Then the kiss is over and we pull apart, and I feel this weird urge to applaud because it seems like he expects it. He says, “Wow.”
“Yeah,” I breathe. “Wow.” Because what else am I supposed to say? Next time, don’t try so hard. And Excuse me while I walk off this cramp.
“Have you ever been to Scandinavia?”
“No.” I haven’t been anywhere except Ohio. I wonder then if he knows I’ve spent part of my life locked inside my house.
“You should go sometime.”
But what I hear is Maybe I’ll take you there. Maybe we’ll go back and I’ll show you where I’m from and you can meet my relatives and I will love you forever.
And even though I don’t want to meet his relatives and I don’t want him to love me forever, I kiss him again. Because while I’m kissing him, there is no America’s Fattest Teen, at least not for tonight. No cranes or hospitals. No dead mother. No Moses Hunt. Most important of all, no Jack Masselin. There is just me. And this boy. And a kiss.
I’ve never seen Caroline cry before, so for a minute I sit there, completely stupid, trying to figure out what to do. She is hiccupping and wheezing, like she’s trying to catch her breath. I start petting her like she’s a dog, and she shrugs me off.
“Why don’t you want me?” She sounds small, like she’s folded herself in half and then another half and then another. “What is it about me?” And now I go even more stupid because here is a side of Caroline I never knew existed. Is it possible she’s as insecure as the rest of us?
I say, “You’re beautiful. You’re Caroline Amelia Lushamp.” But this isn’t what she’s asking me. Tell her you want her. But I can’t because I don’t, not like that. I start to scramble. I give it my all. I tell her over and over again who she is and how beautiful she is, even as she’s pulling on her clothes, even as she’s grabbing her phone. Even as she says, “I can’t do this anymore,” and throws the door open, letting the light in. I’m temporarily blinded, and by the time I can see again, she’s gone.
We kiss for what feels like hours.
We kiss even when someone stumbles into the room and blinds us with the overhead lights and then stumbles out again.
We kiss until he has many, many hands and a tongue in my ear, and I think, I don’t want to be Pauline Potter. I don’t want him to be my first. I don’t want him to be my anything.
So I pull away and say, “I’m sorry, Mick, from Copenhagen. I’m not Pauline Potter.”
And he sits back and says, “Who?”
“Never mind. I think I need a drink. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to make out anymore.”
And I kind of expect him to be devastated, but he just shrugs and smiles at me. “Okay.”
He helps me up, and we walk out as I smooth my hair and shirt. I walk behind him, and even though I don’t want to make out with him, Mick from Copenhagen is so cute I can’t help thinking, Girl, you ARE wanted. And it feels pretty damn good.
I find Kam in the kitchen, knocking back shots. His white hair is plastered to his head and he’s got one arm thrown around a girl who may be Kendra Wu (small, Asian, long black hair in a braid). I say, “What are we drinking?” The Girl Who May Be Kendra hands me something brown that doesn’t look like beer.
I throw it down my throat. My esophagus burns like I just inhaled gasoline. I say, “Another.”
And then they’re all handing me shots.
Kam empties his own glass and slams it onto the counter. He pumps both fists into the air and howls.
—
A while later, I work my way through the party, searching for a black Mohawk because I am too fucked up to drive home, and suddenly I want to go home. I want to go home right now. I find the Mohawk attached to someone who is probably Seth outside by the pool. At this point, I don’t bother lurking, trying to make sure it’s him. I walk right up to the Someone Who Is Probably Seth and say, “I need a ride home.”
He’s like, “Sure, sure, Mass. Just wait till we finish.” And he holds up a joint, takes a drag, and then starts laughing for no good reason.
I grab the joint out of his hand and take a drag, because maybe this is the secret of life right here. Maybe this will give me answers. Instead, I end up coughing like an old man for a good five minutes. Someone hands me a drink to wash it down, and then the pool tilts and the ground tilts and suddenly the sky is where the ground should be, and a boy with a Mohawk is leaning over me going, “Are you okay, man?”
I close my eyes because no, I’m not. I want to keep them closed and go to sleep here in the sky where the ground should be, but the world tilts worse with them closed. I open them again, and somehow I get on my feet. My only hope is that maybe Bailey Bishop is here, because she won’t be drinking. But she doesn’t always come to parties, and besides I’ll never find her in this crowd of blond girls. I go back inside, and it seems like the house is even more packed with people, like the student bodies of three more high schools arrived while I was out by the pool.
