Amy Iddur

Amy Iddur is the carefree friend of Darling for the book, Darling.

Personality and Traits
A gentle sweetheart, Amy is a down to earth and simple girl. Unfazed by even the most trying of situations, Amy always has a carefree disposition and kind words to share. Living in a rural community has also given Amy a wide-eyed approach to the world; she is amazed by every little thing that she comes across. She loves to read and this passion of hers has led her to share an unusual bond with Darling Riccel.

Motives
Amy works as an intern at the hospital nearby her college. She wants to become a nurse, as she figures that she just isn't important enough to be somebody that can change the world, unlike Darling. Darling is beautiful and outgoing and smart and is certainly capable of all those things. All Amy wants to do is ensure that everyone else gets every opportunity there is to appreciate life as she does.

Relationships
Amy has very strong ties with her family back home. While she is incapable of communicating with them as she has no cell phone and her family has no phone to call regardless, she finds a way to send letters back to her folks. Amy wishes that her parents find a way out of the massive debt that her grandparents have accrued.

Her friendship with Darling is peculiar at best. Amy loves to read Darling's writing and enjoys every story she writes. However, Amy does not like Darling's attempts at bringing her fantasies to life but goes with them regardless because she fears that Darling may not like her as a friend anymore. While the two do get along great otherwise, Darling is in the driver's seat of the friendship - Amy hides in the trunk.

Backstory
Amy Iddur grew up in a town without a name. It’s so insignificant it had to borrow the name of the town that actually existed nearby, causing a lot of grief as to where exactly she lived and if her address meant anything.

As plain as a sea of grass, Amy hardly stood out; brown curly hair, a little short, a little overweight, speckled and freckled skin - if anything could be said about Amy is that she is an extremely ordinary girl.

Her looks didn’t win her any popularity contests, and her naivete’ squarely set her in as a prime target at school. Every name you could give to a human being Amy suffered through, but she dealt with every one exceptionally well. Her friends lacked any kind of backbone, and the group she was with would tolerate the verbal and physical beatings they received daily. She was the kind of girl that couldn’t be put down.

That is, until Darling came along and put a stop to all that.

The second eldest of five, Amy has a large family. The first to get into college, as her elder brother couldn’t move on from the fact that his family was unbelievably poor. He was a bad kid, endlessly getting into trouble, probably because he knew that his family inherited a debt from their still living grandparents, and also knew the truth that his folks’ inability to make bank would lead to the simple recourse that it would all fall upon him some day.

A few cases of Bud and a rusty F-150 led to Amy finding herself wearing a black dress and crying tears in front of a wooden box out in her own backyard. Her mother worried for her; a poor girl like that can only take so much abuse before she is going to break. Amy continued on regardless, and after a short grieving period, moved on with her life with very little afterthought. She had responsibilities and other concerns, ones that took priority over a hundred thousand dollar debt that no one could pay back, ones that didn’t involve insults and belittlement at school but rather ones that involved taking the fifteen mile walk down to the social center where she could care for the sick and elderly.

You could call it volunteer service. Amy called it a hobby.

Hobby or not, she would need to make a living, so Amy stopped her social center visits and endured another lengthy walk to work at a run-down Dunkin Donuts, where for two years she made sandwiches behind the counter. Darling drove her there for her second year, giving her feet a needed break from the five to eight hour shifts she would work through. Through her careful saving, she got herself into college with the help of minimal financial aid. Quickly proving her talents and experience as invaluable, she spends her free time down at the hospital as an intern.

Although Amy loved her social work, her deep passion could be found in books. Her beloved cassette player and its five tapes that were bought at a garage sale at a dime a piece were no comparison to the books that she read. Books were her only way to reach to the outside world. With the same trek to the social center Amy would also reach the public library, and her tattered library card always came along with her. One transfer of books to her backpack later, and she was ready to lug them back for the return trip. It was argued before that Amy had read the entire library and had to ask the librarians to special order books for her to read, but anyone that knew Amy would know that she would never ask for anything like that. Besides, when high school came around she had a new opportunity to find stories.

It could be said that Darling was the worst and best thing that happened to Amy - she was bright and beautiful, ambitious and sporadic, Darling was a stellar contrast to Amy’s unique brand of blandness.

Darling loved to write, and Amy loved to read - so on the fateful day that Darling stood up for Amy’s little group of friends did she become acquainted with who the other students referred to as the “Insane Dragon Writer”.

The two became fast friends, and they shared everything with each other, leading Amy to eventually ditch her group and spend time only with her. Darling would write her books and Amy would read them down, devouring each one as Darling showed them to her. Amy loved every one, finding them all fascinating and wonderful, much to the pleasure of Darling’s ego. Along with the books Darling also had access to a car and other formalities that Amy never had, showing Amy that there was a whole world out there for her to explore.

Because of this Amy always is the shadow to Darling’s massive, unstoppable ego, following behind more as a servant rather than as her own person. A better alternative than the daily insults, but Amy never felt any reason to disturb the friendship and never called Darling out on it.

Now that the two are both in the same college, Amy recognizes that her friend is losing herself to the worlds she creates, while she holds onto her own dream of becoming a nurse. It’s a rare case for when Amy has to reign Darling in, and Amy hopes that her friend will wake up to the reality she has been given so that she will avoid the fate that her older brother did.

Trivia
Iddur is an anagram for Druid.