Excerpt from Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1
The Face

I became a private investigator because of my face. It's an ordinary-looking face, but if I ask "How are you?" sometimes people start crying. "I'm getting a divorce," they say. "He ended our marriage by text." Or "I was just diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease." Or a man grips a packet of peas in the frozen food aisle and asks, "How do you cook these? My wife died last month."

Or an immaculately dressed woman suddenly tells me, "I hate my job so much I want to kill myself. I've been saving up Ambiens."

Then we sit on a concrete curb, or stand in line at a train station, or clutch clear plastic cups at a party as the near-stranger in front of me dabs away mascara with a cocktail napkin and dumps out her mind like it's her purse, like I'm the one who can sift through the dust and used tissues to find what she's looking for.

Demographics don't seem to matter. Young, old, women, men, nonbinary, gay, straight, rich, poor, East, West—everyone tells me things. A woman with twenty-six grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren whispered to me at her 101st birthday party that she wished she never had kids, that she had wasted her life on all these people. After I volunteered at an elementary school, a six-year-old followed me all the way to the bathroom to tell me in Spanish that her daddy's not going to come home anymore.

Even as a kid, I was a storage locker for people's secrets. Grown-ups confessed their affairs, lost fetuses, traumas. When I was seven, my maternal grandmother told me her husband chased her with a knife. One of my elementary school teachers told me he was leaving his wife because she hoarded pizza boxes and dead bugs. When I was fourteen, my mother's friend yanked me aside and said, "I just want to say your mother is a bitch. You know she's a bitch, right?" When I was seventeen, X, my abuser, blurted that he had denied a promotion to a friend at work because he was Black. This wasn't intimacy; we hated each other.

I thought that was just how other people were, confessing things all the time, that everyone experienced these constant revelations from both kin and strangers. Except people would always say, "I don't know why I'm telling you this," or "I've never told this to anyone before." Nobody told my older sister or younger brother these things, even though we looked similar. So it must be me, something I was doing, right or wrong or neither. Something in my face bore the shape of a key, or a steel table on which to lay something heavy.

"Where do I know you from?" strangers ask brightly. One surreal morning on a springtime park bench, three strangers in a row insisted they knew me as each sat down in turn. "Do you work at the library? Do you know Pat? Do you eat at Dot's?" I said no, I just have a familiar face, this happens to me all the time. One woman said, "With that face, you must have a tough time even going outside without people bugging you."

Does a familiar face imply a forgettable one? One ex-boyfriend forgot my name. "This is, um," he said, actually snapping his fingers, trying to introduce me to his new girlfriend. Another ex-boyfriend remembered my name, but forgot we had been together for a year. "What's it like to date you, I wonder," he flirted over the phone until I reminded him we did date not long ago, and he had sorta-kinda proposed to me amid a wash of emotion he felt after a screening of Moulin Rouge. But how could I get mad at him? Nobody remembers a mirror.

When I was thirteen, my family moved to Japan for four years. The first year, nobody seemed to understand anything I said. "No, no," they said, waving their hands in front of their faces. "No speak English." "But I'm speaking in Japanese," I said in Japanese and they stared blankly at my casual body, my oddness.

At some point, without realizing it, my gestures morphed from American to Japanese ones. I covered my teeth when I smiled, nodded in short bows, kept my fingers pressed tightly together, pinned my elbows to my sides. My Japanese hadn't improved much, but people now called me fluent, pera pera. They would talk and talk and talk to me, way beyond my capacity to comprehend the language. They insisted I was half-Japanese, "Hafu-desu!" My mimicry was getting me adopted.

Excerpted from Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse. Copyright © 2022 by Erika Krouse. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.