Here he came, as usual half a head taller than most of the kids around him. He'd tried out for the basketball team the autumn before, but he hadn't even got onto the JVs. Being tall wasn't enough. You had to be able to run and shoot, too.

He spotted her and waved. Amanda was tall herself, for a girl-one meter, seventy-three centimeters. Her grandfather, who was old-fashioned as well as old, sometimes said she was five feet ten. That meant next to nothing to her, any more than pounds or quarts or degrees Fahrenheit did.

“We've got to stop at the store and get apples,” Amanda said importantly when her brother came up. He started to laugh. She scowled at him. “What's so funny?”

“Did Mom leave a note in your lunchbox, too?” he asked.

“She left me one, all right,” Amanda said. “You mean she gave 'em to both of us?”

Her brother nodded. “She sure did.”

“Why didn't she just carve the message on a rock and leave it here at the bus stop?” Amanda said. “Sometimes I think she's even more stuck in her ways than Grandpa is.”

“I wouldn't be surprised.” Jeremy pointed up the street. “Here comes the bus.”

It was old-fashioned, too. The school district couldn't afford anything newer and cleaner. It burned natural gas, which meant it spewed carbon dioxide into the air. Most vehicles, these days, were either electric or ran on fuel cells that gave off only clean water vapor. Global warming hadn't stopped, but it had slowed down.

They got on the bus. As soon as it was full, the driver pulled off the side street where she'd picked up her passengers and turned north onto Topanga Canyon Boulevard. The bus rattled almost enough to drown out the trills of telephones as friends on other buses and in cars started catching up with people here. Kids on the bus made calls, too. Back in the old days, Amanda's grandfather said, everybody could listen to everybody else talking. She had trouble imagining that. It sounded like an amazing nuisance. Throat mikes let people keep conversations private, the way they were supposed to be.