I wanted her to be afraid with me. But she said, “I don’t know. I’m just not.” She was afraid of nothing, not even of flying.
This story by Amy Hempel is very different from other short stories. She doesn’t give the readers any names for the characters except “The Best Friend,” “The Good Doctor,” “The Bad Doctor,” and Gussie. I feel like the author wanted us to focus more on what is actually going on with the characters rather than the names of them. Throughout the story, the reader can sense the pain, or depression, that the narrator is feeling. She constantly talks about how she wants her friend to feel really happy and how she would do anything for her friend. When the friend dies at the end, the narrator finally decides to face her fears. She didn’t want to do it when the friend was alive because the friend didn’t have fears; she wasn’t scared of anything. The narrator was scared that the friend was going to die, and when she did, she faced her other fears to try and see if she could get over them.