Page 28 of Hello Stranger

But he followed me. “Do you rent the place on the rooftop?” he asked then as I paused to work the door code to the rooftop stairwell.

Obviously. “Uh-huh,” I said.

“We’re neighbors,” he said, and gestured at the next closest door. “I’m right here. Just under you.”

Could he hear himself?

I nodded without looking up. No eye contact.

“I’d love to get a look at your place sometime,” he said then. “I’ve always wanted to see what it’s like up there.” Then he added, “Especially when you’re clomping around on my ceiling.”

Nope. No thanks. There was no way this wanker was ever going to “see what it’s like up there.”

I turned to face him, double-checking the name on his pocket.

“Look, Joe,” I said, poking my finger—hard—into the embroidered name on his jacket so he’d know I knew it, “I’m not going to be inviting you up to the rooftop.” Then in a tone that very unmistakably saidI know what you did to that one-night stand and you’re a terrible person and we both know it,I added, “That’s not going to happen. Okay?”

That shocked him a little—which reminded me of something else Dr. Nicole had said.

During our lengthy coping-skills session before I left the hospital, as she tried to argue that face blindness was not going to be as debilitating as I feared, she told me, among many other things, that even though I couldn’tseefaces, I would still be able to read the emotions on them.

“So if someone is shocked or embarrassed or angry, you’ll still be able to tell,” she explained. “You won’tseeit, but you’llknowit.”

“How is that possible?” I asked.

“It’s two different brain systems.”

“But how can Ireadfaces if I can’tseefaces?”

“You can still see faces,” Dr. Nicole said. “There’s nothing wrong with your eyes. Your brain just doesn’t know how to put them together to show them to you right now.”

Her tone of voice was so reasonable.

But nothing about this was reasonable.

“The faces aren’t gone,” Dr. Nicole tried again. “The faces are still there. And another part of your brain can read the emotions on them just fine. Just like always.”

“I’ll have to trust you on that,” I’d said, not trusting her at all.

But it turned out—as it would often turn out with Dr. Nicole—she was right.

Because when I sharply rejected the Weasel’s invitation for me to invite him over, I shocked him. I couldn’t see it, but I couldfeelit: that unintelligible face of his was surprised. And a smidge taken aback—most likely having lived his whole life as a complete jerk without encountering nearly enough repercussions. And he was now, at last, ready to withdraw all that inappropriate warmth.

Fine. Great.

He might have fooled that poor one-night stand of his. But he wasn’t fooling me.

I lowered my eyes to his jacket pocket, letting them rest on that cursiveJoeuntil he looked down at the word, too.

Much too nice a name.

I might have to be his neighbor. I might have to bump into him in the elevator. I might have to carry the memory of him saying the wordblubberfor the rest of my life…

But I did not have to invite him up to my hovel.

Joe the Weasel nodded and stepped back. “Got it.”

And it sounded like he really did.

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