Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

AMY ELLIOTT
JANUARY 8, 2005
– Diary entry –
T
ra and la! I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I
write this. I am embarrassed at how happy I am, like some
Technicolor comic of a teenage girl talking on the phone
with my hair in a ponytail, the bubble above my head
saying: 
I met a
boy!
But I did. This is a technical, empirical truth. I met a
boy, a great, gorgeous dude, a funny, cool-ass guy. Let me
set the scene, because it deserves setting for posterity (no,
please, I’m not that far gone, posterity! feh). But still. It’s not
New Year’s, but still very much the new year. It’s winter:
early dark, freezing cold.
Carmen, a newish friend – semi-friend, barely friend,
the kind of friend you can’t cancel on – has talked me into
going out to Brooklyn, to one of her writers’ parties. Now, I
like a writer party, I like writers, I am the child of writers, I am
a writer. I still love scribbling that word – WRITER – any
time a form, questionnaire, document asks for my
occupation. Fine, I write personality quizzes, I don’t write
about the Great Issues of the Day, but I think it’s fair to say I
am a writer. I’m using this journal to get better: to hone my
skills, to collect details and observations. To show don’t tell

---

and all that other writery crap. (
Adopted-orphan smile
, I
mean, that’s not bad, come on.) But really, I do think my
quizzes alone qualify me on at least an honorary basis.
Right?
At a party you find yourself surrounded by genuine
talented writers, employed at high-profile, respected
newspapers and magazines
.
You merely write quizzes for women’s rags. When
someone asks what you do for a living, you:
a) Get embarrassed and say, ‘I’m just a quiz writer, it’s silly
stuff!’
b) Go on the offense: ‘I’m a writer now, but I’m considering
something more challenging and worthwhile – why,
what do you do?’
c) Take pride in your accomplishments: ‘I write personality
quizzes using the knowledge gleaned from my
master’s degree in psychology – oh, and fun fact: I am
the inspiration for a beloved children’s-book series, I’m
sure you know it, 
Amazing Amy?
Yeah, so suck it,
snobdouche!
Answer: C, totally C
Anyway, the party is being thrown by one of Carmen’s
good friends who writes about movies for a movie
magazine, and is very funny, according to Carmen. I worry
for a second that she wants to set us up: I am not interested
in being set up. I need to be ambushed, caught unawares,
like some sort of feral love-jackal. I’m too self-conscious
otherwise. I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I

---

realize I’m obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to
be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and
then I’ve basically turned into Liza Minnelli: I’m dancing in
tights and sequins, begging you to love me. There’s a
bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth.
But no, I realize, as Carmen gushes on about her
friend: 
She
likes him. Good.
We climb three flights of warped stairs and walk into a
whoosh of body heat and writerness: many black-framed
glasses and mops of hair; faux western shirts and heathery
turtlenecks; black wool pea-coats flopped all across the
couch, puddling to the floor; a German poster for The
Getaway (
Ihre Chance war gleich Null!
) covering one
paint-cracked wall. Franz Ferdinand on the stereo: ‘Take
Me Out.’
A clump of guys hovers near a card table where all the
alcohol is set up, tipping more booze into their cups after
every few sips, all too aware of how little is left to go
around. I nudge in, aiming my plastic cup in the center like a
busker, get a clatter of ice cubes and a splash of vodka
from a sweet-faced guy wearing a Space Invaders T-shirt.
A lethal-looking bottle of green-apple liqueur, the
host’s ironic purchase, will soon be our fate unless
someone makes a booze run, and that seems unlikely, as
everyone clearly believes they made the run last time. It is a
January party, definitely, everyone still glutted and sugar-
pissed from the holidays, lazy and irritated simultaneously.
A party where people drink too much and pick cleverly
worded fights, blowing cigarette smoke out an open
window even after the host asks them to go outside. We’ve
already talked to one another at a thousand holiday parties,

---

we have nothing left to say, we are collectively bored, but
we don’t want to go back into the January cold; our bones
still ache from the subway steps.
I have lost Carmen to her host-beau – they are having
an intense discussion in a corner of the kitchen, the two of
them hunching their shoulders, their faces toward each
other, the shape of a heart. Good. I think about eating to
give myself something to do besides standing in the center
of the room, smiling like the new kid in the lunchroom. But
almost everything is gone. Some potato-chip shards sit in
the bottom of a giant Tupperware bowl. A supermarket deli
tray full of hoary carrots and gnarled celery and a semeny
dip sits untouched on a coffee table, cigarettes littered
throughout like bonus vegetable sticks. I am doing my thing,
my impulse thing: What if I leap from the theater balcony
right now? What if I tongue the homeless man across from
me on the subway? What if I sit down on the floor of this