Amy's Perfect Life

by Wyatt Robinette

I didn’t believe her. Not at first.

How could I?

I knew everything she said was a lie.

I had been catfishing her.

I wasn’t trying to hurt her feelings. Or to make her feel tricked.

We were worried—at least the sorority sisters Amy still talked to were. The ones she could call real friends. Honestly, I was tired of her crying all the time, and I thought if she felt chosen—even just once—she might finally stop orbiting my life like a dying star.

I told myself it was kindness, but really, I just wanted peace. Back then, I was the one they came to when things got messy. I planned the events, smoothed over drama, kept everyone from falling apart—including Amy.

I used to feel protective of her. Freshman year, she practically lived in my dorm after that huge fight with her dad. But somewhere along the way, I got tired of always being the strong one.

Yes, I know, I made her date up. I found his photo online. I created his profile. I swiped right. I initiated conversation. But I never asked her out.

I never agreed to a date.

I wouldn’t be that mean or cruel.

We were just trying to help her feel better about herself after a bad breakup. It wasn’t the first time I’d tried to fix things for her. In college, I helped her retake a whole semester’s worth of exams after she stopped showing up to class. Now, years after college, we were just tired of being her crutch. There wasn’t too much more we would be able to do for her.

She was a mess.

She showed up to a chapter brunch in pajama pants and a hoodie with soup stains (lots of them) and Kleenex stuck to her heel like a cry for help.

She didn’t even try to hide it.

Back in college, I’d always been the one to pick her up. I knew her crying routines, her favorite comfort food, her worst mistakes. But this time, it felt like she didn’t want saving.

Then she showed me three photos and a shaky little video where he was laughing in the background. My stomach dropped. I didn’t recognize the feeling at first—it wasn’t fear, exactly. More like vertigo. Like the ground had shifted but not really.

Amy looked different in them—healthier, clearer somehow, like her skin was radiant. Her hair had that expensive kind of shine, like she’d started using one of those oils only influencers know about. Her eyes looked bigger. Or maybe it was just how she looked at the camera—like it was lucky to be looking at her.

I barely recognized her. I told myself I was proud of her, but pride wasn’t the feeling. It felt like watching a better version of her replace the one I knew.

For a second, I wanted to be her. Or at least be seen the way she was.

I used to turn heads. In group photos, I was always center frame. Now, looking at her, I felt like an old draft someone forgot to finish.

It made me think about how little of myself I actually liked. What would my 'perfect version' even look like? I couldn’t picture it. Maybe that’s why it was so easy for Amy to evolve—she already believed she could be more. Her glow wasn’t just lighting—it was proof. Proof that something about her had been chosen, upgraded. And if she could change that easily, maybe I could too—if I only knew what part of me to erase first.

That was the first time I questioned my reflection. Not just in the mirror—but in other people’s eyes. I started to wonder what version of me they were seeing, and if it was already changing.

And he looked exactly like the man I’d found. But instead of gazing off, all brooding and hot, he was smiling, right at Amy. And the way he looked at Amy was amazing. It was like he was already in love with her.

I paused the video and looked at his face.

For a second, it felt like he saw me. Like he knew me. Like he was a long-lost friend.

Like Amy had flipped the script. Like she had learned what we were doing and tracked down the man whose photos we used.

That would’ve made sense. But instead, something impossible happened.

Because the handsome man whose photos I used for the fake dating profile had died years ago. Carmen, my roommate, assured me of this. The man was her recently deceased cousin. She had gone to his funeral. Saw the body. Said it was definitely him.

Or—wait.

Maybe it was one of his friends. I forget what Carmen said when we were looking for photos together.

But I’m pretty sure it was her cousin.

If it wasn’t, it was definitely one of his friends.

I don’t know.

I told her to be careful.

That it was too soon after everything with Mason, and sometimes people fall for the idea of a person instead of the person.

She smiled like I was being sweet. She said, “He wasn’t like that. He was different.”

It was strange, hearing her speak so calmly. A few months ago she would’ve cried if the nail salon messed up her appointment. Now she looked like someone who hadn’t cried in weeks.

“Even if it ends tomorrow,” she said, “it’s already been worth it.”

I laughed and told her she might be falling for a dream.

She smiled.

“Dreams don’t feel like this,” she said. She looked past me when she said it. Her eyes didn’t blur, but something in her face did—like there were two versions, one superimposed on top of the other.

I asked what “this” meant.

She said something like it was the first time she hadn’t felt alone in her own skin.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

I just nodded and pretended to be happy for her.

That night, I kept rereading the old messages I wrote as him. They felt…off. Like the tone was slightly different than I remembered. Warmer. More personal. But I hadn’t changed anything, and the timestamps hadn’t moved. They were my words—same punctuation, same clumsy sign-offs. But they felt warmer. More knowing. Like someone had been shadowing me, waiting for their turn. Like someone had studied my voice and decided to improve it.

