Scrabble, Opening Moves

Priya found a Scrabble board in the crew lounge and placed it between us after dinner. There were no other players. There was also no discussion of whether we wished to play, although I gathered that my presence on the opposite side of the table had settled the matter. She has a gift for making an invitation look like an established arrangement.

The little wooden tiles made a pleasing dry clatter against one another. Outside, the Arabian Sea continued being enormous and largely without vocabulary. Inside, I arranged seven letters on a rack and tried to look like a man whose education was about to prove useful. Priya surveyed her own letters with a calm that should have warned me.

She opened with QUIZ on a double word score and looked entirely too pleased. It was not an extravagant expression. She would never waste effort where a small adjustment of the eyes could achieve the same result. I examined my rack again, hoping that an additional consonant might have appeared through sympathy. The available letters remained disappointingly loyal to their original arrangement.

I lost by forty three points. That is a margin large enough to discourage arguments about luck but not, apparently, large enough to prevent me making them privately. Priya remained warm in victory, which was somehow more difficult than gloating would have been. I have requested a rematch. This allows me to describe the evening as an opening encounter rather than a complete assessment of my abilities.