Nanowhere | Page 6

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 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