Luckiest Girl Alive

“I had to write a description of an object without ever explicitly identifying the object. I went with my cat, and ended the passage with her diving off our back porch to her bloodied, mangled death.” 

In choosing the bloody death of her cat as the subject of her entrance exam essay for Bradley, Ani decides her best bet for gaining admission to a school whose principal claim to fame is that J. D. Salinger’s first wife attended there is to play the dark misfit. This will be the first of many of Ani’s personas she will select. Thus, she begins her education being the very thing Holden Caulfield despises: a phony.

“College was my first go at reinvention, and I couldn’t compromise it by getting a reputation again.” 

Even before she shares with the reader her experiences at Bradley, she confesses that when she went away to college she began what would become her strategy for survival: pretending to be someone else. She never admits to her college friends the dark history she carries. She finds in that process of continual reinvention a way to avoid being hurt or allowing anybody to get too close to her.

“I could have an orgasm any day of the week—underneath my covers, in less than a minute—but there was something about this, about a guy wanting my pain, that strummed me deep inside.” 

This is Ani’s dream for her initiation into sex. At 14, Ani is struck immediately by the athletic build of Dean Palmer, but she searches for more than sex, about which she is only mildly curious. Ironic given what is ahead for her, she believes that her virginity will be claimed only by a boy sensitive to the pain of the actual process and who is nevertheless willing to gently, lovingly share that pain.

“I groaned and lifted my head and so did the boy between my legs. Peyton. He stroked my thigh and went back to doing whatever he was doing that he thought was making me feel good. I couldn’t feel a thing.”

Going in and out of consciousness, Ani surfaces momentarily during the sexual assault by the soccer players and here is aware of one of them, Peyton, performing oral sex on her awkwardly and ineffectively. At the height of the school shootings, a wounded Peyton will crawl to Ani and die cradled in her lap in a position that recalls this moment of assault.

“I told Luke about that night at a time when he was enamored with me, which is the only time you should ever tell anyone something shameful about yourself—when a person is mad enough about you that disgrace is endearing. Each nasty detail made his eyes bigger and bigger.”

Sharing her trauma at last with the man she is going to marry proves difficult for Ani. Luke, himself a jock in school, does not entirely believe her story of the assault. He wants her to put the past in the past and focus on their marriage, which for him means Ani will sacrifice her promising and lucrative career and have the babies she has already told him she does not want. In this moment of confession, Ani realizes that Luke wants the lurid details and neglects to realize the depth of Ani’s victimization.

“Too singularly focused on survival. That would be the most surprisingly lesson I learned at Bradley; You only scream when you’re finally safe.” 

This is the Monday morning after the attack, when Liam, one of her assailants, drives her to a Planned Parenthood clinic to secure the morning-after abortion pills. Ani fantasizes that some extremists will firebomb the clinic and how in the immediate aftermath of the blast the site would be weirdly quiet, which symbolizes her own refusal to speak up about the rape until she sees it as safe to do so, which as it turns out is years later.

“Maybe it wasn’t even a fog, maybe it was a poisonous gas attack and we were under attack, and I was the only one who realizes it.”

Surrounded by her future in-laws and helping to select the menu for her approaching nuptials, Ani reveals her anxiety and her misgivings. After downing a pot-laced brownie supplied by one of her bridesmaids, she imagines the entire wedding party and Luke and his family being killed by poisonous gas. The fantasy, like her earlier fantasy of knifing Luke, reveals not only her discontent with her marriage but also how deeply she has been impacted by her experiences during the shootings.

“Sometimes I wonder if this was the decision that set everything into motion. Or if it would have happened anyway, if, like the nuns […] said, God has a plan for all of us and he knows the outcome before we’ve even been born.” 

Mr. Larson extends a helping hand and a safe haven to crash after Dean strikes her. In retrospect, Ani ponders whether if she had accepted his offer, risking a liaison with a teacher, she might have changed everything in her life. She asks in short whether she is in control of her life and its crises or whether it is all in the hands of some unseen God, a prospect that takes moral responsibility from her.

“It was the perfect moment to be bold. ‘But I want someone to get me.’” 

This moment of insight that Ani shares with Mr. Larson when the two reunite over dinner reveals Ani’s lingering hope that Andrew Larson might be key to her recovery from the traumas of Bradley. Stemming from her crush on the young English teacher more than 10 years earlier, she miscasts Andrew now as her last, best hope to avoid a marriage she begins to see may be toxic.

“You should be mad at you! […] You had the chance to take him down and you didn’t because you […] actually thought you could redeem yourself.” 

Arthur’s angry dismissal of Ani’s sympathies after Bradley expels him for defending Ani against an insensitive substitute teacher reveals the depth of Arthur’s misanthropy, his Holden Caulfield-sized discontent with everyone, even a girl who was up to that point his only confidante. His insight into Ani is as caustic as it is valid. She refuses to name her attackers because she still wants to be in their clique.

“I thought you wanted Luke. I thought this little charade made you happy […] Jesus, Ani, don’t do this if it doesn’t make you happy.”

Nell, Ani’s maid of honor and her closet friend, offers Ani, who has for more than a decade grown adept at playing personas and denying her authentic emotions, the advice she needs to hear. It is time, Nell says, for Ani to be honest with herself.

“His beautiful face took the brunt. One Peyton tooth skittered right in front of me, white and perfectly shaped as a piece of Chiclet gum.” 

