The Bookish Life of Nina Hill (ARC)

by Abbi Waxman

  “Yeah, any of those would be OK.”

  “And a fitting end to our grand romance.” Tom could feel her relaxing under his arm. She was so touchy, this one. Hard to navigate, although in bed they were so easy together, so relaxed and in tune. It was only the afterglow that held land mines.

  He squeezed her shoulder. “Getting hungry?”

  She nodded, wondering at the way his presence was somehow canceling out her anxiety. Each time she started to panic, the feelings just washed up against this big, solid wall of … him. He wasn’t doing it consciously, or at least she didn’t think he was, but he was solid and real, and her anxiety—which was, after all, made of smoke and mirrors—was no match for him.

  “I need to work up a tiny bit more appetite,” she said, sliding her hand under the sheet.

  He smiled and caught her hand before it reached its target. “No,” he said. “Let’s leave room for dessert.” He swung his legs out of bed. “I don’t want you to get a blood sugar crash and have our first fight on our first day.” He tugged her to her feet. “Let me take care of you.”

  She sighed, nodded, and got up.

  Twenty-one

  In which Nina proves useful.

  Polly was thrilled for her, but then again, Polly’s default state was thrilled.

  “It’s all very romantic,” she said. “Enemies first, then a kiss and an epic fail on your part …”

  “Hey,” said Nina.

  “Then coming together at a wedding, the fates aligning …”

  Nina frowned. “I think it’s stars that align, not fates.”

  Polly frowned at her. “Does it matter?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Are you going to see him again?”

  Nina nodded. Then shook her head. Then nodded again. “I imagine so. We got on pretty well to not see each other again.” She thought about it. “Of course, he is a guy, so who knows. I may never hear from him again. Or he might send me a picture of his penis any minute.”

  “Well then,” said Polly, “keep checking your phone.”

  Nina’s phone buzzed, obligingly. She picked it up but shook her head. “It’s not him; it’s Archie.”

  “Oh, now, his penis I’d be totally open to seeing.” Polly leaned over to look, but Nina held the phone away.

  “Excuse me, that’s my married brother you’re salivating over.” She looked at the text. “And it would be pretty weird of him to send his sister a dick pic.”

  “Good point.”

  “He’s wondering if I’m around for lunch. He says he’s bringing a friend he wants me to meet. Do you want to come? Maybe the friend is single.”

  “How can I join you? Liz isn’t here. Are you suggesting we close the store?”

  “Oh yeah.” Nina laughed. “Who knew you would turn out to be so responsible?”

  “Not me.” Polly walked away. “I think it’s your terrible influence. I used to be carefree and disorganized, and you’ve ruined me. The other day I was able to put my hand directly on something I was looking for. It threw me off for the rest of the day.”

  “Sorry,” said Nina.

  “You should be,” Polly replied, heading into the office to grab some paperwork.

  Archie’s friend was nothing like Nina had expected. She was only four feet tall, for a start.

  “This is Millie,” said Archie. “She’s your sister.” He paused. “Mine, too.”

  Millie wasn’t a redhead, but there was still something familiar about her. She looked more like her mom, Eliza, the woman who had attempted to stop Lydia’s tirade the other day, but there was still plenty of her dad in her bone structure.

  She stuck out her hand. “Hi, Nina. It’s nice to meet you.”

  Nina shook her hand. What a formal child. “I didn’t realize you two hung out,” she said.

  The three of them found a table at the back of the restaurant, and Vanessa came over to take their order.

  “More family?” she asked. She looked at Millie. “Do you want a kids’ menu?”

  Millie looked up at her, thoughtfully. “Is there coloring on it?”

  “Yes, and a word search.”

  “Well then, yes, please.” She looked at Nina. “I love a word search.”

  “Who doesn’t?” said Nina. “And Mad Libs.”

  “Yeah!” said Millie, clearly tickled to have found a kindred spirit. Word geeks love to discover each other. Come upon. Identify. Recognize. Etc.

