The Seven Torments of Amy and Craig (A Love Story)

by Don Zolidis

  Goose bumps ran up and down my arms and I stared at the wall, unmoving.

  There had been so much I wasn’t aware of. Just like Brian and Elizabeth. I had missed a huge part of what was going on around me. How could I have failed so completely to understand the person I loved? How was I blind to her pain?

  I started crying and I didn’t even know why.

  Maybe the Amy I created in my mind wasn’t the same one that was standing in front of me. Maybe I was in love with that version I invented.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had never bothered to question myself. I was just doing things; I wanted out, I wanted her, I wanted something, anything, but I didn’t know why I wanted it. I wanted a bigger life, but I didn’t know how to get it.

  Pooh just is.

  Change is good.

  I went over to her house the next day. She was in the backyard. Her dad had set up a hammock between two of the pine trees, and Amy was sitting there, deep in a Joseph Campbell book.

  “So I thought about it,” I said.

  “Good.”

  A cold shiver ran down my spine. My ears buzzed. I had trouble finding my breath.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  The words caught in my throat. And then I heard myself saying them:

  “I think the answer needs to be no.”

  All the sound drained out of the world. Amy’s eyes started to water.

  “I know this seems like revenge,” I said, “but it’s not revenge. Because I’m still gonna be here for you. And we’re still gonna be friends, and we’re still gonna spend time together. Because I think you’re an amazing person…. I know that sounds stupid and cliché, but it’s true, and sometimes stupid and cliché things are true…but…I can’t do this again.”

  I took hold of her with both hands. “I want you to know that this is not about you baring your soul to me and me rejecting it—because I love your soul. I love your mind. But if we do this again, and if we break up again…?” I shook my head. “I don’t know what would happen then.” I said more, and there were a lot more words that came out of us.

  “It’s funny, you know,” she said, finally. “I keep picturing us in the future, and someone asking us, ‘How did you two get together?’ And then I’d say, ‘You’re never gonna believe this story. But I broke his heart six times and he kept coming back.’ And they’d say, ‘Wow, he must have really been in love with you.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah. It’s a pretty cool story.’”

  We were both crying now, and I was hugging her.

  “It’s still a pretty cool story,” I said.

  What the hell?

  I should’ve warned you that that was the stopping point. At least, it was one stopping point. There are no endings until the people are dead, and our story wasn’t over. So there’s one last part I want to tell.

  Tragedies end in death. Comedies end in weddings.

  So I guess this one is a tragedy because Amy’s mom died at the beginning of November.

  I had continued to visit her from time to time. She told me stories about Amy’s childhood, and things that they had done together. She told me when Glenn had decided to come out to her, and how happy she was that he was finding out who he was.

  I even wrote rather funny letters to Amy when I got the chance. At U-Rock I got an e-mail address, and she had one through UCLA, so we were able to communicate frequently, actually. I told her when my dad got a new job; I told her about the insanity of our continuing basement clean-out, which had stretched from a three-week project into five months; I told her about my classes at U-Rock and my plans to transfer at the end of my first year. (I didn’t tell her that I applied to UCLA, ’cause that sounded pretty sad and desperate.)

  Rick hired me for the summer and then extended that through the year. I loved being in the store; I even sold my Deities & Demigods to a guy from Lake Geneva who turned out to work for TSR. He invited me to stop by and I started an unpaid internship two days a week. It was almost like a dream come true.

  The funeral was November 3—a year to the day from when Amy and I first got together.

  She came home to be there.

  There were a lot of people at the funeral. Some I recognized, like Chelsea, but most of them came from a world that I knew nothing about. Amy’s mom had taught elementary school for years; a lot of her former students were there.

  Amy sat up front. She had cut her hair, not chopped in a victory breakup haircut, but still, it was shorter. Just over shoulder length. It looked amazing.

  Was I a jackass for thinking about how pretty her hair looked at her mom’s funeral? Of course, but I think we’ve already established that point.

  Her dad got up to speak. He had gotten a haircut too, and he looked small in the black suit, as if he had shrunk somehow.

  He stood at the podium for a moment and looked down at his hands.

  “So,” he said, with that long Wisconsin O. “Uh…if you know me, you know I don’t…do this a lot.” He stopped again. “Barb and I…uh…we’ve been in love a long time.” He stopped again, trying to keep himself from crying.

  “I’ve been tryin’ to think about what to say. How to talk about her. I met her in high school…and we were in love for a long, long time. You know, we wanted a family—and then we learned we weren’t gonna have one…but then we decided to anyway.” He looked out over the congregation—he looked at Glenn, then he looked at Amy.