I started to wonder if I’d ever really written them. It felt like I’d been erased midsentence and replaced with someone warmer, someone better. In school, I was always good with words—president of two clubs, editor of the student paper. I knew how to shape a narrative. But this felt like someone had hijacked the story mid-sentence.

Over the next two months, things didn’t stop—they spread. Amy was spotted with her new man by different sorority sisters.

One of the girls said she saw them at the farmer’s market.

Said he couldn’t keep his hands off Amy, like they’d been together forever.

She called him “a total upgrade.”

I wanted to correct her.

But I didn’t.

Maya said she saw them at the Wednesday night art walk, holding hands and sharing a tamale from a paper plate. She thought it was cute—the way he wiped a napkin across Amy’s cheek, like they’d been together for years.

“He’s really good-looking in person,” she said. “Tall, but not too tall. Kind of glows.”

I asked her to describe him again. Every detail matched—right down to the green canvas jacket he wore in nearly every photo.

“We’ve been meaning to grab coffee,” she added, meaning her and Amy. Not me. Not anymore. Maya used to text me about everything. Lately, it felt like Amy had absorbed her, too—like they were syncing up without me.

Jules texted that she ran into them downtown. Said they were buying scented soap at that shop that always smells like cedar and weed.

“He was really sweet,” she wrote. “He helped her pick out one that smelled like marshmallow and rain. I think they’re really good for each other.”

I stared at that message for a long time. I couldn’t believe it. The picture she sent with it was even more unbelievable. Amy looked incredible—skin lit just right, smile glowing. But the background was weirdly blurred, like everything around her had been erased except him.

It felt like a prank so slow, so cruel, so perfectly calibrated that no one would ever admit to it—even if they were in on it. But all my sisters, even the ones I consider to be like real sisters, said they weren’t. They wouldn’t do that. Not to a sister.

Yet group chats shifted. Plans were made without me. They still invited me, technically—but everything revolved around Amy now. They used to tag me in memes, vent to me after breakups. Now it was: “Did you see what Amy posted?”

I was a follower in what used to be my circle.

Then Amy started posting more photos of him—on walks, at brunch, in her bedroom.

The angles were too natural, the lighting too good.

They didn’t look staged.

They didn’t look real either.

It was like someone was generating them with a memory of what love should look like.

And with every new photo, Amy seemed a little shinier. Her under-eye circles were gone, her smile lines looked intentional, and even her posture—always a little hunched—had changed.

Then, slowly, Amy stopped showing up in real life.

I’d go to events and not see her, but the next day—or sometimes later that same night— she’d post pictures. And standing next to her, in every photo, there he was. Smiling and gorgeous.

Sometimes I was even in the frame—not next to them, but holding a drink, midconversation with someone else. And I always looked flat. Dim. Like a slightly out of focus version of myself.

I started checking every post before bed, just to see if I’d show up again.

At one event, Jules hugged me too long and said, “You look tired, girl. You okay?”

I laughed it off, but the way she looked at me didn’t feel casual. And when I checked my appearance in the bathroom, I couldn’t help but feel she was right. I looked tired. Beat down.

As I was leaving the bathroom, Maya cornered me and said I’d gone quiet. That I was on stealth mode. Then she added, “You’re not still thinking about that whole Amy thing, right?”

I told her I wasn’t, but I don’t think she believed me.

And why should she?

I was falling apart. My physical appearance and standing with my friends were both suffering. Maya edited me out of a group photo she posted and I had missed too many brunches to count. I obviously wasn’t the same person I used to be. I needed to change. To focus on other things. I was stuck on Amy.

But I couldn’t help it.

It seemed like in every photo Amy and her boyfriend looked more together and stronger as a couple—and I looked more like background noise. She had become high-definition, and I was a low-res extra. And no one else seemed to notice it. It was just me.

Whatever Amy was becoming, I wasn’t invited. Every version of her life now came with a velvet rope I couldn’t cross. I didn’t feel ghosted—I felt forgotten by the script entirely. She once told me I was the only person who really saw her. Now I was just a name in her archive.

Someone she used to know.

Just as I was starting to accept my new reality, Amy’s mom called one afternoon asking if she was okay.

She hadn’t shown up to her aunt’s birthday, even though she’d RSVP’d weeks ago.

But then she posted photos from the event—a backyard shot, a slice of cake, a video of her and her boyfriend clinking glasses.

Her parents were confused.

“Everyone swears she wasn’t there,” her mom said. “But she posted the group photo. And there she is, smiling.”

I tried to explain what I could, but halfway through the conversation her mom started crying and said, “Maybe I just didn’t see her.”

A year passed, and no one—not even her parents—saw Amy in person.

She stopped responding to texts, comments, DMs—everything.

Eventually, I stopped trying, which wasn’t like me. I never gave up. But I’d spent so long pretending to be okay, I’d forgotten how to start over.

But people kept talking about her, like she was still around.

