Nanowhere | Page 5

time so that he planted his kiss on her cheek.
"How was your day, dear?" Kaffia asked brightly in the role of the dutiful wife, something she understood, could role-play, but would never be.
School had let out half an hour ago. The first word that shot into Alex's mind went right to his mouth.
"Blistering."
"Shall I fix you a drink?"
His mouth closed. He raised an eyebrow, pleasantly surprised. "Double, if you can."
Anticipating this, Kaffia dug out two gleaming red cans of Coke from her pack and heaved them. Alex caught them like high-entropy-bound raw eggs, popped open both, but drank at a civilized pace, alternating cans while he rolled back and forth on his board. Kaffia rifled through her pack again, pulled out a fat hardcover textbook, and jutted her chin at the Cokes.
"Girls locker room was out. Had to get some woodshopper to get them for me out of the boys'. It has to be Coke?" She frowned, pausing for an answer, and then rolled her eyes. "And don't give me some marketing slogan."
He gave her a puzzled look, which slid off his face a moment later as if he had slipped out of their world and into another. He drifted in dreamy contentment, savoring the complex natural flavors swirling in an engaging caramel-colored m??lange of high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose.
"It's the spice," he said slowly, almost in a trance.
Arrakisa€|Dunea€|Desert planeta€|
She looked coldly at his faraway look. Reading it, Alex added, "None of the others have anything like it. There's a unique flavor found only in genuine Coca-Cola."
"Spice?"
"It's required if you're going to fold space."
Kaffia bit her lower lip, pondering his words. "And this helps youa€|how?"
He sighed, dropped his shoulders, reentering their world by blinking a few times. He shrugged at the obvious. "How else is the emperor going to maintain control over his ten-thousand year old interplanetary feudal hierarchy?"
"Oh, right, when you put it like that." She nodded vigorously, her subconscious feeding her the author, Herbert, and the title, Dune, which she mentally pushed to the top of the list of books she'd have to read next. Kaffia devoured books like others did candy.
Alex laughed, upended the can in his right hand. "First, the spice. Second, you know I like to burp when I skate." He tossed her the empties and shot off the ledge, plummeting into the concrete bowl. Kaffia dropped her textbook, caught it between her knees, and juggled the cans for half a second before lobbing them into the trash.
Alex Shoaler was a wiry gap-toothed skater with hazel eyes that bugged out and shifted color with the changing light. He liked this effect, and made a habit of moving around a lot, which annoyed just about everyone. His mother thought she could cut hair as well as any barber, and so he usually sported a horribly uneven buzz cut (probably not entirely her fault). His dense bristly orangey-red hair looked like someone had smeared his head with marmalade, the kind with extra shredded citrus rind. It always stood on end, even when it grew out, as if he was walking around with his tongue in a powered light socket. His skin was white as a bed sheet, but so freckled that it appeared splotchy brown from a distance.
He had strong thick fingers that were good for a lot of things: grabbing a board with hot spinning wheels and lots of skull stickers, climbing chainlink fences, hanging from tree limbs, holding a pen, hooking concrete ledges, handling a gamepad with surgical precision, and curling into rude gestures or fists when he couldn't talk his way out of something.
Kaffia Lang was nearly his opposite, female, as dark brown as he was light, as pure a shade of color as he was freckled, as poised as he was loose and jumpy. Both of them were tall. She had shoulder-length wavy bundles of peat-brown hair that she did various things with. Today, she'd gathered two-dozen tiny braids into one thick knot at the base of her neck.
To oppose his way-too-baggy purple camo shorts (Kaffia snorted: where the hell was he planning to blend in with random leafy patterns of lilac, lavender and violet?), she wore a close-fitting lime green bodysuit, hoop earrings, and cycling gloves with the fingers cut out.
She had soft, pretty features with thin eyebrows, but her dark brown eyes were hard, demanding, uncooperative. She was trouble. Anyone could see that. She had a habit of scaring off boys with one cutting imperative. Her advice: never ask a closed-ended question. You want to put fear into annoying, ogling teenage boys? Ask them something they cannot answer with a yes, no, grunt or any other monosyllabic. Instead of snapping the excruciatingly obvious, "What are you looking at?"--to which even a half-wit could answer, "You"--Kaffia would assume a serious, thoughtful