  “And you guys…we’re so happy to have you…and Barb was thrilled…every day…she got a chance to be your mother.”

  His voice was cracking, and the words barely trickled out. You could hear people blowing their noses now.

  “My whole life was her.”

  He stopped again, and managed one last word before Amy came up to help him down.

  “Good-bye.”

  The snow was falling when they lowered her casket into the ground. It was the first snow of the year, and the flakes were huge and wet—they stuck to everything, landing on the black shoulders of my trench coat and tangling in Amy’s hair. Everywhere they fell, they melted.

  I stood there for a moment with my hands in my pockets like an idiot as the snow dropped around us. Then she was hugging me, and I wrapped her in my arms like I had done so many times before. I could smell the cotton of her hat.

  We went for a walk. And we were quiet for a long time, but then we started talking, like we always did. She told me about a philosophy of religion class she was taking, which she liked a lot, and that she was considering being a religion major. I told her about getting to work in a building with all my nerd heroes. We talked about Brian and Elizabeth and Groash and Chelsea; everyone was doing okay. Life was good.

  We didn’t kiss, and we didn’t hold hands.

  Maybe someday, I told myself.

  Later, after she had left, I got in my car and heard the rhythmic squeak of the windshield wipers. I sat there a moment, not wanting to go anywhere at all. Not wanting to let this moment escape into the past. But we all have to go sometime, I guess. I adjusted my hat, put the car in drive, and headed out.

  It’s a cliché that every book is the result of the work of dozens of people, but like most clichés it has the benefit of being true. This book you have in your hands would be infinitely worse and probably unreadable without the contributions, sweat, and kind assistance I’ve received at every step of the way. I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who pitched in.

  First, Shannon Geiken Horn, without whom there would be no book. Shannon e-mailed me in the spring of 2014 asking to commission a play to take to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival the following year. At first I was going to do a play about an astrophysicist, but we lost an actress, so naturally my thoughts turned to heartbreak. That’s where the idea of the seven breakups occurred to me.

  The students we took to Scotland, who performed the original roles, were invaluable to me. Chris Ramirez, the original Craig, and Alex Hammersley, who played the original Amy, were abs
olutely perfect in their parts and gave me so much insight into their characters. I don’t think I ever would’ve understood Groash without Bo Hiel’s performance, and Amelia Kassing, Eric Jewel, Grayson Yerich, and Emily Dial were instrumental in fleshing out this little world I created.

  Next, the amazing Holliana Bryan, who edited the very first, very rough manuscript I sent to her. Without her brilliant ideas and suggestions, this book would be far weaker.

  I need to thank my incredible agent, John Cusick, who took me under his wing and has been there for every stop of this whirlwind process. I completely rewrote the book under his guidance, and the result was a novel that is far more nuanced, complete, and hilarious than anything I could have done on my own.

  I need to thank Carol Nguyen, who gave me invaluable insight into her experiences growing up in small-town Wisconsin and provided some much-needed context.

  My entire team at Hyperion, including super editor Laura Schreiber, who has been a champion for this book, has laughed along with me, and still managed to protect my fragile author feelings while delivering all-important suggestions for improvement. I also need to thank Hannah Allaman, whose input was incredibly helpful, and the careful comma and hyphenation corrections of Dan Kaufman, who solved my numerous, numerous errors. I clearly never learned how to use commas or dashes correctly, and any remaining mistakes are my own.

  I also need to thank the No-Vibe Tribe, who unwittingly provided much of the material in this novel, even though they didn’t realize it at the time. So to Matt, Ken, Dan, Sky, Ray, Tiff, Mike, Russ, Aaron, and Jon: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. It’s in print now.

  Though she probably isn’t aware of it, Jennifer Finney Boylan is also partly responsible for this novel. I had wanted to be a novelist for years and years, but working alongside her at Ursinus College showed me a pathway to my dreams. She helped me along the way with my first book, and for that I am eternally grateful.

  I would also like to thank the good people at Starbucks and various other coffee shops in the United States and Scotland who generously provided me with enough caffeine to do this.

  Lastly, I need to thank Anne Godfrey. I don’t have enough words left to say how much you mean to me.

  DON ZOLIDIS grew up in Wisconsin, went to college in Minnesota, and is mostly known for being a really funny playwright. For the past five years, he’s been the most-produced playwright in American schools. His more than one hundred published plays have been performed tens of thousands of times, and have appeared in sixty-four different countries. He currently splits his time between New York and Texas, and has two adorable boys who will someday read this book and have a lot of questions. He aspires to owning a dog. The Seven Torments of Amy and Craig is his first novel. He’s hard at work on the next one.