  Archie cleared his throat. “Actually, we don’t usually hang out. Eliza reached out to me after the meeting at the lawyer’s a couple of weeks ago, and we decided it might be fun.” He looked at Millie and then back at Nina. “I brought her to lunch because I can’t talk about books anymore. I’m exhausted. I thought you would be a better fit.”

  Millie smiled at him and patted his hand. “It’s OK, you knew quite a lot about Harry Potter.”

  “And if you’d read The Hunger Games, I would have been able to talk about that, too.” He grinned. “But your mother is a sensible woman.”

  Nina said, “The Hunger Games is great, but maybe a little bloody for a …”

  “Ten-year-old,” said Millie. She took a sip of the lemonade Vanessa had delivered. “But I wanted to talk to you about Daddy, anyway.”

  Nina’s smile faded a little. “You know I never met him, right? I didn’t know him at all.”

  Millie frowned. “You didn’t?”

  Nina looked at Archie, who shrugged. “No one even knew I was alive before your dad died. He was never my dad, really.”

  Millie was silent, processing this. “He wasn’t married to your mom at all?”

  Nina shook her head. “You know the other families, though?”

  Millie turned the lemonade glass around slowly on the table. “A bit. I’ve met Archie before, at the holidays, but I wasn’t paying all that much attention, honestly.” She looked up at Nina, her eyes clear. “I mean, I’m a kid; it was Christmas.”

  “I came to see you in the hospital when you were born,” said Archie.

  Millie smiled. “You did?”

  Archie nodded. “I was a teenager, so I was pretending to be really cool about it, but you were deeply ugly as a baby.”

  Millie giggled.

  “Your mom kept asking if I wanted to hold you, and I kept saying no. I was worried you would suddenly attack.”

  Millie giggled harder, then stopped. “I miss my dad,” she said.

  Nina nodded. “I bet you do. What was he like?”

  Millie smiled. “He was amazing. He played with me all the time. He was pretty old, but he came up with the best games. He watched my favorite shows with me, that kind of thing. We would read together every single day. He sat with me at night when I went to sleep, because sometimes I get scared of the dark.” She looked at Nina quickly but found no judgment there. “And sometimes he would set up my toys in funny ways. Long lines of Littlest Pet Shop animals marching across the floor, dinosaurs dressed in Barbie clothes, you know? That kind of thing.”

  Nina smiled. “That must have taken some effort.”

  “Yeah, dinosaurs have shorter arms than Barbie.”

  “Everyone has shorter arms than Barbie.”

  Millie nodded. “He rolled up the sleeves. My mom works a lot, but he was kind of retired, so he picked me up from school. Now my babysitter does it. She’s OK.” A little lemonade had spilled on the table, and she drew a starfish. “It’s been over a month now, but I’m always sad to see her car.”

  Nina wasn’t sure what to say. She was surprised by Millie’s description of her dad. Their dad. For the first time, she wished she’d met him, and impulsively reached across the table and squeezed Millie’s hand.

  “He sounds great. I’m really sorry I didn’t know him.”

  Millie looked up, her eyes shiny. “Yeah, you would have liked him, I expect.” She took a breath. “Lots of people did. He was my best friend, outside of school.”

  “Who’s your best friend in school?” Nin
a was curious.

  “Oh, you know, it changes.” Millie looked at the table. There was a sudden stillness to her shoulders, and Nina looked at Archie.

  “Do you like school?”

  Millie shook her head, and suddenly burst out, “Not really. I have friends, sometimes, but most of the time no one talks to me. Which is fine, honestly, because I’m happy on my own; it’s totally fine. Really fine. And no one wants to talk about books, except sometimes Harry Potter because they’ve read it, but honestly, I don’t know if they really read properly because they don’t know anything, and if I say, well, what about The Candymakers, or Calpurnia Tate, or Penderwicks, and they’re like, what’s that, then I feel bad.” She subsided.

  “Bad for them because they haven’t read those books, which, by the way, are all awesome, awesome books? I love all of those.” Nina felt herself relaxing further; this was her favorite topic. She wished she didn’t feel so much identification with Millie, though; it was giving her flashbacks to her own school years. Recess and lunch, finding a spot to be alone, and then half wishing someone would find you.

