The Bookish Life of Nina Hill(5)

She’d graduated from UCLA with a useless but interesting degree (Art History, thanks for asking) and took the job at Knight’s while she worked out what she wanted to do now that she was grown up. She spent the next few years actually growing up; having short-lived love affairs and one slightly longer love affair and then some more short ones, and Getting in Shape and Being Vegan and Paleo and then Giving Up And Eating Everything Again. She took up yoga, then Spinning, then a combination yoga and Spin class she inwardly referred to as Spoga, then decoupage and knitting and a series of those evenings where you drink wine and paint, but she had a niggling suspicion she was underperforming in some way. Surely her purpose in life wasn’t simply to read as many books as possible?

Many of her friends were in long-term romantic relationships, but Nina was single. She liked sex; she enjoyed people with different points of view; she dated. But dating in LA was an Internet-enabled contact sport, and after a dozen evenings that established new lows for interpersonal behavior, she’d decided to Take a Break from Dating. It had been a lot easier than the time she’d tried to give up caffeine.

Nina worried she liked being alone too much; it was the only time she ever fully relaxed. People were . . . exhausting. They made her anxious. Leaving her apartment every morning was the turning over of a giant hourglass, the mental energy she’d stored up overnight eroding grain by grain. She refueled during the day by grabbing moments of solitude and sometimes felt her life was a long-distance swim between islands of silence. She enjoyed people—she really did—she just needed to take them in homeopathic doses; a little of the poison was the cure.

In solitude she set goals and made them, challenged herself and accepted the challenge, took up hobbies and dropped them, and if she periodically cleaned off her bulletin board and stuck up new goals and plans and dates and budgets and bought a new planner in the middle of the year and started over, so what? Nina leaned forward and crossed off that day’s date on the calendar, even though it wasn’t fully done yet.

See? One hundred percent ahead of the game.

Nina’s trivia team consisted of her and her three closest friends and was called Book ’Em, Danno, because why not? They were unassailable on books (Nina), history and geography (her friend Leah), contemporary popular culture (Carter, an ex-boyfriend of Leah’s who’d been too smart and funny to completely let go of), and current events and politics (her other friend, Lauren). All of them were equally good, in true millennial fashion, at classic popular culture (1950–1995, Lucy Ricardo to Chandler Bing) and identifying international snacks. Despite the fact that Nina was a football fan, their Achilles’ heel was still sports. In an effort to broaden her athletic knowledge, Nina had started reading Sports Illustrated, but so far all it had done was give her dirty dreams about a Norwegian snowboarder whose name she couldn’t even pronounce.

Having been thrown out of their last regular bar for never letting anyone else win, Book ’Em, Danno was now cautiously testing a new venue. Sugarlips was in Silver Lake, had been open two months, and served a vast selection of sodas (international and domestic) alongside the traditional panoply of craft beers. It was also making a name for itself by serving bowls of dry breakfast cereal as bar snacks, which presumably explained the name.

“How is it?” Lauren was watching Carter try a prickly pear soda. Lauren had dark hair, dark eyes, and a dark soul that delighted in humor other people might consider sardonic. She reminded Nina of a really good loaf of sourdough bread—crusty on the outside, with a soft and rewarding interior.

Carter shrugged. “You know, I’ve never had anything else prickly pear flavored, so I realized halfway through I didn’t have a frame of reference. But it tastes like . . . watermelon bubble gum?” He took another sip. “It’s kind of awesome, but I should probably be stoned to truly enjoy it.” He didn’t look like the kind of guy that got stoned; he looked like the kind of guy who helped old ladies across the street and regularly took Communion, but, as we all know, appearances are very deceptive. He had the symbol of the Rebel Alliance tattooed on his arm, and the Force was strong in his family.

“No.” Nina shook her head. “Keep your head in the game. You know the rules.”

“It might make me quicker.”

Lauren snorted into her beer. “Yeah, because that’s something people say all the time: We need to move with maximum speed and efficiency; break out the pot.”

The trivia contest began, and Book ’Em kicked butt for an hour or so. Then a late entry arrived to harsh their mellow.

“Oh crap,” muttered Carter. “Look who it isn’t.”

Nina craned around. “Who isn’t it?”

“Dammit,” said Leah. “It’s You’re a Quizzard, Harry.”

Nina kept a straight face, but inwardly she was vexed. Quizzard was really the only challenge they had in the East Los Angeles bar trivia world, which, admittedly, is an extremely small world, but Nina was competitive.

They watched as Quizzard, which was three guys and a girl, like the bizarro-world version of them, sat down at a table across from them. The team leader was clearly the tall guy who narrowed his eyes at Nina, and then raised his hand in mock salute.

Nina held his gaze for a second, then yawned hugely.

“Nice,” said Lauren. “Subtle.”

“He annoys me.”