Joelle visits Gately, abiding (p. 856)
Most compelling, visually, Wayne had had a deep diagonal furrow in his face, extending from right eyebrow to left lip-corner—Joelle traces the length and angle with a ragged-nailed finger across her veil—splaying his nose and upper lip and rendering him so violently cross-eyed he seemed to address both corners of the front row at the same time.
Context
Retelling last night's round-robin: the Kentucky pipe-dweller Wayne and "the Flaw," the hatchet furrow his Horrors-gripped Daddy put in his face at nine. Joelle demonstrates the wound by tracing it across her own veil — somebody else's facial ruin mapped onto the surface that hides whatever hers is — and Wayne then points her up to speak next, "[a]lmost as if he knew. As if he gut-intuited some sort of kinship, affinity of origin." (Carlisle reads the Flaw as analogous to Joelle's acid incident, committing to the pro-acid verdict our digest declines; recorded.)