  “Bad that I can’t think of anything to say if it isn’t about books.” Millie looked crestfallen. “They want to talk about Pokémon or whatever, and I like Pokémon, but I don’t know all about them like I do about books.” She looked at Nina somewhat pleadingly. “It’s hard to find stuff to talk about sometimes. It gives me a tummy ache.”

  “Well, we can talk about books whenever you like,” Nina said. “Do you think your mom would let you join a book club at the store? I have a whole group of girls your age who love all those books and lots more.” She remembered that Millie and Eliza lived in Malibu. “It’s a long way to come.”

  Millie looked hopeful. “I can ask her.”

  Archie added, “You can also ask the other kids questions; that’s what my mom told me, and I think it was good advice. Ask people if they have a dog, or if they like birds, or if they’re allergic to anything, or if they still believe in Santa Claus, or whatever pops into your head.”

  “The only thing that pops into my head is books,” said Millie, worriedly. “And if I ask them a load of questions, they’ll think I’m even stranger than they already think I am. Last week a boy at school said I was weird, and nobody else said I wasn’t. Nobody said anything.” Her voice broke a little on the last word, and suddenly Nina was furious.

  Trying to keep her voice calm, she asked, “What did he mean, weird?” She looked at Archie and saw he felt the same way.

  Millie shrugged. “I don’t know. Weird. We had been talking about Aragog—you know, the spider?” Both Archie and Nina nodded. “And then I started talking about Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web, and all the bugs in James and the Giant Peach, and this other book about a boy and a beetle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art …”

  “Masterpiece,” interjected Nina.

  “Yes, and the cockroaches in the Gregor books, and I said bugs are interesting because they’re smaller than kids, right, and the way characters treat them is like how we get treated by grown-ups, and then he stared at me and said I was weird.” She looked at the table. “I thought it was a reasonable theory.”

  Archie took a drink of water. “Well, I’ll be honest, Millie. That’s not what I would call weird, it’s what I would call smart, but ten-year-old boys aren’t famous for their insights into literature.” He put his glass down. “Or their manners.”

  Nina was gazing at her little sister, and wasn’t prepared for the rush of affection she felt for a girl she’d met only half an hour earlier. She reached across the table, again. “Listen, I’ll call your mom myself. You have to come to my book club, and then we can go have dinner afterward and talk about all this stuff.”

  “How often is the book club?”

  Nina frowned. “Once a month.”

  “Oh,” Millie said. “That’s not very much.”

  “But maybe your mom will let me pick you up after school sometimes, and we can hang out and chat. I don’t mind coming out to Malibu.” She almost choked on the sentence, but found it was actually true.

  Millie looked happier. “That would be awesome. I don’t really have anyone to talk to, now.”

  “Well then,” said Nina. “I’ll make it happen. We can do it on Thursdays,” she added impulsively. “I have nothing planned on Thursdays.”

  “Really?” said Millie, squeezing her hand.

  “Yes, really,” said Nina, confidently. “Thursdays can be our night.”

  Twenty-two

  In which Nina gets a shock.

  The Larchmont Spring Festival was, as you might expect, an annual affair. There was cotton candy and sno-cones, there were hot dogs and burgers, and the scent of burning onions blended beautifully with Los Angeles’s signature perfume: sunscreen and money. There were even ponies to ride, though it was hard to reach them through the animal rights protesters complaining that there were ponies to ride.

  Knight’s was closed for the day, but Nina, Polly, and Liz always went to the Festival and mingled with the punters, as Liz put it.

  “It’s a community event,” she said. “Get out there and commune.”

  This year, Nina invited Tom to meet her by the carousel and tried not to be filled with childish glee when she saw him. But it was hard; she was a smitten kitten, and she was starting to be OK with that.

  He pulled her into a hug and kissed her firmly. Polly, who was tagging along, grinned and demanded a hug, too.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said, but thankfully, didn’t elaborate.

  “What do you want to do first?” he asked them. “Pony ride? Corn dog on a stick?”

  “I want to go in a giant floaty ball,” said Polly, confidently.

  A major draw for the children of Larchmont was a vast paddling pool of water in which floated maybe a dozen large, clear inflatable balls. You climbed into one, they blew it up around you, and then you rolled yourself into the water and wobbled about and got wet and overheated, and thirty seconds after you realized sunstroke and suffocation were distinct possibilities, your time was up. The kids loved it, but Nina rarely saw adults in there, because, you know, wisdom.

  Polly was ready to embrace it, though.

  “I think it looks like fun, and every year I want to do it and every year I talk myself out of it, but not this year.” She took a breath. “This year I’m going to ignore my inner voice and go for it.” She looked defiantly at Nina and Tom, but they just shrugged.

  “Honestly, you’re overthinking it. Go, be your best self, and get into a smelly ball of plastic.”

  Polly went off to do that, and Nina and Tom wandered over to the sno-cone stand.

  “Sno-cones don’t really make a lot of sense,” said Nina. “They’re only ice and sugar water, yet they’re deeply pleasing.” She sucked on a mouthful of shavings. “They started in Baltimore, you know.”

  Tom smiled at her. “I didn’t know that. What else do you know about the humble sno-cone?”

  “Well, they’re regionally distinct, of course.”

  Tom nodded.

  “And they became widely popular during the Second World War because all the ice cream was sent to the soldiers.”

  “It was?” Tom frowned.

  “Oh yes,” said Nina, warming to her theme. “Ice cream is the frosty treat of choice for the military industrial complex.”

  Tom stared at her. “You know, I’ve never met a woman who throws the phrase ‘military industrial complex’ around with such confidence. It’s very sexy.”

  Nina flicked ice at him. “You should look it up; it’s fascinating.”

  “I’d rather you explained it to me. You’re much nicer to look at than Wikipedia.”

  “Wash out your mouth,” she said, and then turned as someone called her name.

  “Nina!” It was Millie Reynolds, clutching the hand of her mother, Eliza.

  “Hey!” Nina was thrilled, and bent down to hug her little sister. “Tom, this is my sister, Millie
.”

  “Is this your boyfriend?” asked the little girl.

  “Yes,” replied Tom, shooting Nina a sideways glance. “I think it’s acceptable to say that, isn’t it?”

  Nina nodded, feeling unusually relaxed. Maybe it was the sno-cone, maybe it was the sunshine.

  “You know, Archie’s here somewhere, with his little boy, Henry …” Millie giggled. “He’s my nephew.”

  “I’ll let him know we found you,” said Eliza. She smiled at Nina. “Millie told me about your book club. I think it sounds like a good idea. I’ll see if I can make it work.”

  “Great,” said Nina. She grinned at Millie, who gave her a quick thumbs-up.

  Suddenly, Liz appeared, moving quickly.

  “Hide me,” she said. “Meffo’s here. He’s cornering people left and right. He just trapped the toy store owner in front of the funnel cake stand.”

  Everyone but Nina frowned in confusion, and Nina started looking around for an escape route. She spotted their landlord moving slowly up the street, scanning the crowd left and right like a cop car cruising a shady neighborhood.

  She had an idea. “Look, Polly’s about to get into a giant inflatable ball. Go take her place.” Nina pushed Liz toward the long line to get into the attraction. “Go on!”

  Liz scrambled over to where Polly literally had one foot in a ball, and rapidly explained the situation. The blower guy was harder to convince, and the line of parents was muttering darkly, but Liz’s panic communicated itself, and Polly stepped aside. Liz was launched just in time; Meffo was among them.

  “Hi, Nina,” he said, smiling politely at everyone. “Is Liz at the Festival? I’ve been looking for her.”

  “I don’t see her right now,” said Nina, which was true.

  The landlord sighed. “Can I speak to you privately?” he said, drawing her to one side. “Please tell your boss that time is up. I’m going to sell the store.”

  Nina frowned. “Surely, we’re not that late on the rent, Mr. Meffo?” She’d always kind of assumed the dance about the rent was just one of those things, a normal part of business. Liz certainly never seemed all that worried, not that she discussed business with her. “It’s the first of June, I get that, but May just ended yesterday.”