For you, a thousand time over...

I saw we had ended up on a ruttled road near Isteqlal Middle School. There was a field on one side where lettuce grew in the summer, and a row of sour cherry trees on the other. I found Hassan sitting cross-legged at the foot of one of the trees, eating from a fistful of dried mulberries.
"What are we doing here?" I panted, my stomach rolling with nausea.
He smiled. "Sit with me, Amir agha."
I dropped next to him, lay on a thin patch of snow, wheezing. "You're wasting your time. It was going the other way, didn't you see?"
Hassan popped a mulberry in his mouth. "It's coming," he said. I could hardly breathe and he didn't even sound tired.
"How do you know?" I said.
"I know."
"How can you know?"
He turned to me. A few sweat beads rolled from his bald scalp "Would I ever lie to you, Amir agha?"
Suddenly, I decided to toy with him a little. "I don't know. Would you?"
"I'd sooner eat dirt," he said with a look of indignation.
"Really? You'd do that?"
He threw me a puzzled look. "Do what?"
"Eat dirt if I told you to," I said. I knew I was being cruel, like when I'd taunt him if he didn't know some big word. But there was something fascinating - albeit in a sick way - about teasing Hassan. Kind of like when we used to play insect torture. Except now, he was the ant and I was holding the magnifying glass.
His eyes searched my face for a long time. We sat there, two boys under a sour cherry tree, suddenly looking, really looking, at each other. Ther's when it happened again: Hassan's face changed. Maybe not changed, not really, but suddenly I had a feeling I was looking at two faces, the one I knew, the one that was my first memory, and another, a second face, this one lurking just beneath the surface. I'd seen it happen before - it always shook me up a little. It just appeared, this other face, for a fraction of a moment, long enough to leave me with a unsettling feeling that maybe I'd seen it someplace before. Then Hassan blinked and it was just him again. Just Hassan.

-Excerpt from The Kite Runner.