Muzi’s alphie goes to the corner, too, navigating around piles of dirty cutoffs and pit-stained practice jerseys. The bot settles, retracting its legs into its base. Muzi joins them, pressing his thumb on the port cover on his alphie’s underside. It slides out of the way, revealing a tangled Dobi-12 wire, which he unreels and connects to the input port on Elkin’s alphie. Direct interface is so much more efficient and secure, swapping all sorts of juicy tidbits, at least those not password protected. And Elkin doesn’t even seem to know the meaning of the word.
“You shouldn’t treat it so rough,” Muzi says when he’s done. He pats both alphies on their domes.
“I’ve got a five-year warranty.” Elkin rummages through the dresser where he keeps his stash, rolled up tight in a pair of plaid boxers. He pulls out two vials of indigo powder and shoves one into Muzi’s palm. “Now stop messing with those things. You’re killing my buzz.”
“What is it?” Muzi asks. He plops down on the foot of the bed, loosens the laces on his tackies, and kicks them off.
“Godsend, my cousin calls it. He gave me some samples—wants me to spread the word, build up some hype. Says it’s gonna drop on the streets in a couple weeks.”
Muzi turns the vial over, his thumb rubbing over the smooth glass, and then bites his lip. He’s not so excited about being a guinea pig, but Elkin’s cousin Rife has always come through for them, giving them loads of free dagga, the good stuff, not that crap the guys on campus deal. Rife supplies to the stars—all those celebrities who go through the revolving door of rehab faster than even the trashy gossip rags can keep up with—including brood band drummer Leon Duffy, former premier Blile Nkogosi, and most recently, pop sensation Riya Natrajan.
Still . . .
“Muzi, I swear if your forehead wrinkles up any further, I’m going to get the iron and sort you out myself. Now do you want to blow or what?” Elkin dumps a bit of powder into his palm. Feeling flushed and befuddled, Muzi lets his mouth drop open, but before he can reply, Elkin balls a fist and blows into one end. Indigo dust shoots out the other, lingering and shimmering in the air. “Breathe, dof!” Elkin says.
So Muzi inhales deeply, then closes his eyes. After a few seconds, he tingles from head to toe. It’s not a completely pleasant experience, more like someone’s trying to forcibly shed his skin. He tries to wiggle feeling back into his extremities, but his fingers are all fused together. He panics and coughs out his breath.
Elkin’s busy snorting a dab of godsend right from the meat of his fist, then he leans back on the bed, arms propped behind him. “Huh,” he says before letting his head loll back, “a crab.”
Muzi looks down at his own arms, and sure enough, they’re rough and hard like an exoskeleton, ending in two rust-colored pincers. Muzi snaps them and they click—the most realistic hallucination he’s ever had. When he looks back at Elkin, he’s only Elkin from the waist down. The top half looks a lot like a dolphin, eyes too close together and fins way too long, but a dolphin nonetheless.
“Oh, man,” says Muzi. “This is bladdy sick.”
“Hey, Piece of Shit,” Elkin calls to his alphie. “Play artist Riya.”
The alphie obliges. Ambient music from one of the tracks from Riya Natrajan’s latest album, Midnight Seersucker, fills the room. The discordant beats cut right to the soul, and her shrill voice sounds like a couple of horny tomcats in a blender, but oh man does it hit the spot. Muzi claps his claws to the rhythm of the snare drum, and just when he gets it down pat, his arms and hands become his own.
“Snort it. It’ll last longer.”
“How much longer?” Muzi asks, imagining how pissed Papa Fuzz would be if he had to circumcise a five-foot-ten crustacean.
“Maybe an hour. Two at most. Relax, guy. You’ll have plenty of time to make it to your penis party.”
“You’re still coming, right?”
“Can’t. Got a thing.”
“What kind of thing?” Muzi raises an incredulous brow, but he’d had a feeling Elkin would back out at the last minute. Burned again, but damn it if Muzi doesn’t keep coming back like a moth to a flame. He tries not to take it personally. Elkin and Papa Fuzz don’t really get along, and neither of them is afraid of letting the other know about it. Papa Fuzz thinks Elkin is a bad influence, and Elkin thinks Papa Fuzz is a tired old windbag, certifiably obsessed with cultural traditions, never mind what Muzi has to say about it.
Sad part is, they’re both right.
“Eish, Muzi! If I’d’ve known you were going to sit around asking a million questions, I would’ve gotten gaffed by myself.”
So Muzi zips his lips and pours out a bit of godsend, wondering how it is that he and Elkin are having the same hallucination. He sniffs hard, and a wildfire rages up his nostril and systematically through his brain until all that’s left are charred worries and a crab’s desires. And funny thing—as gaffed as he is, he feels more like himself than he has in his whole sixteen years of life. By the time he remembers to exhale, all inhibitions are gone. He watches Elkin, envious as he bounces on the bed doing dolphin flips. So graceful. All Muzi can think to do is skitter side to side on his four pairs of crab feet. He falters each time Elkin lands back on the mattress. Muzi clips at Elkin’s dorsal fin when he gets close enough, and then they’re play fighting, all claws and snout.
“Hey, we should go take a dip in your pool,” Muzi huffs, nearly out of breath. “Or we could bike down to the seawall and check the waves.”
“It’s too cold out for that,” Elkin says, and even though he’s a porpoise, he has that jag look in his eye he sometimes gets when they’re wasted out of their gourds.
They both pretend not to remember, but they fooled around maybe a month ago—a kiss on a drunken dare—but what Muzi had intended to be a closed-mouth peck had quickly escalated into more. He tries to forget, tries not to read anything into the sideways glances held milliseconds too long, tries to ignore the palpable tension that’s brewing between them.
But it’s too damned hard.
“Ja,” Muzi says, his crab heart pounding against his carapace.
“Piece of Shit, volume up.”
Riya’s screeches blare loud enough to rattle the orange, handblown bong sitting atop Elkin’s dresser. Elkin’s too wasted to care though, even if it is his most prized possession.
“You really should give it a better name,” Muzi shouts.
“It’s just a bunch of metal and wires. What does it care what I call it?”
Muzi fumes, then out of reflex, clamps his claw down on Elkin’s flipper, and not in a playful sort of way.
“Eina!” Elkin screams in pain. “Fine. Piece of Shit, rename Bucket of Sunshine.”
Muzi grins.
“You know I’m changing it back after you leave?”
“Ja,” Muzi says. “Wouldn’t expect otherwise.”
“Good. Now come over here and check out what I can do with my blowhole.”
Muzi isn’t sure if that’s supposed to be a euphemism or not, but he skitters sideways across the bed anyway, fantasizing all the different ways a crab can make love to a porpoise.
Chapter 2
This Instance