“Why didn’t you say something?” she demanded, suddenly feeling like she’d led her entire life with a trail of toilet paper stuck to her shoe.
“I did,” Roger insisted. “I told you we both have your grandmother’s face.”
Pandora tried picturing the face in question but couldn’t. It had been years since she last saw it in person at Grandpa Herman’s funeral.
“Is there even a name for this?” she asked, the words coming out like air from a punctured tire.
Roger nodded. “Hyperexpressive face syndrome,” he said. “But back when I was a kid, Dad would say that Mom or I were ‘exubing’ for ‘exuberance’ when we were happy or excited. Pretty much everything else he just called our ‘stink eye.’”
“Stink eye!” Pandora fairly exploded, her eyebrows flying upward—excessively—like a pair of startled birds. “I’m doomed . . . ,” she wailed, letting her head sink so her hair curtained around it.
“The Botox people are calling it restless face syndrome,” Roger went on, imagining more information might help. “The implication is it’s like resting bitch face, but treatable, presumably through the miracle of botulism-facilitated facial paralysis.”
Not that all sufferers actually suffered from the condition, Roger hastened to add when Pandora seemed amenable to the idea of having a deadly bacterium shot into her forehead.
“Take Jim Carrey,” he said. “He’s like the HEFS poster child. And he’s monetized his affliction quite handsomely.” Plus, there was Roger himself, who’d paired his HEFS with a sense of empathy that helped turn his face into a magnifying mirror of his clients’ emotional states, creating a face people were bound to pour their hearts out to.
“Now that’s a billable asset,” he concluded, as well he might, being a therapist after all.
But Pandora was a girl, and her father’s examples were all guys. And guys always got off easy when it came to looks. A guy could have a face that others found comical, or interesting, or hypersympathetic in a confession-eliciting kind of way. But for women, there were only two options, facewise: 1) somewhere on the spectrum between cute and gorgeous or 2) other. And Pandora’s restless face put her squarely in the latter camp, one she could already see taking its place among those of the crazy bitches who got fed up and cut a bitch before going to prison to become some other crazy bitch’s bitch—if Orange Is the New Black was any indicator.
“So,” she said, finally, training a hyperserious eye on her father, “which am I?”
Roger aimed a hyperconfused expression back at hers. “Which what?”
“Which Jim Carrey?” she asked. “Spotless Mind or Mask?”
Her father did that teeter-totter thing with his hand and sucked in his lips, so much so that his mouth looked disturbingly like an anus.
“Somewhere in between?” she translated.
Her father nodded as Pandora’s face slowly constricted ass-ward.
Pandora Lynch was more than her face; she was also scary smart, something her father had concluded not because of parental bias, but because of a series of IQ tests he’d given her throughout her life, providing Stanford-Binet-certified proof. It was because of her brain that Roger hadn’t focused on the superficial covering she faced the world with. Her mind was what impressed him. And it was the hungriness of that mind that led to her first nickname: Dora the Implorer.
From the moment she could speak, Pandora wielded the word why like a lethal weapon. Why this? Why that? In this, she was like a lot of kids before their hopes and dreams were crushed. Whether his daughter’s barrage of whys was actually excessive or only seemed that way because he lacked a partner to share answering duties with, Roger didn’t know. His wife hadn’t survived having their daughter, leaving Roger as sole parent. And so, instead of saying “Mama,” a word most kids come to as a byproduct of suckling, Pandora had landed on what she’d heard her father say most often after his wife’s passing—“Why?”—the crowbar word she used to learn all the rest.
Soon, his daughter’s whys started sprouting other whys, branching and replicating, forming a fractal set of whys, looping self-referentially as she why’d her own why-ing until the victim of her curiosity lost it and shouted or got up and tried walking away, only to have his insistent inquirer wrap herself around his leg.
It was in self-defense, then, that Roger introduced his daughter to her first computer, a kid-proofed laptop, hermetically sealed in chunky pink plastic with rounded edges and ruggedized just shy of military field specifications to withstand being dropped from as high as a statistical kid in its recommended age range might drop it during the course of statistically ordinary use. He’d introduced her to it like it was another person—or billions, which it was—by cracking open its clamshell, booting it up, and clicking through to the Google homepage.
“Pandora,” he said, doing the introductions, “I give you the world.
“World,” he continued, “I give you my daughter, Pandora Lynch.”
He showed her how to search with her voice, seeing as he hadn’t taught the three-year-old to read yet. After that, he trusted Pandora to ask “the ’puter” all the questions she’d been asking him. The top answer usually spoke itself aloud, and by looking at the words on the screen as they spoke themselves, Pandora taught herself not only the answer to her questions, but also how to read by the time she reached four. Many happy years of surfing followed, Pandora collecting bread crumbs of information like Pac-Man gobbling up dots, content to end every day smarter than she’d started it, and eager for the next day to begin.
Her next day at school was worse. The curlers flanking her locker had decided to make her infamous. While one stood off to the side, smartphone at the ready, his accomplice approached her from behind with a printout from an anti-chewing-tobacco website, featuring a collage of jawless faces and metastatic gums.
“Hey, Emo,” the accomplice said, slapping Pandora on the back, leaving the printout attached through the miracle of spray adhesive. Knowing something must be up, she reached around, tap-tapping until she hit the rattle of paper and pulled away a modern-day upgrade to the “Kick Me” sign. Bringing it around to where she could see it, Pandora reacted as planned, while the amateur videographer caught her face in all its uploadable glory.
Thus Pandora Lynch went from merely self-conscious teen to internet meme. After editing it to remove any trace of the setup, the pranksters provided the world with two formats: a GIF of Pandora’s face going from nearly normal to Munch’s The Scream in real time and a triptych of JPEGs—normal, transition, and money shot—ready to be captioned with variations of “X be like . . .” or “Me when I . . . ,” while the GIF was used uncaptioned as a reacticon to whatever the latest political absurdity happened to be.
The trouble was, it was mesmerizing, watching it loop, over and over. Though it was her own face, even Pandora couldn’t stop watching until—hypnotized by the repetition—she stopped seeing herself and started seeing this crazy woman the rest of the world was watching. The spell was such that looking away caused her to imagine the pock-pock of two popped corks—her eyes—being ripped out. A pretty miserable state of affairs for a cyber native—being stalked by her own face online—and a perfectly good cause for revenge.