Luckiest Girl Alive

These chapters, which close with Ani’s gripping account of the mayhem and violence of the attack on Bradley, ironically work to humanize Arthur, one of the shooters. The chapters contrast the viciousness of the two misfit students who attack the school and the viciousness of the honors students who attacked Ani just weeks earlier. In humanizing Arthur by allowing him to emerge as more than the stereotypical psychopath that police forensics experts later make him out to be, the novel enhances the stark difference between appearance and reality that Any plays out in her role as Luke’s fiancée.

In the evening she spends with Andrew Larson at the restaurant, Ani has what she feels is a much-needed respite from the psychological pressures of playing happy wife-to-be and Manhattan publishing success. Under the influence of several cocktails, Ani begins to feel the need to be honest—to strip away the pretense of her happy adjustments and her psychological recovery. Andrew seems to see through her contrived reinventions. He looks her in the eye and asserts that he wants to know her: “I’m just trying to figure out who you really are” (147). His stare unnerves her, “like he was squinting through the peephole in my entire façade” (147). That look is like a “spider crack that would eventually make the windshield cave in” (147). She believes Andrew is what she needs; unlike Luke, here is a man who wants her to be “broken.” It is only much later that Ani will come to see that the façade here is not hers but rather his and that his unctuous ministration and his plethora of motivational clichés is less a reach out to help her and more a strategy for handling his life of boredom and routine.

Much as Ani comes to see that Andrew’s concern is self-serving and manipulative—that he is not entirely what he seems—the narrative of the days leading up to the shooting reveals that Arthur Finnerman is not entirely what he seems. In helping Ani when her clique turns nasty and humiliates her on the mistaken assumption that she has ratted out the soccer team, Arthur reveals an unsuspected capacity for kindness and a generosity of spirit hidden by his brittle intellect and his impatience with his peers and their mean-spirited shenanigans. In what is emerging as central to Ani’s own quest for identity, the people she meets appear to be one thing and yet are something entirely different. Arthur shares the story of his friendship with Dean and how just a year earlier the two were inseparable; he shares the story of Ben Hunter and his humiliation at the graduation party; and he shares the photograph of his father, long gone, and the goofy seashell-decorated frame that his mother made. These chapters create a sympathy for a misfit, a loner who is emotionally stunted but intellectually developed to the point that he disdains his peers. He is lonely, kind, and gentle. Like Holden Caulfield, who with his signature hunting cap always appears one bad week away from shooting up Pencey Prep, Arthur is frustrated by a world that refuses to be what it so clearly ought to be and could be. His discontent is suggested in the moment when, without warning or explanation, he pulls his father’s hunting rifle out to show a shocked Ani.

The description of the school attack is vivid. Ani’s recollections of the impact of bullets in the heads of friends is stark and immediate. In a novel that otherwise explores how reality can be reinvented and trauma circumvented, the accounts of both the shootings and then Ani’s methodical knifing of her only friend are a reminder of the brutal impact of truth. Chapter 12, then, is an exercise in documentary realism. Ani drops her pretenses. She records the events with a journalist’s eye on getting details right without emotional excess. When she stabs Arthur, for instance, she recalls her father patiently teaching her how to throw a softball: “I shifted my weight back, the way my dad taught me do before I threw the ball, the only useful thing the man ever taught me in my life. Then I slammed the knife into the side of [Arthur’s] neck” (212). As with Hemingway, a writer who figures prominently in Ani’s college literature courses, the author renders the violence, brutality, and sheer bloodiness of the attack in sentences that are controlled and unembellished.

Chapter 12, as the novel’s midpoint, prepares for Ani’s own turn in the narrative present to honesty—to forsaking the comfort and security of her obsession with inventing and reinventing a person she can pretend to be. This section closes with the most difficult admission Ani makes, one she shares with the reader, not with the film crew. She admits that when she dispatched Arthur, her first thought was that now the clique who had used her and humiliated her would certainly allow her back into their good graces. That moment, that decision to still seek out the approval of toxic others, is what the novel will now interrogate. Ani, now both a hero and a killer, has much still to learn.