Holding Up the Universe(75)
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.