Amy Smith Character Analysis

Laurie’s best friend Amy is a fun and free-spirited teenager with a rebellious streak. Petite and pretty with “Goldilocks hair,” Amy is nonetheless insecure about how she measures up to Laurie, and desperate to emulate her more popular friend. Laurie feels nervous about the occasionally competitive nature of their friendship, and hyperconscious of how Amy’s desire to constantly one-up Laurie keeps them from being truly close. Laurie is surprised when Amy gets swept up in The Wave, and as Amy gets sucked deeper and deeper into the movement, Laurie has trouble connecting with her friend. Eventually, Amy admits to Laurie that the reason she is so supportive of The Wave is because it “means that nobody is better than anyone else”—and admits that her constant feelings of jealousy for Laurie have driven her into the rhetoric of The Wave’s equalizing force. Smart and wily but deeply emotional and impressionable, Amy—one of the students most affected by the screening of the Holocaust documentary in Ben Ross’s class—forgets the dangers of groupthink and gets swept up in the idea of a uniform, conformist society.