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the characters as having hyperactivity or attention-deficit disorder. I rolled my eyes and wondered why there weren’t any stupid kids anymore. Why did there have to be something to explain everyone? Were the cave people on Ritalin? I didn’t think so.
    But waiting for my father to find me in the supermarket that day, I started calculating how many times I had embarrassed myself, how many perfectly functional watch faces I had defamed. Whatever natural inability I had to orient myself I had doused with a self-made need to cover it up. People get lost and invert numbers. They make plans for Tuesday the sixteenth when the sixteenth is a Wednesday. Most people would claim they are “terrible with” something. Names, dates, faces. Even make-believe characters on TV had these problems. But did they feel the need to lie about them afterward?
     
     
     
     
    WHEN I CONFESSED MY SAT METHODS TO A FRIEND, she said she knew someone who had facial blindness, a kind of recognition agnosia that makes it impossible for her to recall faces of casual acquaintances and old friends. To compensate, she goes through life taking photographs and being dangerously friendly to strangers on the street. How cool, I thought. If anything, this is a convenient way to snub people. I also found this woman’s existence oddly reassuring. I wondered how many of us there were out there with severe disabilities walking among us, like anti—X-Men with disadvantageous powers.
    Recently, my sister had a barbecue, and the best means of getting to her house is to take the bus. I took the opportunity to leave the country for the weekend instead.
    “We were making fun of you,” my mother recounted. “I thought, She’s going to Canada because she doesn’t want to take the bus.”
    “No one would go to Canada over that, Mom. It’s a ladies’ weekend in Montreal.”
    “You can’t fool me,” she said. “I know how much you hate the bus.”
    “Mother, I feel as strongly about the bus as I do about the Canadians.”
    “No,” she reveled in her rightness, “I think you’d rather sit on a Canadian than on a bus.”
    “Well, sure,” I gave in. “That’s probably true.”
    Fine, I thought. Let them think I’m a snob. Let them think I’m lazy. See if I care. It’s better than the fear of falling down the rabbit hole and realizing the smiling cat has a better sense of direction than you do, and then running into the white rabbit only to realize that he has facial agnosia and doesn’t recognize you, and it’s not as if you can read his pocket watch, anyway.
    Then my mother, forever the parent of a genius toddler, laughed and said, “But I know you, and I thought, She won’t get on a bus because it’ll take her too long to translate the schedule. And then she won’t know which direction to go when she gets off. And then I thought, I wish I could tell her that it’s no problem—I’ll just stand at the corner, and when she walks down the stairs I’ll be there to meet her.”

Take a Stab at It
    A week before college graduation, I made plans to live in New York with my friend Mac. Mac’s parents were intent on buying him an apartment. The idea was for them to pay the mortgage and for me to pay the monthly maintenance. On average, we were talking about a good four hundred dollars less than renting from scratch. Though not the real estate equivalent of winning the lottery, it was certainly the equivalent of finding a bunch of money on the street and keeping it. Over the next few months, most of the New York—bound members of our graduating class had also paired off—or, in some cases, quadrupled off—erecting fake walls out of bookshelves and pounding the underdeveloped fishy quadrants of Red Hook, tearing phone numbers off the paper fringe on lampposts. They divided spaces that were never meant to be divided. It was like splitting a wasabi pea in half with your thumb. Doors opened into bed corners more often than not. Watching TV was a bet