And now, standing in our kitchen, I’m thinking about Dr. Oliver Sacks, who believed that the recognition of faces doesn’t depend solely on the fusiform gyrus twelve, but on the ability to summon up the memories, experiences, and feelings associated with them. Basically, being able to identify the face of someone you know comes with a lot of meaning. It also gives them meaning—the people you know and love.
My mom already means a lot to me—she’s my mom, after all—but would she mean even more if I could identify her face?
I say to her, “Just promise me you won’t be one of those couples that stays together for the children. That only screws people up, including the children.” I toss the juice box. Take a breath. Say the thing I probably shouldn’t. “You deserve better.”
The first attempts at facial recognition technology were made in the 1960s. Every face has distinct landmarks—about eighty of them—and the technology works by measuring these. Width of the nose, distance between the eyes, length of the jaw. All these things are added together to create a sort of faceprint.
Okay, so that particular kind of technology is beyond me, but what I can do is this: I stay up for hours connecting the wires that make up the robot’s brain. This is a delicate job, like surgery. You can have the grandest design in the whole fucking world, but the thing every single book or video or website will tell you is that you need a complete circuit, perfectly wired, in order for the motors to work. If a single wire is disconnected, the motors won’t spin and your robot won’t function.
I can’t do anything about my own brain, but I can make sure the red wire goes here, the black wire goes there, must get the wiring right, must make the motor spin. I’m going to fill this robot’s mind with fully working fusiform gyrus twelves. He won’t just have one; he’ll have a hundred.
Before dinner, I tell my dad I’m going over to our neighborhood Walgreens to buy some “girl things.” Ten minutes later, I’m walking up and down the aisles, fluorescent lights blinding me, filling a basket with junk food. Everything I used to eat—cookies, chips, soda. People are staring at me, and I know how I look: the fat girl getting ready to binge. I don’t care. I suddenly want everything. There’s not enough food on these shelves, not even with Halloween around the corner. I’m grabbing bags of candy, and the basket is full, so I march to the front of the store and find a cart, and I throw the basket in there and go back up and down the same aisles, filling it with all the food I missed.
I’m standing by the cereal, reaching for a box of Honey Nut Cheerios, when I feel my chest clenching but not unclenching. It clenches tighter and tighter, like someone has wrapped a corset around it. My palms are wet. My head is compressing, growing and shrinking at the same time. I can hear my breathing, and it’s so amplified that, to my own ears, I sound like Darth Vader. A woman at the end of the aisle is frozen as she watches me. She looks scared. A boy comes over, wearing a Walgreens uniform, and he’s maybe sixteen years old. He goes, “Are you okay? Miss?”
My breathing is getting louder, and I cover my ears to block it out. And that’s when the ceiling starts to spin and the air disappears and my lungs stop working and I can’t breathe at all. I drop everything and run away from the cart and all that food until I’m out the door. I stand in the parking lot, bent over at the waist, breathing in the fresh night air, and then I lie flat on the ground, as if this will open my lungs wider and make them work again, only the breath won’t come. And then I close my eyes, and everything goes black.
This is the way it happened three years ago. My lungs stopped working, and all the air everywhere, in my house, in the world, disappeared, leaving me on my back, unable to talk or move. There was only panic.
I open my eyes, and instead of the dingy metal ceiling of a truck, I see the sky.
Get up, Libby.
I push myself to sitting and wait as the world rights itself. I look around slowly so that things don’t tilt or spin. Inside Walgreens, I can see the sixteen-year-old boy with a phone to his ear and someone on his way out the door to help the girl lying in the parking lot.
On your feet.
I pull myself to standing, and as I do, this feeling comes over me. It’s this kind of quiet, peaceful feeling, and that’s her, that’s my mom. I want it to last, to keep her with me.
Live live live live …
And then I breathe.
I breathe.
At home, I stand in front of my mirror, wearing the bright purple bikini I bought myself when I first lost the weight. The tags are still attached because I’ve never actually worn it, but now I rip them off and let them fall onto the carpet. I look at myself.
In the glass, George watches me with the same expression he always wears, and I think, If only people were more like him. He looks at me the way he does when I’m fully clothed, with makeup or without, laughing or crying. He is unwavering, which may be the thing I love most about him.
Still in my bikini, I sit down on my bed and open my laptop. I stare at the screen for approximately ten seconds, and then the words just pour right out of me.
THE NEXT DAY
* * *
It’s the first day of swimming, which means for the entire hour of gym class I’ll be fulfilling one of my worst nightmares: parading around in front of my classmates, wearing the world’s smallest, most unflattering piece of clothing.
I’m in the locker room with thirty other girls, and this is exactly how the nightmare always begins. Everyone who isn’t Caroline Lushamp or Bailey Bishop stares into their lockers, as if this will somehow hide them from sight. Even Kendra Wu is cheating by sitting down on the bench, talking a mile a minute like she’s the most confident thing in the world, when she’s draping a towel around her lap. She ties this around her as she stands, and I know this move because I’ve done it a hundred times.