Waterways (15 page)

This morning, that something was lying on his bedroom floor, the first rays of the morning sun illuminating the black of his chest fur and the white patch at his throat. He’d turned onto his side so that one of his large black ears was folded under his head, a problem Kory’s small round ears never gave him. Below the fox’s slender stomach, a loose white sheet covered his hips and legs. His long black tail lay straight out behind him, as far away from his body as possible, the faint luminescence of the white tip seeming almost detached from its owner.

Thirty or forty sleepovers, nearly an entire summer, hadn’t diminished the magic of waking up in the same room with the black fox. He rolled over onto his stomach and turned his head to one side so he could still see Samaki’s stomach rise and fall, and slowly dropped one arm to the floor. His paw came to rest on the fox’s outstretched paw, where it would remain until Samaki woke up in a few minutes.

On this morning, their routine was broken by a loud splash and a soft chirp. “You guys decent?”

Samaki woke with a jump. Kory rolled back onto his side and propped himself up on an elbow, looking at the corner of his room that was open to the house pool. His brother Nick bobbed there, eyes squeezed shut. “Of course,” Kory said, suppressing the shiver he’d felt at the intrusion, even though his mother never swam and Nick knew about him and Samaki. “What are you doing up?”

He could see Nick’s eyeshine in the dusk. “I wanted to catch you guys before you took off. You want a ride downtown today? Me’n’Mickey are going to the card show before the game to get autographs and his dad’s driving us. They’ve got a Durango so I’m sure he has room, and the show’s in the mall just the other side of downtown.”

Kory peered down at the fox, who was rubbing his eyes. “Can you stand to ride in an SUV?”

“As long as we don’t go to the gas station.” Samaki yawned, showing off a grin of perfect white teeth and a long pink tongue. “When are you leaving, Nick?”

“Quarter to eight. The show opens at nine but Digger Clawson is gonna be there so there’s gonna be a line. I’m gonna go shower then you guys can go.” He vanished under the water with barely a ripple.

“Hang on,” Samaki said, too late. He turned to grin at Kory. “Should know better than to try to keep up with an otter in the water.” He rhymed “otter” and “water,” making Kory smile.

“What did you want?”

“My dad’s a big Clawson fan. I was going to ask if Nick would get me an autograph.”

Kory trailed his paw up Samaki’s arm. “You have enough money?”

“Money?” The fox cupped his ears forward. “They charge money for autographs?”

“Sometimes.”

Samaki wriggled his ringers. “I have ten dollars. I hope that’s enough.”

Kory leaned over the bed. Samaki met his muzzle in a short kiss. “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” the otter said.

The hiss of the shower started up. “Hmm,” Samaki said. “I guess we have about ten minutes.” He closed his paw around Kory’s arm. “What can we do in ten minutes, I wonder?”

Kory giggled. “We can’t. What if my mom walks in?”

“Aw, she never does, though.” Samaki’s fingers teased right in the crook of Kory’s elbow.

The otter squirmed, already hard from waking up and feeling the familiar tingle in his groin. “We just did it last night!”

“Well, I can’t stay over tonight,” Samaki said. “Consider it an advance payment.”

Kory laughed, hesitating. He knew it was a bad idea, but his body was already urging him on.
Come on, it’ll only take a few minutes.
Samaki’s finger trailed up his arm, two claws parting his fur and just teasing the skin beneath. “I, uh…”

The fox withdrew his finger with a grin. “All right. You’re probably right, I think it’s a bad idea.”

“You were just getting me worked up!” Kory got up on his paws and knees, glaring at the fox, who was already scooting back and away from him with a big grin.

“I wasn’t! But now we don’t have time any more, so I stopped.” His protest of innocence was severely undermined by his self-satisfied tail twitching, the motion of the white tip clearly visible.

Kory didn’t say another word, just launched himself off the bed. Samaki ducked to one side with a yelp, only partially rolling out of Kory’s way.

The otter caught his arm and scrambled into the water, pulling the fox behind him. Samaki yelped theatrically as he was tugged into the pool, his yelp coming to an abrupt halt a moment before Kory pushed his head underwater.

The fox had gotten much better at playing in the water. He squirmed out of Kory’s hold and rolled on top of the otter, sending him underwater as well. No matter how good Samaki got, though, he was lighter than Kory, and even in summer when his coat was thin, his thick, bushy tail was a liability. Kory grabbed at it, careful not to pull too hard, and Samaki clutched one of his hindpaws in revenge, nibbling at the sensitive pads.

