She was the type of person who would wear black turtlenecks and berets in July. She carried around a beat-up leather satchel that looked important but that really held only a few textbooks and a shiny new laptop that she bought with her own hard-earned money working at a fast food place three nights a week. She could be frequently found in a little coffee shop called “Russian Tea-Room” writing a novel that never seemed to be finished, or plays that were never performed. She drank her coffee strong and black in public, and full of milk and sugar in private. She tried to keep a journal, and failed, and is a promising young artist who has never painted anything worth keeping. She was in art school, actually, studying journalism- perhaps not the best place to learn about that profession, but being in art school sounded better to her than having to say that she was in a community college because she couldn't afford anything else. The art school had given her a full scholarship because they were trying to expand their horizons.
Her name was Amy-Louise Jones. She was twenty years old but felt much older. She had once had terrifically long black hair, with just the right amount of wave, but to fit in with the avant-garde population of her school she had cut it all off into a 1920s bob and used too much product to keep it shiny and straight. She had big brown eyes- doe eyes- which her mother always told her were her best feature. She took it to heart and wore dramatic smudges of deep kohl on her lash line and blinked slowly to accentuate their persuasive power. She was too pale, perhaps artificially, and almost too thin. When she was at bars, she used a very long filter and waved it about in a languid manner, but the cigarette was never lit.
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