Luckiest Girl Alive

Luke Harrison, Ani’s wealthy fiancé, is at once exactly what she wants and the last thing that she needs. Her self-defined life plan, formulated during a field trip to New York in her junior year of high school, is simple: to be one of those successful women she watches walking the sidewalks of Manhattan, “busy, important” women who go to “cocktail parties and sessions with a personal trainer” (288). With his athletic frame and good looks, Luke, Ivy League educated, a wunderkind on Wall Street, scion of a wealthy family, fits perfectly that life narrative. There is, she decides, “protection in success” (288). Even as she nears their picture-perfect wedding, Ani has doubts: “I’m the blade that nicks at the perfectly hemmed seams of Luke’s star quarterback life, threatening to shred it apart” (8). Healing from the trauma of her experiences requires more than the superficial trappings of Luke’s wealth and that privileged lifestyle. After all, Luke, the ex-jock, indirectly sides with the jocks who attacked Ani, dismissing the rape with air quotes, the antics of a wild party that got out of hand. Luke believes Ani should let those memories go in favor of assuming the duties of his wife, following him to London and providing him, and his blue blood family, a new generation. Moving on, for him, means no longer dwelling on the past.

His treatment of the photograph of Arthur and his father, precious to Ani, reveals what the increasing friction over the wedding planning hints: his gross insensitivity, his brutish disregard for her emotional health, his elitist willingness to lie to avoid unpleasantness, and ultimately his deep-seated selfishness and his preoccupation with his ego. Ani is the luckiest girl alive only when she leaves the reception dinner free of Luke. In the end Luke is the one mistake Ani does not make.

Arthur is a misfit at the Bradley School and Ani’s only friend there. He becomes one of the two school shooters who terrorizes the school until Ani stabs him to death. In the aftermath of the shootings, everybody thinks they understand Arthur Finnerman. The national media, the forensic psychologist brought in by police, social media posts, and the friends and families of the victims and the survivors are quick to pigeonhole the shooter. What quickly emerges is the cliché school shooter: Arthur was a loner, an only child, estranged from his father, smothered by his mother, a social misfit, overweight and acne-scarred, effeminate, and bullied by the in-crowd, until he reached a breaking point. In this reading, Arthur is little more than a two-dimensional caricature, a fledgling psychopath who came to the school with a grudge and a hit list.

Ani’s account, however, interrogates this caricature, and in the process, Arthur Finnerman emerges as a complex character, intelligent beyond his years, well-read, charismatic, emotional, caring (his mother recalls Arthur’s devastation over the death of the family dog), deeply sensitive, and bothered not by the antics and pranks of his juvenile and immature peers as much as by the hypocrisies and phoniness of the world at large. Indeed, his original plan is to level the entire school with the two homemade bombs. Only the failure of that plan drives him to start shooting.

The template for understanding Arthur Finnerman is not the avenging trench-coated shooters from Columbine but rather Holden Caulfield, the introspective narrator of The Catcher in the Rye, the novel Mr. Larson assigns his Honors English class to read over the summer and the subject of the first day’s discussion. Holden, institutionalized for his own good at the end of the novel, dreams of riding a nuclear bomb into the heart of Manhattan. That free-floating discontent with the human race is less the mark of a run-of-the-mill psychopath and more the dark, if logical reasoning of an existentialist at odds with a world that resists every opportunity to be better than it is.