Nanowhere | Page 5

together. When her parents
sighed, "Off in your own little world, Kaffia?" she would say,
"Actually, it's quite large, as large as I want it to be."
The private world she shared with Alex always appeared when they
met. They'd been friends about a year but it felt like five times that, and
they'd taken it so far, that for fun and the delight of annoying others,
they pretended to be married. That was the act they usually put on
while in their world, a comfortably married couple with loud staged
greetings and grotesquely sweet nicknames. It threw everyone around
them into uncomfortable amusement or sickness, sometimes both.
Alex waved off another boarder, turned to Kaffia, puckering up.

"Lips," she said shortly in mock reproach, followed his lip-scrunching
expression, but turned her head at just the right 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 mélange of high fructose corn syrup
and/or sucrose.
"It's the spice," he said slowly, almost in a trance.

Arrakis…Dune…Desert planet…
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
you…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