In the thrashing around, tails and paws weren’t the only things that got grabbed. By the time they finally surfaced in Kory’s room again, giggling and gasping for breath, neither made a move to get out of the water even though the shower had stopped. Arms resting on the floor, Kory returned Samaki’s grin, conscious of the warm weight between his legs, his paw still tingling with the memory of the fox’s. “Got to get decent for the shower,” Kory said.

“Uh-huh,” Samaki said. “Think of baseball players?”

“That never works.”

“Think of girls?”

Kory giggled. “That doesn’t work either.”

“Does for me.” The fox chuckled. “Wrap a towel around yourself?”

Kory eyed the pile of towels on his floor. “Maybe.”

“Wait here while I go first?” Samaki rubbed his wet muzzle against Kory’s.

“That works. I get a show that way anyway.”

The fox clambered out of the water, grinning, and turned his profile to Kory before lifting his arms over his head and stretching. Taut muscles under black fur drew Kory’s eye as much as the well-defined bulge in front of his swimsuit. Since he’d molted, muscles had seemed to pop out of the fox’s body, hills and valleys revealed by the melting black snows. Though Samaki would protest he wasn’t really an athlete, his lithe body always looked barely able to restrain the energy within, as if it would take no more than a touch to send him into motion. In chemistry class that spring, Kory’s professor had explained unstable equilibrium to them with a diagram of a marble poised at the top of a hill, unmoving, but needing only a touch in any direction to plunge down the slope. That was how Kory thought of Samaki: balancing expertly on a summit, just waiting to choose his direction.

Samaki grinned, flicked a large ear, and then cocked his head, remembering. “Oh. My mom understands why I’m over here all the time, because of the pool and all, but she wants you to come over for dinner again sometime soon. And Ajani wants to show you his latest comic book.”

“Another League of Canids?”

The black fox picked up a towel. “It’s a Red Lightning solo story. He’s read it, I would guess, something like five hundred times since he bought it. He quotes lines from it at the dinner table. I even know some of them by now. ‘If you didn’t want trouble, you shouldn’t have messed with my family’.”

Kory laughed at the imitation of Ajani’s squeaky voice. “I like his comics.”

“I know. I don’t hold it against you.”

Small streams of water trickled from Kory’s elbows to Samaki’s feet, meeting and puddling on his bedroom floor. “You can hold other things against me,” he said softly.

Samaki glanced around the room, and at the door. He blew Kory a kiss and then padded to the shower.

Kory ducked under the water and swam quickly to Nick’s room, surfacing with his eyes closed. “One, two, three,” he counted, and when Nick didn’t tell him not to, he opened his eyes.

“Hey,” Nick said. He’d tossed on a pair of jeans with patched knees, which their mother hated. She’d bought him three new pairs last month for the summer.

“Hey,” Kory said, “Samaki’s gonna give you ten dollars for a Digger Clawson autograph. Just tell him that was enough. I’ll make up the difference.”

Nick pulled down a t-shirt with the Dragons logo on it and squeezed his torso into it. Like Samaki, Nick would protest that he wasn’t an athlete. He claimed he just liked swimming and was on the team to meet girls, but in the last year, his frame had grown enough that his t-shirts could barely contain it. He liked the look, and the girls did too, from what Kory could tell. “I dunno if I have enough.”

“How much is it going to be?”

Nick shrugged. “I’m bringing forty.”

“I’ll give you another forty in the car,” Kory said. When he wasn’t volunteering with Samaki, he did some work at the local grocery store that he’d added to his savings. Forty was not so much, not for something Samaki wanted.

His brother flashed him a smile and a thumbs-up. “Cool.”

As he blinked water out of his eyes, back in his room, he saw a shape at his desk and thought for a moment that Samaki had gotten back early from his shower. Then he smelled his mother and his nerves flashed a quick burst of panic. He wiped his eyes hurriedly, ready to leap out of the water, but she was only looking at the pile of college brochures. Was there anything else on his desk, anything he’d left there? He didn’t think so. He rested his elbows on his floor, his body in the water, and tried to slow the racing of his heart. He hoped Samaki’s strong scent would cover the scent from last night. He and Samaki were careful, always cleaning up and de-scenting, but he didn’t know how keen his mother’s nose was. Not as sharp as Samaki’s, he was pretty sure.

