Dance was about to add quickly that she knew Boling through work, to reassure Wes and defuse any potential awkwardness. But before she could say anything, Wes's eyes flashed as he gazed at the computer screen. "Sweet. DQ!"
She regarded the splashy graphics of the DimensionQuest computer game homepage, which Boling had apparently extracted from Travis's computer.
"Are you guys playing?" The boy seemed astonished.
"No, no. I just wanted to show your mother something. You know Morpegs, Wes?"
"Like, definitely."
"Wes," Dance murmured.
"I mean, sure. She doesn't like me to say 'like.' "
Smiling, Boling asked, "You play DQ? I don't know it so well."
"Naw, it's kind of wizardy, you know. I'm more into Trinity."
"Oh, man," Boling said with some boyish, and genuine, reverence in his voice. "The graphics kick butt." He turned to Dance and said, "It's S-F."
But that wasn't much of an explanation. "What?"
"Mom, science fiction."
"Sci-fi."
"No, no, you can't say that. It's S-F." Eyes rolling broadly ceilingward.
"I stand corrected."
Wes's face scrunched up. "But with Trinity, you definitely need two gig of RAM and at least two on your video card. Otherwise it's, like . . ." He winced. "Otherwise it's so slow. I mean, you've got your beams ready to shoot . . . and the screen hangs. It's the worst."
"RAM on the desktop I hacked together at work?" Boling asked coyly.
"Three?" Wes asked.
"Five. And four on the video card."
Wes mimicked a brief faint. "Nooooo! That is sooo sweet. How much storage?"
"Two T."
"No way! Two tera bytes?"
Dance laughed, feeling huge relief that there wasn't any tension between them. But she said, "Wes, I've never seen you play Trinity. We don't have it loaded on our computer here, do we?" She was very restrictive about what the children played on their computers and the websites they visited. But she couldn't oversee them 100 percent of the time.
"No, you don't let me," he said without any added meaning or resentment. "I play at Martine's."
"With the twins?" Dance was shocked. The children of Martine Christensen and Steven Cahill were younger than Wes and Maggie.
Wes laughed. "Mom!" Exasperated. "No, with Steve. He's got all the patches and codes."
That made sense; Steve, who described himself as a green geek, ran the technical side of American Tunes.
"Is it violent?" Dance asked Boling, not Wes.
The professor and the boy shared a conspiratorial look.
"Well?" she persisted.