Waterways (3 page)

“We saw them in church this morning, and you didn’t say anything.” He didn’t see a need to reply to that, so he crammed potatoes into his mouth. “Don’t bolt your food,” his mother told him. “I just don’t know why I had to learn about these things secondhand. Do you know how embarrassing that was? Mrs. Kish asked if you were doing all right, and I didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled through flecks of potato.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.” She paused. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, mom,” he said. “Can I be excused?”

She looked at his plate, which was mostly clean. “No,” she said. “We’ve got banana cream pie for dessert, and I want us to sit around and talk. Tell me what the municipal pool is like. Is it as nice as Caspian?”

“No,” he said. “It’s smaller and more crowded.” Then he decided to give her something to worry about, to stop her asking more about the pool, because he didn’t want to tell her about Samaki yet. “I banged my head on the wall. I was trying to get out of this kid’s way…”

It worked. His mother gasped and leaned closer. “Where?”

He showed her the spot. “Oh, Kory,” she said. “It’s swelling up. Let me get an ice pack.”

The rest of the dinner was spent with her fretting over him, because those municipal pools might be full of disease, you never know. He let her worry, not pointing out that he hadn’t broken the skin. The ice did help, really, and the banana cream pie (from the market, not homemade) was delicious. He was in a somewhat better mood when he swam back to his room and lay on a towel on the floor to dry off.

Nick surfaced and rested his arms on the floor, his nose only a foot from Kory’s. “You went to the municipal pool because of the poem, didn’t you?”

“Shut up, Nick.”

“Hey, I think it’s cool,” his brother said. “I couldn’t do it.”

“Nick…”

“Why do you care what those dipwads think?”

Kory rolled over and stared up at his ceiling, where he could just see the glow-in-the-dark stars he’d put up when he was seven. “It’s complicated,” he said. “You’ll understand when you get to high school.”

He knew that would irritate Nick. He hoped it would end the conversation. Instead, he heard a huff, and then Nick kept talking. “Well, I think it’s dumb. What happened with Jenny?”

“Nick…”

“Come on, Kory. I liked her. Why’d you dump her?”

Kory closed his eyes. “I didn’t, okay?”

“Oh,” Nick said, his voice small.

“Please, Nick,” Kory said, resting a paw over his closed eyes.

“Yeah, sorry, I…” Kory felt his brother touch his arm gently. “I’m gonna go to bed. Hope you’re okay.”

“I’m fine,” Kory said, and then felt bad. “Thanks, Nick. I’ll tell you about it later. Just don’t feel like it now.”

“Okay.” He heard the soft ripples of water as his brother slid down and swam back to his room.

The truth was, Kory had thought he’d be relieved to be broken up with Jenny. They’d had a nice summer together, then slept together a few times, and that had changed their relationship. Suddenly she wanted to talk about other people’s relationships, like how Sal and Allie were doing, and things Jake Conly had said to Amanda that Amanda didn’t understand, and what did Kory think of all that? He didn’t care, truthfully, and apart from their double dates with Sal and Allie, he started making excuses to avoid Jenny unless it was in a public place like the pool. He’d retreated to an online book group, until he looked forward to logging on in the evenings more than he looked forward to seeing Jenny.

So he’d thought he wouldn’t be upset if she dumped him; in fact, he was almost trying to get her to do it so he wouldn’t have to. But he hadn’t expected her to do it Saturday, when he wanted to talk to her about the previous week of school, when he really needed a sympathetic ear. Instead, it had been all about her, and how this was really too much, and she’d been talking to Chris Stafford—Chris Stafford!—and he’d asked her to the prom and she’d said yes.

He was surprised by how hurt he’d felt. No, he didn’t want to be dating her, but he wanted to be the one to decide to stop. He’d been in a funk for most of Sunday, except when he’d been swimming, and when he’d been talking to Samaki.

The violet eyes and easy smile of the black fox crept back into his thoughts. If their engaging talk had been any indication, Samaki would enjoy the online book group too. He turned his cell phone over thoughtfully and wondered if Samaki would really call him. He could call the fox; he had his number and it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. Would the fox be eating dinner? Maybe it was a little too soon to be calling.

Too soon? Kory laughed at himself and set down the phone. It wasn’t like he wanted to date the fox.

Though… come to think of it, he wondered now if the fox wanted to date
him.
He’d certainly been very friendly considering they’d just met. And had he gotten dressed a little too slowly, maybe showing off for Kory’s benefit? Kory pulled his tail to his chest and scritched through it with his claws, thinking about the luxuriant ebony tail the fox had. Maybe Samaki had been hitting on him. He should call up and set the fox straight.

But what would he say? He didn’t really know any gay people that weren’t in movies or on TV. It was odd to think of Samaki that way; until that moment, he’d just been a friend, with a vast unexplored landscape, as if Kory had landed on a new planet. If he were gay, then all his actions took on a different cast, and maybe he really was more alien. That didn’t mean they couldn’t be friends. He just couldn’t ever tell his mom. But if the fox thought he might be gay… well, he should say something, he shouldn’t let that rest. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them. He picked up the phone.

