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Liquid Blue, Book 1, Part I Page 3
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Chapter 2
The residential module party was always well received. Most families in the unit attended the evening of food and music and gossip. Being in a small community, separated from what only outsiders called “the real world,” made gossip the number one form of entertainment. That and the latest movie transmitted from Earth. The party had all of these in abundance. It was held in the largest room in the unit, the community room, which probably held about 750 people comfortably sitting. There were couches and lounge chairs and plenty of tables for food to be both displayed and eaten. It was always interesting to see what culinary delights had been concocted.
Caeden knew well enough that this was the one night to stay out of his mother’s sight. As much as she was an excellent organizer, this one night a year, she became the worst parent a child could ask for. Nothing was ever done right that she didn’t do herself. So, Caeden had learned to stay as far away as possible, by making excuses that he had to tend to friends and friends’ families. This always pleased his mother, to a degree, as she hoped that his intervention might make the party that much more pleasant for the guests. His father wasn’t so lucky, as he was then left to carry the burden of her silent abuse. They often said that the day after the party was their favorite day of the year.
Caeden’s focus this night was on Anita. He had spotted Turk as soon as he entered the room and hastened to greet him and his parents. Turk’s father, a large, amiable man, who Turk had obviously been molded from, boomed as he greeted Caeden.
“Hello, Cae,” he said, and Caeden wondered if Turk had mentioned his desire to take Anita to the holiday dance to his father.
“Hello, Mr. Turkovitch, how are you?”
“Well, Cae, I can’t complain, and if I did, who would listen, right?” His laughter boomed across the hall, and he swatted Caeden briskly on the back.
“Mrs. Turkovitch,” Caeden said, smiling in her direction.
“Hello, Caeden,” she said, and moving in close, she planted a kiss on his cheek. “How are you? Freddy tells me you aced another paper in engineering. Your mother must be very proud.”
“Oh, she will be,” Caeden said. “I don’t dare tell her until tomorrow. Might throw off her party rhythm. Wouldn’t want to do that.”
Mrs. Turkovitch smiled knowingly. She was a handsome woman, relatively tall, and stark black hair that she had obviously passed down to her daughter. He blushed a little as she caught him quietly admiring her. He redirected his attention to Anita.
“Hello, Cae,” Anita said. She moved in close beside him. “Do you think they would talk if I kissed you like my mother does?”
“Well, I…um. Hi, Anita, how are you?” She giggled and continued past him, waving to someone on the other side of the room, who may or may not have even existed.
“She’s so mean,” Caeden said, as Turk sidled up next to him.
“Oh, Hi Turk, how you doing? Good? Oh, that’s nice. Glad to hear it…jeez! Might as well be a speck of dust.”
“I just saw you two hours ago!”
“It’s the principle of the thing.”
“Duster.”
“You have really got to get over her.”
“Get over her?”
“She’s got you hooked so bad.”
“I know it.”
“Just go over there and ask her to the dance.”
“You think?”
“Do you want to lose out to some Sophomore duster? The dance is next week.”
“Hell no.”
“Well?”
Caeden could see fairly well across the room, being his height. He spotted Anita gravitating toward a group of girls on the far side of the room. She was in no rush. If he could catch her before she arrived at the other side, perhaps he’d get a moment with her alone. He bade Turk farewell and picked a path. Being his size, was both a blessing and a curse. He could clearly see the surrounding room, but getting from point A to B was another study. Every parent who hadn’t seen him in a week or so, stopped him to say Hi. How’s it going? How are your grades this year? What university module were you looking to get into? What did you want to study? And, as well prepared Caeden had been with generic pat answers, it was still some time before he made his way even halfway across the room. He watched as his friend Vic entered from the other end of the hall. It made him feel good that he had managed to drag him out to a social gathering. He smiled and nodded in Vic’s direction when he waved. He tried to use it as a way of getting out of his present conversation with Jacob Miller, the civic leader of the residential unit. Caeden’s mother called him “A bluster of a man, who took his position as having much more authority than it really had.” Caeden wasn’t apt to disagree.
