"Really?" said Max, tilting her head to the side, sort of like a confused puppy might do, even though she was a person, and not a baby animal. She was, however, confused. So there was that. She'd been kinda joking about the secret thing. Mostly because there weren't many secrets in Bradbury, but then she could totally understand wanting to keep some things to oneself, so maybe she shouldn't have been so surprised. 

Anyway, Iikka had been the first to speak (aside from herself, of course) and break the totally not at all awkward silence, so she rounded on him like a starving, feral cat might the wounded bird who'd just fallen helplessly from the tree. Except she wasn't going to kill and eat him. And again, she wasn't an animal. 

"Well...okay," she added slowly. She couldn't even begin to imagine what sort of secret Jason and Iikka could be sharing that involved a wine aerator -- well, no, that wasn't true. She could easily imagine about a hundred different things, but since most of her wild imaginings involved things like pirates and space giraffes, she tended to keep those to herself. She got overexcited pretty easily, and could be about as naive as they came, but she wasn't [i]stupid[/i]. It was highly unlikely that Jason and Max were buying a wine aerator as the final, crucial piece of the super stealth jet powered by pizza grease from Mario's parents' pizza place. She knew that was absurd, she [i]knew[/i] it, just like she knew they'd probably had to remove the part they'd built to jettison extra cargo into outer space, in case the plane started going down due to the great pizza grease shortage of 2012. 

It never even once occurred to her they might just use a wine aerator for aerating wine, since they were underaged, and they were nice boys, who wouldn't do that, obviously.

She turned to Jason and offered a polite smile. She liked Jason -- well, she liked everyone, but Jason seemed nice than most. Thank Iikka, at least. Not that she would ever say as much -- and sometimes she saw him on her way walking the boys to their preschool. He only waved back sometimes. 

"Hi, Jason." She pointed. "I like your pants. I saw that on TV once, it was cool." 

And then she turned to Mario, who hadn't said much of anything so far. She hoped he wasn't shy. She knew she could overwhelm shy people. She didn't think he was, he was on the track team and had lots of friends and everything, but you never knew. 

"Hey, Mario. Good job at that meet last week, I heard you came in first again. Melissa told me." That wasn't really true. Melissa didn't ever really talk to Max. But she'd overheard her telling one of her other friends about it, and people liked compliments. Also, people liked Melissa. 

"So...how 'bout that Rubik's cube?" Only now that she was saying it out loud, she realized how weird it sounded and sort of smiled. Maybe Iikka was making a joke. He made jokes like that kind of a lot. Max didn't really get them, but she laughed anyway, because she didn't want to hurt his feelings.