Nanowhere | Page 6

scowl, tilt her head a little as if truly puzzled and say, "I notice you've been staring at my ass. Share with me your motives and intentions." She would resume her look of polite perplexity and let them stammer, redden, shake their heads and stuff their hands in their pockets. After a minute of this they typically walked off, mumbling like idiots.
Everyone made fun of her name, not to her face--you want to see trouble?--a hundred variations on coffee, cafe latte, coffeepot, Columbian Supremo, French Roast, iced coffee, decaf, half-caf, espresso, expresso.
Alex called her Joe.
Joe had another name, NDIS ("endiss"), but she only permitted a few privileged people to call her that, and no one seemed to know what it actually stood for.
She liked Al because he wasn't frightened of her--not anymore.
She liked him because he liked to fiddle with the world, trying to figure out how things worked. Alex liked to play with electricity, even though it bit him occasionally.
If she dumped out his backpack, a ratty blue climber's pack, the bulky stuff would hit the concrete first, schoolbooks, his writing journal, a box of pencils and erasers, and then the heavy stuff, batteries, spools of wire and solder, motors, baggies of electronic components, maybe even propellers and sections of PVC pipe, if he was in the middle of a project. He usually was.
Alex liked Joe because she could skate, even if she preferred inlines. When Alex said skate he meant planting your feet on a board with wheels while the rest of the world whirled by you, not someone's idea of rearranging the wheel order and pretending they weren't roller skates. But then Alex liked hockey, and he could think of inlines as ice skates for asphalt. So that made them palatable.
Alex liked Joe because she didn't ask him what he meant when he said some particularly tough looking thug had a "4d8 right hook." She searched the grids for an OCR'd copy of the Dungeon Masters Guide--and not the simplified 3rd edition but the epileptically complex 2E rules. She read it cover to cover--so to speak--and then nodded knowingly whenever he used other D&D derived phrases.
Alex liked her because she was strong and careful and stood up for herself and looked him in the eye and put her soft dark fingers on his arm to stop him when he was about to say something stupid.
Alex liked her because she was good.
That, and she was a total badass hacker. She was 31337, hacker-speak for "eleet." ("Elite" to everyone else. Hackers have trouble with the English dictionary, probably reminds them too much of those oppressive drone-spewing schools).
No one else saw the same relationship they could see. From the outside they didn't seem to fit together. Only Kaffia saw Alex for what he was: smart and perceptive, someone who skated and surfed well, loved the ocean more than life, pretended to be a brash, insensitive teenager, read novels of faraway places and times, and had a way with words.
Kaffia had once glimpsed his open notebook, a tired old black journal he kept rubber-banded and closed from all eyes but his own. She didn't have enough time to read the neat blocks of text she'd glimpsed. It couldn't be wild designs for submarines and underwater robotics because he'd shown those to everyone. She suspected he wrote stories, probably fantasy or science fiction. She knew him almost as well as she knew herself, enough not to ask him for a look. If he didn't feel comfortable sharing his writing with her, he certainly wasn't showing it to anyone else.
That was okay, she thought. Everyone needs a private space, a lockbox, a secret diary, a hallowed place in the soul to keep personal preferences, intellectual property, fantastic designs, wild notions, patentable ideas, questions too bold to ask and unhatched plans. She understood that part of it. Alex had his journal. She had her subnotebook. Why anyone who had something worth writing didn't take it right to digital baffled her though. Why waste your time making gray scratches on paper when you could get the thing right into binary?
Kaffia sat at the edge of the skate bowl, face in her schoolwork, ignoring the laughing of the other skaters, the occasional grunt and scream of someone eating it, and then more laughing. She joined the other skaters in glancing suspiciously up at the roar of some military aircraft that cruised overhead, right above the treetops. The second to go over in the last five minutes.
She managed to finish her trig homework, read a chapter on the early battles of the First American Civil War and re-lace her skates, all before looking up to find the sky had turned pale and the few skaters and lurkers had all gone home. Alex was still hopping embankments and