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

PART TWO
BOY MEETS GIRL

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AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
THE DAY OF
I
’m so much happier now that I’m dead.
Technically, missing. Soon to be presumed dead. But
as shorthand, we’ll say dead. It’s been only a matter of
hours, but I feel better already: loose joints, wavy muscles.
At one point this morning, I realized my face felt strange,
different. I looked in the rearview mirror – dread Carthage
forty-three miles behind me, my smug husband lounging
around his sticky bar as mayhem dangled on a thin piano
wire just above his shitty, oblivious head – and I realized I
was smiling. Ha! That’s new.
My checklist for today – one of many checklists I’ve
made over the past year – sits beside me in the passenger
seat, a spot of blood right next to Item 22: Cut myself. 
But
Amy is afraid of blood
, the diary readers will say. (The
diary, yes! We’ll get to my brilliant diary.) No, I’m not, not a
bit, but for the past year I’ve been saying I am. I told Nick
probably half a dozen times how afraid I am of blood, and
when he said, ‘I don’t remember you being so afraid of
blood,’ I replied, ‘I’ve told you, I’ve told you so many times!’
Nick has such a careless memory for other people’s
problems, he just assumed it was true. Swooning at the
plasma center, that was a nice touch. I really did that, I
didn’t just write that I did. (Don’t fret, we’ll sort this out: the

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true and the not true and the might as well be true.)
Item 22: Cut myself has been on the list a long time.
Now it’s real, and my arm hurts. A lot. It takes a very special
discipline to slice oneself past the paper-cut layer, down to
the muscle. You want a lot of blood, but not so much that
you pass out, get discovered hours later in a kiddie pool of
red with a lot of explaining to do. I held a box cutter to my
wrist first, but looking at that crisscross of veins, I felt like a
bomb technician in an action movie: Snip the wrong line
and you die. I ended up cutting into the inside of my upper
arm, gnawing on a rag so I wouldn’t scream. One long,
deep good one. I sat cross-legged on my kitchen floor for
ten minutes, letting the blood drizzle steadily until I’d made
a nice thick puddle. Then I cleaned it up as poorly as Nick
would have done after he bashed my head in. I want the
house to tell a story of conflict between true and false. 
The
living room looks staged, yet the blood has been cleaned
up: It can’t be Amy!
So the self-mutilation was worth it. Still, hours later, the
slice burns under my sleeves, under the tourniquet. (Item
30: Carefully dress wound, ensuring no blood has dripped
where it shouldn’t be present. Wrap box cutter and tuck
away in pocket for later disposal.)
Item 18: Stage the living room. Tip ottoman. Check.
Item 12: Wrap the First Clue in its box and tuck it just
out of the way so the police will find it before dazed
husband thinks to look for it. It has to be part of the police
record. I want him to be forced to start the treasure hunt (his
ego will make him finish it). Check.
Item 32: Change into generic clothes, tuck hair in hat,
climb down the banks of the river, and scuttle along the

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edge, the water lapping inches below, until you reach the
edge of the complex. Do this even though you know the
Teverers, the only neighbors with a view of the river, will be
at church. Do this because you never know. You always
take the extra step that others don’t, that’s who you are.
Item 29: Say goodbye to Bleecker. Smell his little
stinky cat breath one last time. Fill his kibble dish in case
people forget to feed him once everything starts.
Item 33: Get the fuck out of Dodge.
Check, check, check.
I can tell you more about how I did everything, but I’d like
you to know me first. Not Diary Amy, who is a work of fiction
(and Nick said I wasn’t really a writer, and why did I ever
listen to him?), but me, Actual Amy. What kind of woman
would do such a thing? Let me tell you a story, a 
true
story,
so you can begin to understand.
To start: I should never have been born.
My mother had five miscarriages and two stillbirths
before me. One a year, in the fall, as if it were a seasonal
duty, like crop rotation. They were all girls; they were all
named Hope. I’m sure it was my father’s suggestion – his
optimistic impulse, his tie-dyed earnestness: