been a bookworm. There was a picture hanging on her bathroom wall that showed her lying on a rug somewhere, fast asleep, surrounded by books. She had been around one, maybe. She was still traveling around with her mom at that point, going where she went and sleeping where she slept. But even then, the only constant thing—apart from Candice Hill and her camera, of course—had been books. On her shelves somewhere she had The Tale of Peter Rabbit (the single story, not a collection) in English, French, Tagalog, Russian, Greek, Hindi, and Welsh. They hadn’t visited all those countries together, but once Nina was settled in Los Angeles it became somewhat of a thing for her mom to send her Peter Rabbit from wherever she was working. Nina still found herself occasionally hunting online for languages she didn’t have, although it felt like cheating to order them all on eBay. Besides, she didn’t have the shelf space.
Shelf space was always a problem for the dedicated booklover. Nina had three large floor to ceiling bookcases, a stroke of good fortune that made her friends gasp when they first walked into her apartment. One entire bookcase was Book of the Month selections, which was a problem, because they kept coming—monthly, naturally—but space was running out. Louise had given her a membership when she turned eighteen, and she had tried very hard to restrict herself to only one a month, but that still meant she now had over 120 beautiful, hard-backed books in that one section alone. Another section was books that had been signed by their authors; again, an easy hundred of those. She was strict about only including books she’d had signed in person; buying them already signed didn’t count. In a totally separate, smaller, glass-fronted bookcase were rare first editions or interesting printings, which was a much smaller collection, because Nina could only afford those occasionally. One time an elderly customer who’d been coming to Knight’s for years brought her a first edition of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, and pressed it into her hands.
“I’m too old to read the print now, Nina. You should have it. I was given it when I was not much more than a child, and it was special then. I think my mother bought it when she was young.”
Nina had been incredibly touched. “But don’t you want to give it to your son?” She’d met him, once, when he came in with his mother, but she couldn’t remember much about him.
The lady had smiled and shaken her head. “He would be more impressed that it’s worth a little money than by the book itself, and that’s not right. You take it, then I know it will be well taken care of.”
And it was, carefully covered with an acid-free slipcover and frequently admired. It contained Nina’s favorite saying: You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts. She wanted to wear it on a T-shirt, embroider it on a pillow, or maybe tattoo it on her wrist. But the trouble with wordy tattoos is that people start reading them, then you have to stand still while they finish, and then they look up at you and frown and you have to explain yourself . . . Way too much human interaction, plus also the needles, the pain, the fear of the needles and pain. So, no tattoo, but an embroidery wasn’t out of the question.
Another wall was dedicated to books Nina had already read, which were obviously alphabetized by author and then subordered by date of publication. A few years earlier, while recovering from a broken heart, she had purchased a little stamp kit, library tickets, and library ticket pockets, and spent five weekends in a row organizing her library. It turned out that her heart was only slightly dented and that five weeks is exactly how long you need to spend distracting yourself in order to realize it. Plus, now she could keep track of every time she reread her books or, on the rare occasion she had a friend who could be trusted, when she loaned them out.
Libraries were her favorite places, and when she traveled, she would start out at the local library, thus immediately identifying herself as a total nerd. They say you always remember your first time, and Nina definitely did. Walking into the Los Angeles Central Library to get her first library card, when she was eight or so, was still a memory she treasured.