Miss Misery Read Free Page B

day.
    And I didn’t tell Amy about her. There was no good reason to. She knew about my adventures in Diaryland, of course—knew all too well after Thom Watkins called and offered me $7,500 to write a quickie paperback about the phenomenon for Pendant Publishing—but I think she thought it was cute or quirky, like my lifelong allegiance to certain pro sports teams or the assorted canned cookery of Chef Boyardee. I was already retreating by then and she knew it; if talk turned to her new job, I would change the subject or make passive-aggressive jokes about it. “You’re a writer,” she would say. “You can write anywhere.” Which was technically true. But another truth was that I wasn’t actually getting any writing done, and the sort of stalkerish online loafing I was engaging in was only possible in the too-comfortable environs of our apartment. I didn’t want to lose her, of course. But I felt lost myself. And so I ignored nearly everything until it was all too late.
    When I signed the book contract (under the working title True Fiction —cute, eh?) I had tried to start my own diary, but it ended up being completely self-indulgent and useless, filled with lines like: “The day Amy left was the first nice day of the year—at least in terms of weather. She had told me not to bother going with her to the airport, so I didn’t. When I woke up that morning, all the windows were open and she was gone.” So I quickly deep-sixed the thing and got back to my real daily routine: hitting REFRESH on sports Web sites, eating two or three lunches, and, when I wasn’t catching up with Gus or Lizzie or Jaymie, staring at the white wall in front of me.
    I had never kept a diary, though my childhood bedroom was still filled with halfhearted attempts: spiral-bound notebooks and expensive leather journals and sketchbooks filled with two consecutive days’ worth of dime-store-psychological scribbling about then girlfriends and other typical high-school woe-is-me-isms and the remainder of the pages left blank. I’ve never been particularly self-reflective; I have a bad habit of not noticing things until they’ve already happened. This can lead to good things, like getting paid to write a book at the age of twenty-seven, or bad things, like losing your girlfriend to the International Criminal Court. But at least I had those empty notebooks to prove I’d always been that way. Secret thoughts aren’t only kept secret; in my muddy brain, they’re positively buried. Other than: “My name is David Gould. Things seem to be going all right. I wake up in the morning and I go to bed at night.” How much more does anyone need to know?
    The kids I met online, though, seemed to be wired differently. When things happened to them, they felt compelled to unearth them, to share them, to dissect them in a virtual lecture hall in front of their friends, peers, and assorted sketchy cyberstalkers. Diaries didn’t come with locks on them anymore—they came with stadium seating.
    And the personalities displayed for the anonymous crowds were gargantuan—much larger than life. Operas could have been composed with the raw emotional ore that was mined from the lives of these kids before lunchtime. Breakups weren’t mundane; they were earth-shattering. A fight with Mom registered on the Richter scale. The enthusiasm generated by a good rock and roll show could provide the U.S.A. with the alternative energy source it’s long needed. And kisses— closed-mouth kisses—could change the orbit of the Earth around the sun.
    So that’s where the “fiction” part of the book title came from. These people weren’t real to me; how could they be? And none of these feelings or events could truly be that huge—that life-changing. But the diaries—their adventures, their rogues’ galleries, their quirks and habits—kept me company and