Dead End Job by Ingrid Reinke Page B

height and build with the kind of olive skin that you would never need to put a speck of foundation on. Where Lisa was loud and boisterous, Maxine was quiet and brooding. Though she didn’t often complain, she unfortunately had one of those faces that make her look like she always either mildly upset or had a serious case of gas.
    “Hi, Poops,” said Alex. Then, after taking a drag of her cigarette, “Sorry I never got back to you on Tuesday night, I was on a bike ride. How did your date go? Did you sleep with him?”
    “Oh God. What? No!” I replied, confused. I had completely forgotten about the text message I sent to Alex during that my lame ass-date. I looked at her, brushing aside her question impatiently. “That seriously is not even relevant right now. I have something way more important to talk to you about,” I said. “Listen, some lady that I work with got killed in my office Tuesday night, and the messed up part is that I was the one who found her body on Wednesday morning when I came into work. I think she was stabbed or something. Blood everywhere. Plus, the police questioned me, and I have a date with one of them. Well, not exactly. I mean, he asked me on a date, but there is nothing on the books yet. You know how it is…” my voice sped up and trailed off, as it tends to do when I am stressed out.  I shrugged my shoulders and looked around at the girls for reaction.
    The whole group took a break from their cigarettes and now Alex, Lisa and Maxine were all staring at me, open mouthed and completely dumbfounded.
    “Ah - what?” Alex spoke first. “Lu, what the hell are you even talking about?” I just shook my head and stared at her. She dropped her cigarette on the ground and stared at me for a split-second before grabbing me by the arm, turning towards the building and declaring: “Fuck me. Let’s get a drink,” which seemed to me the proper response for the moment.
    We all walked in together and sat at our usual tall table in the corner by the bar. The Loft was a newish bar and restaurant in Ballard that catered to the hipster crowd with PBR on tap, quiz night, and a game room upstairs with the must-have hipster games: Big Buck Hunter , darts and Foosball.
    Being a regular had its perks, and upon seeing us walk in, the bartender, Aaron came over and handed us our usual drinks before we even ordered anything. A shot of Jameson and a beer for Alex, a gin martini for Lisa, a vodka tonic for Maxine and a glass of pinot grigio for me. 
    Once we all had our drinks in front of us and got settled in, the trivia started. Just like every Thursday at 8:00 PM, the bar tables were completely full of teams. The quizmaster went through the rules (no yelling out answers, no looking at smart phones, no pretending to go take a piss and secretly looking and cheating off of anyone else’s table and no being a dick) then collected $2 from each player for the pot, from which the quizmaster took his fee. The rest of the money was then left for the winning team to claim at the end of the night.
    To my knowledge, our team had never won. It didn’t help that I normally didn’t pay any attention to the game, generally got a bit too drunk and usually left early. I knew, and the rest of the team knew as well, that I was just there to drink, eat fried pickles and look at boys, then not find anyone remotely interesting to date, bum cigarettes from Alex, go into work extremely late and extremely hung-over on Friday, regret my last two glasses of wine and all of the fried pickles drenched in ranch dressing, swear off Thursday night trivia, promise to spend the next Thursday at the gym, and inevitably find myself doing it all over again the next week. There was an unspoken agreement in our group about my behavior, so every week we pretended this was not the case, and I tried to care about the questions and winning the game, which usually lasted about forty-five minutes, or until I got bored.
    Usually, trivia ran in four