“…but, your great-great grandfather was a man for the ages,” he said, as if he had been the first to reveal this tidbit to Caeden.
“Just a man though. Dad says it could just as well have been one of his colleagues. Then the name of Llewellyn would just be another boring name insinuating British history long-since forgotten.”
This response caught Miller completely off-guard and he stopped short, as if having had the wind taken out of him. It was momentary and he brushed off the self-deprecating in stride.
“I see your mother is free. I’ll see if I can catch her.”
“Nice talking to you, Mr. Miller.”
When Caeden looked around again, he spotted Vic. He was standing next to a table of desserts chatting with a girl. Not just any girl though. He was chatting with Anita.
“Cae! Cae, my boy, I want you to meet an old friend of mine,” came a booming voice to his right. It was Turk’s dad.
“Mr. Turkovitch, I…”
“Cae, this is Paul Stolten. We go way back he and I.”
“Diapers, I think. Hello, Caeden. Turk’s told me a lot about you,” Stolten said. Caeden grasped the man’s hand, a surprisingly strong shake for a man who looked on the lighter side of a hundred and sixty pounds. He was a short-shaved man with glasses and a gray jumpsuit.
“Hello, Mr. Stolten. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a gray suit before,” Caeden said.
“That’s why I stopped you,” said Mr. Turkovitch, and he suddenly lowered his voice and leaned into Caeden with a slight smile, “Paul here, works for the CRA.”
The Callistoan Rectification Agency was the version of the CIA, only owned and operated by the corporations. As his father put it, they didn’t need police on Callisto, when they had the CRA. Then he had to explain exactly what police where to Caeden. There just wasn’t a great need in small communities where running meant eventually coming to the end of a long hall. It was something never discussed by anyone he had ever met, and for that, it had become all the more interesting to Caeden. He had found the marks required for entry into the CRA academy in an old handbook. The new ones had failed to even list it. He had the grades, but he had never met anyone who had actually worked in that role. He glanced back over at Vic. He was torn. Somewhere inside of him, something twisted.
“So, Mr. Stolten, do you work in the field?”
“I could tell you that, but then I’d have to take you out for a one way visit to the ice,” he said, stone-faced, then quickly laughed when he saw Caeden’s reaction. “Lighten up, son, we’re not all the shadows and mystery folks like to believe.”
“Do you like your job?” Caeden said.
“It’s a job, but it sure as hell beats sucking blue all day,” Stolten said, and he and Mr. Turkovitch shared a knowing glance.
“It’s part of the CRA’s job to make sure the miners are safe, though, right?” Caeden said.
“Sure, we’re responsible for everyone up here. The corporations wants…”
“Everyone to be happy. I know the script, Mr. Stolten. I might be young, but I’m no fool.”
“Well, Caeden, happy workers are healthy workers.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Turk’s told me a lot about you. You see me next year and I’ll see what I can do to get you into t
he CRA track on Ganymede.”
“Oh, well sir, I’d greatly appreciate that, though I was hoping to stay here on Callisto. The university module here is highly rated and…”
“For everything else, it may be the best, son, but Ganymede’s where you go for the type of work you’d be doing for the CRA. Trust me.”
Caeden took the opportunity for a pause in the conversation and offered his hand to both men.
“Pleasure meeting you, Mr. Stolten. Mr. Turkovitch.”
Both men smiled and nodded and Caeden made his way through another crowd. He looked back to where Vic had been standing. Nowhere in sight. He had failed badly in his attempt to cross the room and intercept Anita. There she was in a pool of sophomore girls, all wearing their school greens and maneuvering like a bunch of scared buffalo, shoulder to shoulder, and giggling at anyone and everyone. He waited, hoping an opportunity might present itself. It had passed. They might stand like that for the rest of the night. He tried to catch her eye, but after a few minutes he was convinced she was purposely looking the other way. She wanted to see him squirm. Oh, how she loved to see him twist in her palm. He stepped out of the crowd toward her.
