How It All Goes Down
Amy Elliot—January 8, 2005
- Okay. There's going to be a lot of time travel in the first section of this book, so fasten your seatbelts. It's time to go back to the night Nick and Amy met, by way of Amy's diary. Cue the time travel sound effects.
- Amy works for a few women's magazines using her psychology degree, wit, and creative writing skills to create personality quizzes—basically, she is doing Buzzfeed before Buzzfeed was a thing. She's keeping this diary as a way to develop her skills at people watching and reflection. Oh yeah—she's also the inspiration for Amazing Amy, the central character of a young adult novel series her parents wrote twenty years ago.
- On this particular night, Amy is excited because she has met a boy at a party she attended with her friend, Carmen. At the party, Carmen became preoccupied with the host of the party and abandoned Amy at the refreshment table, where she encountered the man we now know to be Nick. She describes him as slightly cocky, a compulsive dropper of movie references, and filled with corny puns; he also has a Missouri accent and used to spend summers as a teenager working on a Mark Twain riverboat tourist attraction. This is kind of geeky, but nonetheless she thinks he's super hot and leaves the party with him.
- Nick walks Amy home. They pass a bakery that's getting a powdered sugar delivery and the air is filled with it—they share their first kiss as it rains down around them.