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.