“Anita,” he said.
“Hi Cae,” she said, and the sea of girls around her giggled and held their ground. Despite his senior status, they outnumbered him ten to one, and they knew it. He tried to put them out of his mind by looking straight at her.
“I came over to ask you something,” Caeden said.
“Ask away,” she said, and she met his gaze with a fierce determination. He fought the urge to look away, and the sensation of heat that was building at his collar.
“You know the holiday dance is coming up, right?”
Her face slackened and she actually looked sad for a moment.
“Cae, you were going to ask me to the dance?”
“I, well, yeah…I was,” he said, “but, if you don’t want me to…”
“I thought you were going with that Sandy girl from unit 3…the pretty junior.”
“Who told you that?”
“Well,” she said, blushing for the first time that Caeden could ever remember, “I just heard…from some really unreliable sources, I guess.”
“But,” said Cae, “I’m not going with her, so its ok.”
“But, Cae,” she said, and now she looked completely downtrodden, “I already told Vic I would go with him.”
“What? Vic asked you? My Vic?”
“Yeah, didn’t you see him before? I’ve never seen him at a get-together before. He came over and we started talking and he just mentioned the dance and if I was going with anyone. I said no, and next thing I knew, he was turning red and asking me. I couldn’t really say no to him. He’s a nice enough guy. He’s no duster, and I figured with it only being a week away, I’d better get someone to go with me.”
“I’m the duster,” Caeden said.
“Yeah, you are,” Anita said, and Caeden felt the sweat start to trickle down his sides.
“I’m already a fool, so I may as well ask you out then. Forget the dance. A proper date sometime afterwards? Maybe a movie night?”
“You’ll have to ask my dad,” Anita said, smiling.
“I will, if you’ll say yes.”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re not going to back out on me now, are you?”
“I’d rather take a long walk into the ice.”
“Well, don’t have too much fun with Vic at the holiday dance.”
“I’ll save a dance for you.”
“Ok.”
When Caeden found Turk a short time later, he was stuffing a crabcake into his mouth.
“Wherf you been?” he asked.
“Have you seen that duster, Vic?”
“Vic? Yeah, he stopped by a little while ago. Said he had to head back home. Took some cookies for his mom.”
“That flaming duster! That absolute spacer!”
“Whoa, Cae. What’s he got your dust in a swirl for?”
“He asked your sister to the holiday dance.”
“What? She didn’t say yes, did she?”
“Of course she did! She thought I was already going with that junior, Sandy. The little blonde miner’s daughter. A miner’s daughter!”
“Cae, easy. Keep your voice down,” Turk said, grabbing his friend by the arm and guiding him to a less exposed area of the room. “You can’t say something like that here. There’s blue shirts all over the place. It ain’t right.”
“I’m sorry,” Caeden said, dropping himself into a nearby armchair. “But, what a duster. I can’t believe him.”
“Cae,” Turk said, “You set yourself.”
“You came up with the idea about saying I was already possibly going with someone. Note the emphasis on the possibly? And why that blonde? Like I would ever go for someone like that.”
“Cae, Sandy’s a perfectly nice girl. It’s not the end of the world. It’s only one dance.”
“He’s still a duster.”
“You’re right, he’s a duster. Are you going to let it ruin the rest of your night?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you meet that Stolten fella?”
“Yeah, he’s an interesting guy.”
“Told my Dad he could probably get you into the Ganymede academy no problem with scores like yours. Of course, when Dad asked about me, he gave him one of these,” and Turk held up two open palms half-heartedly.
“Don’t know if I want to leave Callisto, though.”
“You could probably jump back on weekends and stuff.”
“Yeah, we’ll see.”
“Yeah.”