I don’t know anyone.
I shove my way through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room. People are hollering at me, and one girl makes a grab for me, holding on to my arm like it’s a life raft. She smells like Caroline, but she isn’t Caroline—she’s skinny and white and has curly hair the color of margarine. She goes, “Oh my God, Jack Masselin!” And plants a kiss right on my mouth.
She tastes like cigarettes, and I push her away. “Masshole.” She turns and dances with the people standing next to her.
I’m breaking every rule I’ve ever created for this exact kind of situation—I don’t smile or nod or say “Hey, what’s up.” I don’t flirt with every girl. I make eye contact, as if suddenly I’ll be able to recognize who everyone is. (I don’t.) I stare at one guy so long, he goes, “What the fuck are you looking at?” But I don’t care. I’m amped as all hell because it feels like I’m doing something dangerous, like any second they might figure me out.
The room I’m in now has tripled in size and the walls are miles away. It is just people from here to the moon, and I will never make it through all of them. I feel like a rock star, complete strangers yanking at my shirt, at my arms, at me. I push through harder because the door must be there somewhere, and what I need right now is air. My lungs are filling with the fumes of smoke and booze and my ears are filling with the boom boom boom of the music and my brain is filling with all this information that I can’t process.
I could drive myself home. Except that I’m wasted and I can’t won’t shouldn’t will not drive.
I say to someone, “Where’s the door?”
“What?” He’s shouting.
“Where’s the door?” I’m shouting too.
“Through there, man.” He nods his head.
As I’m turning, a girl stumbles into me, and I nearly lose my balance. She clutches my arm, and she’s laughing and laughing. “Sorry!” She grabs hold of my hand and starts spinning to the music. I let her go.
The air in here is so tight and close that the oxygen may be disappearing. There’s not enough air left, and I picture us all laid out like cult followers after a mass suicide. I need to get to a window or a door, but I’m being swallowed by this room and these people and this music. How are they not panicking? Everyone seems happy, like they’re having the time of their lives. How are they not worried about the lack of air in here?
I don’t remember Kam’s house being this big or complicated, but it feels massive. I say to the guy next to me, “Hey, how do you get out of here?”
“What?”
“Where’s the door?”
“I just fucking told you where the door is.”
It’s like the worst déjà vu, and what if I’m trapped in here forever, trying to find a way out, destined to relive the same conversations and the same interactions over and over again?
In that moment, I want to give up and let the crowd carry me away until we’re all moving as one colossal body with hundreds of arms and legs and mouths
and eyes. The weight of it will suffocate me or flatten me until I’m as thin as a paper doll, and then maybe they’ll carry me outside, where I can float off on the breeze or drift under a bush and lie in peace forever.
I close my eyes, and when I open them again I see it, just beyond the crowd—the front door. I’m shoving my way there when I run into Caroline. I mean, it’s her. Same black shirt, same pants. She turns, and I don’t see the beauty mark, but I tell myself it must have rubbed off when she pulled her shirt back on or maybe when she was dancing. Before she can say anything, I grab her and kiss her.
She can drive me home. She will get me out of here and I’ll apologize and she can be the forgiver, and all will be fine.
It’s a long kiss, one of my best, and even as I’m kissing her, I know something’s wrong. But I keep right on doing it, and when I finally push away, I say, “That’s how much I missed you.”
“Is that Jack?” Iris points across the room.
The four of us turn like one person, just in time to see Jack Masselin grab some girl and start kissing her.
One by one, my friends look at me, and I realize that my hand is on my mouth. I am touching the lips that Mick from Copenhagen recently kissed, and all I can think is that Jack is free to kiss anyone and everyone he wants, but I don’t have to stand here and watch it.
I push my way toward the back door, away from Jack and the girl. I can hear Bailey calling my name, but I don’t stop. I can’t stop. I also can’t breathe.
Outside, I step into the cool night air and push my way past everyone gathered there until I’m around the corner and the night is suddenly quiet, and I’m alone. I lean against the house and fill my lungs.
Caroline has the weirdest look on her face as she gazes up at me, and then suddenly there are two of them. Two Carolines, side by side. Matching black shirts, matching pants, only this other one has a beauty mark by her eye.
The song ends, and there’s this brief moment of quiet. The one with the beauty mark goes, “You’re such a bastard.” And then the music starts back up, but by now everybody is looking at us.
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.