I'm Esmé. I'm sixteen, clumsy, awkward, and quite frankly, bored out of my mind. Now, I don't want you to get the wrong impression. It's not like I'm some lonely social outcast with absolutely no life. I have friends. Many friends. That's not to say that I like most of them or anything, but they fill up the cafeteria lunch table, and hey, that's what friends are for. I live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but I am definitely not one of those. I know the type, I am surrounded by the type, I am often mistaken for the type, but I am not, nor will I ever be, one of those headband-wearing, dinner-party-attending, driver-owning bitches. Yes, I attend a prep school on Park Avenue, and yes, I reside in a four-story townhouse, but I think that my relatively low self esteem and overall hatred for society keep me more or less down to earth.

There's another thing you should know. I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate parties. With a passion. For one thing, I have never gotten the whole casual dance thing quite right. I spent the entire bar mitzvah season shrugging my shoulders from side to side, thinking I was the hot shit, until one night, at Zach Goldberg's big blowout shindig, I realized that everyone else's legs were, well, moving. I no longer hit up the dance floor, unless it's at one of those wildly overcrowded house parties where no one can see you anyway and you're sort of just crushed between several sketchy guys who are trying to grab your butt. I also despise smalltalk. It's the worst- people just standing there thinking of easy discussion topics as they carry on a dying conversation with absolutely no flow whatsoever. Or maybe I'm just particularly bad at smalltalk. Probably the latter.

Anyway, it is my junior year of high school, so I'm going to go attempt to be productive, though I'll most likely end up writing a short story or watching a season of How I Met Your Mother or eating the leftover brisket or something.