In reading “Dangerous Laughter,” I felt that I had sort of been cheated. Instead of two distinct stories, I had been given the same story with different circumstance between “Dangerous Laughter” and “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman.”
The basic plot of the two stories is this: Our narrator is an unnamed adult reflecting on their high school experience. Specifically, they (“they” in this context being used as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun) tell us specifically about a female classmate of theirs who had gone largely ignored, and who dies under mysterious, fantastic circumstances. The narrator becomes fixated on this character, to the point of obsession, and realizes that her death could have been avoided if she had only been paid more attention to.
All that being said, a story isn’t about what happens but who it happens to, so the twin stories still end up distinctive. The clearest differences between our two narrators are gender, age at which the fixation occurred, and proximity to the deceased. In “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman,” our male narrator is an adult before Elaine disappears. He spends most of the story talking about their complete lack of relationship. To him, Elaine is nothing more than a face on a poster and blurry memories of parties and classrooms. As such, she is completely removed from a story in which she is the titular character, instead replaced by the narrator’s ideas of what she could have been.
In “Dangerous Laughter,” our female narrator is still in high school at the time of Clara’s death, which occurred the summer after their freshman or sophomore year. Clara and the narrator weren’t close, but they’d had enough interaction for Clara to hold her own role in the story. There’s no speculation on what had happened to Clara; she, and half the other girls, had seen it personally.
This is perhaps one of the finest examples I’ve seen of how the same plot can be used in such different ways.