Ani’s meticulous and unblinking account of the shootings of her classmates marks the novel’s assertion of honesty as a difficult but necessary remedy for trauma. In a novel full of spin doctors, performance personas, rumors, and lies, the account of the shooting is a tonic shot of truth. Ani spares no detail, resorts to no euphemisms, and begins her own movement toward honesty.

“But there’s one more thing, the part I never tell anyone. Which is that I actually thought, They have to forgive me now, as Arthur landed on his knees, the weight of his upper body propelling him forward.” 

This passage reveals the emotional pull of cliques. At the moment she knifes Arthur in the school, killing the only kid at the school who ever bothered to get to know her, this comment reveals the depth of her need to be accepted by the very clique whose members were responsible for taunting Ben and Arthur into the attack and who gangraped her at the party. In killing Arthur, Ani reasons, they will embrace her.

“I’ve worn my victim’s mask, thinking that was what he wanted from me. But there was no performing in my arms, gelatinous and quivering, as I reached for him.” 

The momentary re-infatuation with Andrew Larson, which in many ways climaxes here with their embrace after they break into the school, appears to promise Ani what she needs: a chance to stop playing a character, pretending to be a victim, and allowing herself to be defined by others, and a chance at last to be her imperfect and damaged self.

“‘So I guess what I am not understanding is that if assaulted you […] why would you even want to save him from Arthur?’ ‘I was trying to save myself.’” 

The detective suspects Ani might have wanted to kill the boy who raped her. The hardline stance taken by the detectives in the aftermath of the shootings is responsible for Ani’s damaged reputation. Everyone, including the police, believe the story Dean, a sympathetic figure as a wheelchair-bound survivor, spreads that Ani participated in the shooting.

“I saw how there was protection in success, and success was defined by threatening the minion on the other end of a cell phone, expensive pumps terrorizing the city, people stepping out of your way simply because you looked like you had more important places to be than they did.” 

This moment of false illumination Ani experiences in New York City during a junior class field trip defines her plan for handling the traumas from Bradley. Success, she sees as she watches the professional women stride along New York’s busy sidewalks, comes not from being strong but from playing strong. Intimidation becomes itself a charade. She will become a formidable presence through the manipulation of dress and calculated mannerisms, not through the difficult business of dealing with her experiences.

“He sobbed when she died. Sobbed. So he couldn’t be what they say he is. He had emotions.” 

In the reunion with Arthur’s mother, Ani is reminded of what social media, news outlets, and police forensics have worked to deny: that Arthur and Ben were not simple sociopaths. Arthur, like all school shooters, was a kid, sensitive and hurting. Arthur grieved his dog when he was a child. Arthur struggled with a cruel and emotionally abusive father who abandoned the family when he was still a child. Arthur struggled with his weight in a culture that viewed obesity as a subject for scorn and ridicule.

“‘Luke Harrison wouldn’t marry a murderess skank […] He fixes me.’ I look down at my hands, at my stunning armor. ‘I just want to be fixed.’” 

In relying on Luke Harrison and his social position, his financial resources, and his blueblood family for her redemption, Ani buys into the fantasy that she needs to be fixed. The logic in this passage reveals not only why Ani does not need Luke but why the marriage would represent her abdication of her self-esteem and any chance at her own recovery.

“But you’re just another guy who wants to put it into the Bradley slut […] Someone else to tell me what will make me happy. Exactly what I fucking need.”

Harsh perhaps, but Ani’s epiphany concerning the contradictory motivations of the married Andrew Larson reflects how little Ani needs his counseling or his moral direction. High school is over. She movies toward her closing affirmation that only she can make herself happy. He is after all a complication, married with kids. Ani does not need to be the focus of his midlife crisis.

“Because it’s more about how you’re not acting like the person Luke fell in love with […] You better start acting like the old you if you want this wedding to happen.” 

The lack of encouragement and emotional support Ani’s mother provides is encapsulated in this biting remark. So disconnected is she from her daughter’s emotional trauma, the mother actually counsels her daughter to play a part and get better at playing a part. Insincerity and pretense are her mother’s advice for a successful marriage.

“It will be very impactful for my fans […] to see us come to some sort of peace. But I also think people will understand why it took me so long to get to this point, and why I was confused at first.” 

This exchange with Ani reveals the duplicity and moral hypocrisy of Dean Palmer, who has parlayed his wounding at Bradley into a lucrative career as a motivational speaker. He wants to stage an emotional reunion with Ani because it will play well for his millions of social media followers. He is not concerned with Ani and the emotional burdens she carries, nor is he particularly bothered by the fact that he raped her in high school.

“Because if I had gotten my hands on it, I think I just might have blown that motherfucking cocksucker’s cock right off. Arthur would have gone second.” 

Ani cautions early on that she is no cliché plucky heroine, no two-dimensional victim. Her anger toward the boys who got away with raping her has shaped her for more than a decade. This stunning moment of honesty and revelation in a life spent otherwise engaging in the artful dodge of a life of reinvention is the tipping point in her movement into the redemption she has sought since Bradley.

“I just thought it was better. And better for you. To move on. Why would you want to hold on to something like that anyway […] It’s creepy, Ani.”

At the rehearsal dinner, Luke reveals at last what Ani has long suspected: He is another control freak, another meddling man trying to impose his will on her. In destroying and then discarding Arthur’s photo, Luke reveals at nearly the last possible moment the justification Ani needs to break off the engagement.