In a way, she was.

I couldn’t stop checking her profile.

She was still online, somehow—posting less frequently, but always smiling, always glowing, always with him. I wouldn’t see her at a party but then, there she was in a photo or video on her timeline. She looked like the best possible version of herself. And I looked like a glitch.

Amy’s strange and perfect life slowly became normal.

It was like she’d been absorbed into a higher tier of reality—more beautiful, less reachable.

Everyone had a different theory.

She was living in Bali. She’d become a Reiki instructor. Someone even said she got scouted by a modeling agency.

I didn’t believe any of it.

But I also didn’t know what I believed anymore. Reality didn’t feel fixed. My own memories felt editable. Things were starting to slip in a major way.

Sometimes I’d look in the mirror and feel like I was rehearsing someone else’s expression. It started to feel like my presence was being siphoned off. People stopped texting me back. I’d enter a room and forget why I was there—or worse, find someone already doing what I’d planned to do. Like a cleaner version of me had been uploaded and I was just the leftover draft. At a girl’s night drinking event, Carmen asked if I had been eating. I said yes, but we both knew I was lying. The look she gave me told me everything I needed to hear but I wasn’t ready for it then. She must’ve known because she didn’t say anything. But I knew: I looked different. Not just tired—off. Possibly mentally troubled. My friends knew it, even if they never said it directly.

Sometimes I’d try to remember what Amy looked like before all of this, and I’d get it wrong. I’d picture her hair shorter, or her teeth slightly crooked—little details I was sure were once true. But the more I thought about it, the more my memories bent toward the photos she posted. It was like her new version was backfilling the past, editing all the old drafts of her face.

When Carmen accidentally saw one of the photos on my screen, she said, “I still don’t think it’s him.”

“Your cousin?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“Or one of his friends. They all looked alike in high school.”

Then she left the room like it wasn’t the weirdest thing she could’ve said.

I wanted to dig deeper but I also thought it was time for me to move on. Focus on something else besides Amy.

I reactivated my planner. Started making to-do lists again. I even RSVP’d to two events in the same week, just to prove I could still be that person—the one who held everything together. I missed one of the events, but that was OK. I was making an effort.

Before this Amy mess, I used to run our whole calendar—brunches, formals, fundraisers. Now, getting through a week without checking her profile felt like progress.

It was hard, but I was slowly getting better.

Then after, a few weeks of focusing on myself and making minor improvements, I saw Amy and her man at a new brunch spot.

The same green jacket. The same hair clip. The same soft laugh I remembered from a story she posted six months ago.

It felt like watching a memory re-perform itself.

I was waiting for a table and, by the empty set of plates and cups in front of them, they were obviously waiting for a check.

I stood up and made my way toward them, weaving between tables, murmuring quiet “sorrys” as I passed seated strangers.

Amy looked unreal. Like a version curated by someone who loved her more perfectly than she ever thought possible.

Halfway there, they shifted slightly. Her hand dropped to his side. He looked at her. She nodded. It was like they’d been expecting this—expecting me. Like this was the end of something.

For a second, I thought they were saying goodbye. Then I wondered if I was the last loose thread.

The crowd thickened between us—servers with trays, people getting up to leave, someone pushing a stroller.

I picked up my pace, but the closer I got, the harder it became to see them. It was like the restaurant was stretching. It felt like a corrupted simulation—smiling couples frozen mid-toast, a baby with its face turned away, a waitress mouthing a conversation that didn’t match the sound. A server passed me twice, carrying the same tray, with the same three drinks. A woman coughed beside me, and the sound echoed. Every table I passed looked familiar, like I was looping back to the front. I think I passed the same mural twice.

My phone buzzed in my hand but I didn’t look at it.

I didn’t want to lose Amy.

Finally, I reached the table by the window where I thought they were.

Nothing.

Just silverware and a receipt curled beside a pair of empty glasses.

I turned three times looking for them but couldn’t find them.

For some reason I thought of the first message I ever wrote to her as him.

It said, “You deserve to be seen.”

I think I finally know what that meant.

I turned to go back to the waiting area, but for a second I wasn’t sure where it was. I didn’t see my group. The people all looked familiar but rearranged—like I’d walked into a different version of the brunch spot, one where no one had been expecting me.

I sat down next to a family that was arguing about leaving for another less busy restaurant and looked at my phone. There was a text from Amy.

“Thank you,” it said.

I frantically looked for Amy but couldn’t find her. She wasn’t inside the restaurant.

And she wasn’t outside of it.

She was gone—living the perfect life.

“You’re welcome,” I texted back.

Then I stared at my phone until it went blank and my dull reflection stared back at me from the dark, lifeless screen.

Wyatt Robinette lives and works in Tucson, AZ with his two cute cats. Previous work can be found at Bourbon Penn, CityWide Lunch, Blood + Honey Lit and the Superlative Literary Journal. Twitter: @vvyattrr