Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
SEVEN DAYS GONE
I
’m pregnant! Thank you, Noelle Hawthorne, the world
knows it now, you little idiot. In the day since she pulled her
stunt at my vigil (I do wish she hadn’t upstaged my vigil,
though – ugly girls can be such thunder stealers), the hatred
against Nick has ballooned. I wonder if he can breathe with
all that fury building around him.
I knew the key to big-time coverage, round-the-clock,
frantic, bloodlust never-ending 
Ellen Abbott
coverage,
would be the pregnancy. Amazing Amy is tempting as is.
Amazing Amy knocked up is irresistible. Americans like
what is easy, and it’s easy to like pregnant women – they’re
like ducklings or bunnies or dogs. Still, it baffles me that
these self-righteous, self-enthralled waddlers get such
special treatment. As if it’s so hard to spread your legs and
let a man ejaculate between them.
You know what 
is
hard? Faking a pregnancy.
Pay attention, because this is impressive. It started
with my vacant-brained friend Noelle. The Midwest is full of
these types of people: the nice-enoughs. Nice enough but
with a soul made of plastic – easy to mold, easy to wipe
down. The woman’s entire music collection is formed from
Pottery Barn compilations. Her bookshelves are stocked
with coffee-table crap: 
The Irish in America. Mizzou

---

Football: A History in Pictures. We Remember 9/11.
Something Dumb with Kittens
. I knew I needed a pliant
friend for my plan, someone I could load up with awful
stories about Nick, someone who would become overly
attached to me, someone who’d be easy to manipulate,
who wouldn’t think too hard about anything I said because
she felt privileged to hear it. Noelle was the obvious choice,
and when she told me she was pregnant again – triplets
weren’t enough, apparently – I realized I could be pregnant
too.
A search online: how to drain your toilet for repair.
Noelle invited for lemonade. Lots of lemonade.
Noelle peeing in my drained, unflushable toilet, each of
us so terribly embarrassed!
Me, a small glass jar, the pee in my toilet going into the
glass jar.
Me, a well-laid history of needle/blood phobia.
Me, the glass jar of pee hidden in my purse, a doctor’s
appointment (oh, I can’t do a blood test, I have a total
phobia of needles … urine test, that’ll do fine, thank you).
Me, a pregnancy on my medical record.
Me, running to Noelle with the good news.
Perfect. Nick gets another motive, I get to be sweet
missing pregnant lady, my parents suffer even more, 
Ellen
Abbott
can’t resist. Honestly, it was thrilling to be selected
finally, officially for 
Ellen
among all the hundreds of other
cases. It’s sort of like a talent competition: You do the best
you can, and then it’s out of your hands, it’s up to the
judges.
And, oh, does she hate Nick and 
love
me. I wished my
parents weren’t getting such special treatment, though. I

---

watch them on the news coverage, my mom thin and reedy,
the cords in her neck like spindly tree branches, always
flexed. I see my dad grown ruddy with fear, the eyes a little
too wide, the smile squared. He’s a handsome man,
usually, but he’s beginning to look like a caricature, a
possessed clown doll. I know I should feel sorry for them,
but I don’t. I’ve never been more to them than a symbol
anyway, the walking ideal. Amazing Amy in the flesh. Don’t
screw up, you are Amazing Amy. Our only one. There is an
unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child –
you grow up knowing you aren’t allowed to disappoint,
you’re not even allowed to die. There isn’t a replacement
toddling around; you’re it. It makes you desperate to be
flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In
such ways are despots made.
This morning I stroll over to Dorothy’s office to get a soda.
It’s a tiny wood-paneled room. The desk seems to have no
purpose other than holding Dorothy’s collection of snow
globes from places that seem unworthy of commemoration:
Gulf Shores, Alabama, Hilo, Arkansas. When I see the
snow globes, I don’t see paradise, I see overheated
hillbillies with sunburns tugging along wailing, clumsy
children, smacking them with one hand, with the other
clutching giant non-biodegradable Styrofoam cups of warm
corn-syrupy drinks.
Dorothy has one of those ’70s kitten-in-a-tree posters
–