“Two more college brochures came today,” she said, tapping her paw on his desk. “I thought you might want to look at them before you went off to your homeless shelter.”

“Thanks,” Kory said, his mind racing to figure out a way to get her out of his room before Samaki came back. “I’ll take a look.”

“Bruin College is a possibility. I don’t think much of Havertown, but I brought the brochure in anyway.” She looked disdainfully down at it.

“Okay, Mom. What’s for breakfast?”

She looked startled. “I didn’t make anything. Do you want me to?”

“I dunno. I think we have to leave pretty quickly. What do we have?”

She turned her head in the general direction of the kitchen, and started walking toward the door. “I’ll check.”

He slid out of the water when she’d left and walked over to his desk. She didn’t come into his room uninvited, usually, but she seemed to be doing it more and more when Samaki was over, as though she sensed that something was wrong without knowing quite what it was. If she caught them together… 

He drove that thought from his mind, and pawed through the evergrowing pile of college brochures. Some of them knew enough to send laminated brochures to an otter household; Forester University was one of those. He picked up their brochure again, dripping water on the less well-prepared Bruin College. Much as he hated to think about it, he was going to have to start applying to colleges and making a decision soon.

Samaki was almost certain to attend State, where his father worked and his older sister Kande was attending. They hadn’t talked about it much, but State was conspicuously absent from the pile of brochures his mother had organized for him, even though he knew they had sent more than one brochure to the house. How they knew there was a high school senior living there, he hadn’t figured out yet. Colleges just had an instinct for that, he guessed. He sighed and put down the plastic, having not really even seen the pictures of old brick buildings and lushly colored maple groves.

By the time Samaki returned, just as wet, but smelling of soap more than just fox, Kory had moved on to checking his e-mail, and the sounds of his mother and Nick moving around in the house filtered through his walls to him, a soft chorus that nevertheless set the unromantic mood as effectively as anything he might have chosen from his stereo. Samaki didn’t say anything as he sat on the bed in his underwear and attacked his fur with his brush, and Kory flashed a chaste and friendly smile on his way across the floor to take his own shower. Already his room wasn’t “safe” any more; the memory of his mother’s presence there made sure of that.

After his shower, they scarfed down bowls of cold cereal in the kitchen with Nick, during which his mother emerged wearing a simple white robe. “Why did you ask me what we have if you were just going to have cereal, Kory?” she said. “We have toast, and oatmeal, and eggs.” She took some slices of bread out of the breadbox as she spoke.

“Can’t eat oatmeal in summer, mom,” Nick mumbled.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” she said. “Well, we’ll have Sunday breakfast tomorrow. Samaki, will you be here tomorrow morning?”

The fox swallowed, shaking his head. “No, Mrs. Hedley. Not Sunday.”

Kory thought his mother didn’t really look like she cared that she’d forgotten, even though Samaki had told her every weekend he was over that he spent Saturday nights and Sundays at home. She went right on preparing her breakfast, getting the butter and jam out of the fridge while the bread toasted. “Oh, right. How is your family?”

“They’re fine, thank you.”

“I’m sorry your mother couldn’t make it to our church social.”

“She wanted to, but Mariatu had an upset stomach. You know how it is.” Kory knew that was a lie.

“I certainly do.” His mother smiled. “Kory had all kinds of stomach problems when he was four. There was a two-week stretch where he had the worst diarrhea I’d ever seen.”

“Mom!”

Samaki had the grace to look away, and Nick, snickering, came to the rescue. “We gotta get ready. Mickey’s gonna be here any minute now.”

“Don’t bolt your food!” their mother cried, but it was impossible to know whom she was talking to, so they all ignored her. By the time she’d gotten Nick’s name out, all three were already getting up from the table.

Kory knew Mickey vaguely, a short, muscular, chattery otter. His father, built similarly, proved that “the oysters don’t stray from the bed,” greeting Kory and Samaki with a hearty slap on the back. He ushered them into his large SUV with obvious pride.

“Nice truck,” Samaki murmured to Kory, ducking his head to clamber up into the spacious back seat. Kory giggled and nudged the fox, but Mickey’s father hadn’t heard; he started chattering about the players he’d admired growing up as he started the vehicle with a roar that made Samaki flatten his ears dramatically. Kory grinned, and nudged him again.