Nathan Hill - The Nix

Like Hamlet. She was trying to read Hamlet, trying to form a thought for an essay she had to rewrite about Hamlet. But the thing that was more interesting to her right now was a fistful of paper clips that she tossed lightly into the air and then watched as they bounced and scattered all over the linoleum of her dorm-room floor. This was more fun than reading Hamlet. Because even though every paper clip was shaped exactly like every other paper clip, they bounced in chaotic, random, unduplicatable ways. Why didn’t they bounce exactly the same? Why didn’t they all land in the same place? Plus there was that delicious click-chhh sound when they all hit the floor and slid. She had lofted the paper clips into the air roughly fifteen to twenty times in the last few minutes — a pretty transparent Hamlet -reading stalling maneuver, she had to admit — when her phone dinged. A new message!

Heeeeeeeeeeeey honey

From Jason. And she could tell by the several iterations of the letter e that he was feeling that very special urgent way tonight. Boyfriends were so transparent sometimes.

Hey!:-D

The reason college was so stupid was due to learning things she would never need in life, ever. Like knowledge of Greek statuary, for example, such as she was memorizing for the Intro to Humanities class that was required of every student and that the university offered online. This was such a dumb waste of time because she was sure when she interviewed for her first real job they would not show her flash cards of statues and ask “What myth does this represent?” which was what she had to do in the timed two-minute weekly quizzes the class required and that were such a total joke—

Her phone chirped. It was an update on iFeel, the excellent new app that was the social media darling du jour among the college set. Laura’s friends were all on it, and used it obsessively, and would abandon it as soon as it was discovered by the late-adopters, meaning old people.

Laura looked at her phone. iFeel happy tonight!!! one of her friends had posted. It was Brittany, who had so far survived the several purges Laura had made to her Alert List.

The phone asked: Do you want to Ignore, Respond, or Autocare?

Laura selected Autocare. Placed the phone back on the floor, on the paper clips.

What had she been thinking about? Right, the art quizzes, which were a total joke because all she had to do was scroll through the quiz taking screen-grabs along the way and then unplug her modem, which the test interpreted as a “crash” or “network failure” (i.e., not her fault), thus allowing her to take the quiz again. So she looked up all the answers and plugged in the modem and aced the quiz and didn’t have to think about Greek statuary for another week.

Then there was biology, which pretty much made Laura gag just thinking about it. Because she was pretty sure the first week of her powerful marketing and communications job that she would someday have would not require her to identify the chemical chain reaction that converted a photon of light to photosynthesized sugar, such as she was currently memorizing in her Intro to Biology class that she was stupidly forced to take in order to satisfy a science requirement even though hello? she wasn’t going to be a scientist? Plus the professor was so dry and boring and the lectures so unbearable—

Her phone dinged again. A message from Brittany: Thanx girl!! Responding to whatever message iFeel selected to Autocare with, obviously. And because Laura was in the middle of studying and trying really hard to read Hamlet she decided not to engage and instead sent back the universal glyph signifying the end of a conversation:

:)

Anyway the biology lectures were so unbearable she’d begun paying her roommate twenty bucks a week to record herself reading aloud from the important parts of the textbook so Laura could listen to the recording during the biweekly chapter tests, when she sat inconspicuously next to the wall about halfway down in the three-hundred-person lecture hall and slipped one small earbud into the wall-side ear and leaned against the wall and listened to her roommate reading the chapter while scanning the test for keywords, vaguely impressed by her own multitasking skills and her ability to pass the test without ever studying once.

“You’re not using this to cheat, are you?” her roommate asked a few weeks into the operation.

“No. It’s so I can study. At the gym,” Laura said.

“Because cheating is wrong.”

“I know.”

“And I’ve never seen you exercise.”

“I do exercise.”

“I’m at the gym all the time and I’ve never seen you there.”

“Well, rats’ eggs on you!” Laura said, which was something her mother always said instead of cursing. Something else her mother always said is Don’t let anyone EVER bully you or make you feel bad about yourself, and at that moment her roommate was making her feel very bad indeed, which was why instead of apologizing Laura said, “Listen, feeb, if you haven’t seen me at the gym it’s ’cuz some of us don’t need to be there as long as you do,” because her roommate was, let’s face it, objectively morbidly (almost fascinatingly) obese. She had legs like sacks of potatoes. For real.

The word “feeb” was something she made up on the spot and felt pretty proud of, actually, how sometimes a nickname can capture a person’s essence like that.

Her phone dinged.

Whatcha doin 2nite?

Jason again, probing. He was never as obvious as when he wanted to sext.

Homework:’(

The only class Laura was taking this semester that related in any way to her future was her one business class, macroeconomics, which was so abstractly mathematical and had basically nothing to do with the “human element” of business, which was really why she was going into this field at all, because she liked people and she was good with people and she maintained a huge cavalry of online contacts who texted her and messaged her several times daily through the many social media sites she kept a presence on, which made her phone ding all day, repeatedly, the sound like a spoon lightly tapped against a crystal goblet, these pure high singing notes that made her feel bolts of Pavlovian happiness.

And that was why she was a business major.

But macroeconomics was so stupid and boring and unnecessary for her future career that she did not feel at all bad collaborating with a boy from her orientation group, a graphic design major and Photoshop artist who could, for example, scan the label of a Lipton Green Tea bottle, erase the ingredients list (a surprisingly long and sciencey thing for something that claimed to be “tea”), and replace the ingredients with an answer key to the test — all the formulas and concepts they were supposed to have memorized — matching exactly the original Lipton typeface and color so that there was no way the teacher would ever know she had all the test answers in front of her except by reading the ingredients list on her Lipton Green Tea. Fat chance, in other words. This boy was quasi-repaid with hugs that were maybe a little too tight and too close, as well as bi-semester visits to his dorm room downstairs when she “forgot” the key to her own room while going for a shower and so had nothing to do but crash at his place wearing only her favorite tiny towel.

Did Laura feel bad about all this cheating? She did not. That the school made it so easy to cheat meant, for her, that they tacitly approved of it, and moreover it was actually the school’s fault for making her cheat by (a) giving her so many opportunities, and (b) making her take so many bullshit courses.

Example: Hamlet. Trying to read stupid Hamlet again—