays of the setting sun warming my skin. And enjoy my skirt’s ruffles swishing around my calves. And sway a little bit to the music of the band.
If that’s not a triumph, I don’t know what is.
* * *
ON A SCIENTIFIC level, it was totally fascinating to watch the fusiform face gyrus somewhere in between functioning and not functioning—seeing it do its thing in real time. It kept prompting me to think about everything my miraculous body did all the time without ever needing help or acknowledgment.
Which made me feel grateful. Scientifically and otherwise.
There was one confounding variable, though, in my data-gathering. One totally unfamiliar face that should have—by all established patterns—been unintelligible … showed up on the rooftop fully intact.
I could see it loud and clear.
A guy in a dark blue suit arrived maybe half an hour in … and I recognized him right away—even though I’d never seen him before.
I sidled my way over to Sue and elbowed her until I had her attention.
“What?” she said.
“Tell me who that is,” I said, tilting my head in the blue suit guy’s direction.
Sue peeked over. “Oh god, I’m sorry!” she said. “My dad invited him.”
“Tell me it’s not—”
“It’s Joe,” Sue confirmed, with a no-sense-fighting-it nod.
“No, no, no,” I said. Had I just been boasting about how okay I was?
“My dad loves him, apparently,” Sue said. “He’s helped him move furniture so many times, my dad nicknamed him Helpful. Did you know that?”
“I did,” I said.
“My dad invited him as a setup! For you! I cleared it all up and explained that being willing to help move furniture does not definitively make anyone a good person and that a setup was useless because he’d already dumped you and broken your heart. But by then it was too late.”
He’d already dumped me and broken my heart.
Wow. He sure had.
While Joe greeted the Kims, up here in the breeze, against a brilliant pink sunset, I let myself watch him.
Seeing my mom’s portrait had been bittersweet bliss. Seeing my own real face in the mirror had been a relief. Seeing Sue and the Kims and various friends from art school had been all varying levels of fun.
This was something different.
First of all, I wasn’t seeing Joe again.
I can’t even capture how mind-bending it is to see someone for the very first time—and recognize him.
I mean, I had kissed this guy! Twice!
But I’d never seen him before.
A memory of Joe’s naked torso as he threw me down on my bed rumbled through my memory like thunder.
I shook it off. Fine, fine—I’d seen him but hadn’t seen him. It was a brain glitch. Not news. We got it.
But here’s what was shocking: how dreadfully good-looking he was.
He didn’t just have a face. He had a really, really good one.
Strong, straight features. Angles and edges. A chin! An Adam’s apple! Plus a nose, two eyes, and—here, a close-up memory flashed through my mind—that mouth.
Astonishing.
And dreamy. And heartbreaking.
And … the opposite of fun. Given that he’d already dumped me and broken my heart.
My awareness of his attractiveness—and the fireworks of longing it was setting off in my body—came into focus and permeated everything I saw before I’d had time to tell my fusiform face gyrus no. I mean, the man had a silk pocket square! And he could tie a double Windsor knot! And that blue suit! It looked so good, it made me angry. No one should ever be allowed to look that good in a suit. Who tailored that thing?
Agony.
Mr. Kim must have said something funny then, because Joe smiled and looked down. I stared, mesmerized, at the scruff of his neck as he leaned forward and nodded. He shook hands one more time and then turned to join the party, walking a few steps before I looked away.
But seeing a few of Joe’s steps were enough.
Confirmed: Definitely Joe. With that heartbreaking gait.
No wonder I’d fallen for him so hard.
“Just ignore him,” Sue said—watching me watch him—like, You got this. “And stay close to me.”
Ignore him. Ignore him.
Sue took my hand then and walked me over to her very dashing cousin, Daniel. She gestured back and forth between us. “Daniel? Sadie. Sadie? Daniel.”
Daniel was faceless, but he had great hair.
Sue went on. “Sadie is my best friend, and she has a situation tonight, so I’m putting you in charge of flirting with her for the rest of the party.”
And Daniel, bless him, gave a no-problem nod and said, “You got it.”
Sue was, of course, the star of the evening—so staying close to her was easier said than done. Fortunately, Daniel was happy to adopt me, and he took me all around, introducing me to his cousins and friends. So I spent the hors d’oeuvres portion of the evening nursing a glass of champagne and heartily doing that thing where you never, ever look at the only person you want to look at.
That thing where you pretend to not even be aware of the only person you’re aware of.
That thing where you give an Oscar-level performance of being totally, utterly, blissfully fine because the person watching you from across the party never kissed you senseless and then broke your heart.
Did that even happen? Because you sure as hell don’t remember it.
You’re too fabulous to remember it. You and your ruffly dress and your flirty new rooftop companion are far, far too awesome for a thing like being dumped—and then ghosted and then treated with contempt—to even matter.
Daniel turned out to be highly accomplished at flirting—and then it didn’t take that long before his face delighted me by coming into focus.
“Oh, hello,” I said, with a frisson of delight when it happened. “There you are.”
“Here I am,” Daniel agreed gamely, with no clue what I meant.