Page 43 of Hello Stranger

Ugh. So this wasgotchatherapy. “Yes.”

“Was that not ‘helping other people’?”

“That was an emergency,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. But it was sarcastic.

I took a bite of coconut bread and contemplated that.

Then a thought lit up my head like sunlight breaking through clouds. “Dr. Nicole?” I asked, trying not to sound suspicious. “When you were arguing with me just now, were you… teaching me how to argue with myself?”

And then I could see her teeth—but also feel her big smile—as she said, “You’re smarter than you look, choonks.”

Eight

WHAT WERE MYcoping strategies?

A full list on that was yet to be googled, but for now, I decided on the ride home from Dr. Nicole’s bungalow, coping strategy number one would be art.

I mean, objectively, I had a giant deadline. So I needed to be doing art, anyway. And the truest thing I knew about myself was this: I was always happy when I was making things.

I grabbed my favorite, most bright and delightful box of watercolors… but then, instead of just doing something fun, I started working. On faces. Instead of just picking something, anything, colorful and pleasant to paint—a fruit basket, say, or some flowers—I bore down on myself like some kind of ruler-toting schoolmarm. Hell-bent on forcing my fusiform face gyrus into submission, I spent an entire Saturday painting face after face after face like a madwoman chasing her own puzzle-piece-shaped shadow.

How did it go?

I’m guessing not well.

But of course once they were done, I couldn’t see them.

Fine. Didn’t matter. Maybe if I did enough of them, things would start to shift.

Or not.

Either way, it was something to do.

So what if the grim determination of my attitude sucked the joy out of it all?

I had less than three weeks to fix my FFG.

By the end of the night, when my fingers were stained turquoise and plum and tangerine, and my eyes felt like sandpaper, I had a stack of scribbled, unintelligible faces a foot high and a whole table of others laid out to dry.

My plan was to get up the next day and do it again.

But then, the next morning, Peanut got sick.

THANK GOD THISface-blindness thing applied only to humans.

Peanut’s big, brown, perfectly round, saturated-with-affection puppy eyes had been like a balm for my weary soul. After I’d brought him home from being boarded, it was the two of us against the world. I looked at that little mug of his a hundred times a day—positively savoring his jaunty yellow mustache and that perky button nose and those ears that never could seem to both flop forward at the same time.

“You’renot faceless, Peanut,” I’d tell him, pressing my nose into his fur.

If there were a dog hall of fame, Peanut would be on all their merchandise. He was cute as hell without being full of himself. He was endlessly cheery. He was a good eater without being a glutton. He was just as happy to go on a walk as he was to spend the entire day napping. He loved a good squeaky toy, but he lost interest at exactly the same rate I did. He loved me madly—leaping in circles whenever I came back home from anywhere—but without taking it too far. Without, say, suffering from separation anxiety and eating my shoes. His self-esteem was solid. His fashion sense was legendary. His sense of humor was totally deadpan.

I preferred him to most people even in normal times, is what I’m saying.

But of course, even more so now, when “most people” were the last thing on earth I wanted to see.

And so when I woke up way too early on Sunday morning and set out his favorite breakfast dish—torn pieces of croissant from his favorite French bakery—but he sat still and stared at me… my heart dropped in my chest.

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