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.”
“Is it his cuteness or the fact that he knows so much more about sports than you?”
“He’s not cute. And he knows more about sports because he’s a dumb jock. Have you noticed he never answers a question about anything other than sports?”
“That’s not true; he answered a question about supermodels a few weeks ago.”
“Pah, swimsuit issue,” said Nina.
Lauren and Leah looked at each other over her head. “I think it’s the cuteness, personally,” said Leah. “I think you two are destined to fall in love and run off together on a trivia honeymoon.”
“Which would take place where?”
“The Culver City studio where Jeopardy! is filmed?”
“Washington DC, so you can geek out at the Library of Congress?”
“Hawaii?”
They all looked at Carter. “What has Hawaii got to do with trivia?” asked Lauren.
Carter shrugged. “I don’t know. I was focusing on the honeymoon part.”
Nina sighed. “He’s objectively attractive but subjectively repulsive, on account of his overwhelming self-confidence.”
Carter nodded. “That’s right, because women hate a confident man. That’s why Luke is so much more attractive than Han.”
Nina said, “Sarcasm gives you wrinkles.” She looked at the Quizzard team leader, surreptitiously. He had dark hair that seemed uncombed, which was good, and a bony, lean face that only just missed being traditionally handsome because he’d clearly broken his nose at some point. “Besides, he looks like he fights, and I’m a pacifist.” Neither of these things was strictly true, and Carter rolled his eyes.
The quizmaster tapped on his microphone. “OK, we have a new team joining the fray, You’re a Quizzard, Harry. The current leader, Book ’Em, Danno, is ahead by ten points, but we’ve still got three rounds to play, and, per the rules, late teams don’t get any extra credit, so, good luck, everyone.”
Nina checked that everyone had their pencils handy, and spare paper for notes. No one else needed paper and pencil, of course—she was the one who filled in the answers—but she liked everyone to be prepared. What if she suddenly had a seizure and broke her pencil? Her brain smash-cut to a slo-mo of her falling to the ground, the pencil snapping under her, pieces of wood and graphite flicking across the floor. She really needed to get laid; this kind of daydreaming couldn’t possibly be a good sign. She looked over at the Quizzard guy who, she had to admit, was totally sexy and probably as dumb as a stump. No, brain, no, she told herself, to which her brain responded that she was not in any way responsible for the issue at hand, and suggested Nina address her complaints to a lower authority.