Gone Girl

in a load of laundry if she needed clean underwear. Hold on.’
    Again I could hear the shuffle of her hair against the receiver. Marybeth had brought every Elliott photo album with her in case we needed more pictures. She’d shown me a photo of Amy and Hilary, cheek-to-cheek grins. So I could picture Hilary now, the same butter-blond hair as my wife, framing a plainer face, with muddy hazel eyes.
    ‘ Jason, I am on the phone – just give them a few Popsicles, it’s not that dang hard .
    ‘Sorry. Our kids are out of school, and my husband never ever takes care of them, so he seems a little confused about what to do for the ten minutes I’m on the phone with you. Sorry. So … so, right, I was little Suzy, and we had this game going, and for a few months – August, September, October – it was great. Like intense friendship, we were together allthe time. And then a few weird things happened at once that I knew kind of bothered her.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘A guy from our brother school, he meets us both at the fall dance, and the next day he calls me instead of Amy. Which I’m sure he did because Amy was too intimidating, but whatever … and then a few days later, our midterm grades come, and mine are slightly better, like, four-point-one versus four-point. And not long after, one of our friends, she invites me to spend Thanksgiving with her family. Me, not Amy. Again, I’m sure this was because Amy intimidated people. She wasn’t easy to be around, you felt all the time like you had to impress. But I can feel things change just a little. I can tell she’s really irritated, even though she doesn’t admit it.
    ‘Instead, she starts getting me to do things. I don’t realize it at the time, but she starts setting me up. She asks if she can color my hair the same blond as hers, because mine’s mousy, and it’ll look so nice a brighter shade. And she starts complaining about her parents. I mean she’s always complained about her parents, but now she really gets going on them – how they only love her as an idea and not really for who she is – so she says she wants to mess with her parents. She has me start prank-calling her house, telling her parents I’m the new Amazing Amy. We’d take the train into New York some weekends, and she’d tell me to stand outside their house – one time she had me run up to her mom and tell her I was going to get rid of Amy and be her new Amy or some crap like that.’
    ‘And you did it?’
    ‘It was just dumb stuff girls do. Back before cell phones and cyber-bullying. A way to kill time. We did prank stuff like that all the time, just dumb stuff. Try to one-up each other on how daring and freaky we could be.’
    ‘Then what?’
    ‘Then she starts distancing herself. She gets cold. And I think – I think that she doesn’t like me anymore. Girls at school start looking at me funny. I’m shut out of the cool circle. Fine. But then one day I’m called into the principal’s office. Amy has had a horrible accident – twisted ankle, fractured arm, cracked ribs. Amy has fallen down this long set of stairs, and she says it was me who pushed her. Hold on. ‘ Go back downstairs now. Go. Down. Stairs. Goooo downstairs . Sorry, I’m back. Never have kids. So Amy said you pushed her?’
    ‘Yeah, because I was craaaazy . I was obsessed with her, and I wanted to be Suzy, and then being Suzy wasn’t enough – I had to be Amy. And she had all this evidence that she’d had me create over the past few months . Her parents, obviously, had seen me lurking around the house. I theoretically accosted her mom. My hair dyed blond and the clothes I’d bought that matched Amy’s – clothes I bought while shopping with her, but I couldn’t prove that. All her friends came in, explained how Amy for the past month had been so frightened of me. All this shit. I looked totally insane . Completely insane. Her parents got a restraining order on me. And I kept swearing it wasn’t me, but by then I was so miserable that I wanted to leave school anyway. So we didn’t fight the expulsion. I wanted to get away from her by that time. I mean, the girl cracked her own ribs . I was scared – this little fifteen-year-old, she’d pulled this off. Fooled friends, parents, teachers.’
    ‘And this was all because of a boy and some grades and a Thanksgiving invitation?’
    ‘About a month after I moved back to Memphis, I got a letter. It wasn’t signed, it was typed, but it was obviously Amy.