But what if he were wrong? He weighed the phone and set it down again, continuing to stroke his tail. Gay guys had a gay-dar or something, didn’t they, to let them know whether someone else was interested? Surely he’d have seen that Kory wasn’t gay. No, maybe he was just another lonely soul, with nobody to talk to about the books he was reading.

Hard to believe, though, as handsome as he was. Kory couldn’t believe the fox would have any difficulty finding any kind of companionship he wanted. So maybe he was gay, and that explained his loner attitude.

“Grrr.” He clutched his head. Best just to finish up his homework and worry about it next time he heard from Samaki, which would probably be never. He’d probably just asked for Kory’s number to be polite, and walked away thinking what a dork he’d just swum into at the pool.

Though he had waited and waved goodbye to the bus. He didn’t have to do that.

Kory sighed and grabbed his math homework. He’d ask Sal about it in the morning.

Like Kory, Sal was smaller than the otters on the high school swim team. They’d been friends since Kory could remember, going to church together, movies together, even playing Ultima Online together a few years back. Then Sal had discovered girls.

Kory had been mostly blind to the changes going on around him, but Sal began to act like a tourist in a strange new land. “I got a date with Jessica,” he’d hiss. “Check her out. No, don’t turn and stare!” Her primary claim to beauty appeared to Kory to be the now-prominent breasts straining against her sweater, because otherwise her features hadn’t changed. He didn’t think that was such a big deal, but the next week Sal had gleefully reported to Kory how they felt, the first in a long string of kiss-and-tell incidents.

Kory listened with polite interest, but it wasn’t until the summer that he finally realized that this wasn’t just a new game Sal was interested in, but a change that was happening to all his peers, one he was expected to share in. It was even harder for him to keep up, since he was seeing less of Sal than he had in the years when they’d spent the whole day together.

Sophomore year had been the first year Sal and his friends on the vocational track left the school every afternoon to get training for real world jobs. Sal was going to be a computer technician. “I’m gonna be the guy the big guys have to call to get their machines fixed,” he was fond of boasting. “For you, Spike, I’ll do it free.” Sal still called him ‘Spike’ after his Ultima Online character, but he didn’t want Kory to call him ‘Ike’ any more.

This morning, he was in a particularly good mood, so Debbie, a pretty sophomore skunk who was his current girlfriend, must have spent at least one of the nights of the weekend. Sal refrained from telling him about it, though. “Hey, Spike,” he said. “I heard about Jenny. You okay?”

Kory shrugged. “I’m fine. How did you hear?” It must be all over school by now, he thought.

“Debbie’s older brother’s dating Jenny’s older sister’s best friend,” Sal said, stretching his lanky form and curling his tail up behind him. “So what did she say?”

Kory dropped into his seat. “She said she didn’t understand why I didn’t write poems like that to her.”

“That’s all? That’s weak.”

“That and Chris Stafford asked her to the prom and she said yes.”

“Stafford?!”

“Yeah.”

Sal shook his head, unable to muster any more words. “Freakin’ Stafford,” he said.

“Yeah.” Kory saw one of his Warcraft buddies come in and waved to him across the room. Jason waved back and went to sit with Dev. The two of them were hardcore gamers, and though he enjoyed playing with them, they didn’t consider him dedicated. He sometimes hung out with them; they were nice enough in small doses.

“Hey, Sal,” he said into the silence. “Say I bumped into a girl at the pool, and she… slipped and banged her knee. If I bought her coffee after, and then asked for her phone number, you think she’d think I was hitting on her?”

His friend turned to him with a grin. “Did you get the phone number?”

“Uh… yeah.”

Sal punched him on the shoulder. “Back on the horse already!”

“Ow.” Kory grinned. “C’mon, would she think I was hitting on her?”

“Heck, yeah,” Sal said. “But if she gave you her number, she didn’t mind. You didn’t call her yet, did you?”

“No. But what if she thought I was just being friendly, like I said she should give me her number so I could check up on her knee?”

Sal laughed. “She wasn’t, like, thirteen, was she?”

“No!”

“Then she knew and she didn’t mind. So here’s what you do. Call her tomorrow night. Not tonight, that’s still too soon. See if she’s free Friday night. Me and Debbie will go to the park with you. What species is she? Otter?”

“Uh, fox.” Too slow to think of another lie.

Sal cocked his head. “Fox? At the pool? It’s not Sharisse, is it? Please tell me it’s not Sharisse.”

“It’s not Sharisse.”

“Good. So who is it? Gina’s dating that tod from Westgate, Ellen’s seeing Jim Brush, and Tanya Torick is dating that foreign exchange student, the fennec. Not one of them, right?”

“No, she, uh, goes to Hilltown P.S.”

Sal raised his eyebrows. “She was at Caspian?”

“No. I went to the municipal pool. Just to get away.”

Geoff Hill, a large raccoon, stepped into the room and ambled back to them. “Oh, great,” Sal muttered. “Just ignore him.”

“I know,” Kory muttered back.

“Hey, Rainbow,” Geoff said in a falsetto, and the class tittered. “I got a pome for ya. ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, who’s the biggest wuss in school? it’s you!’ Har har!” He dropped into his seat behind the two of them, still laughing at himself.

The sad part, Kory thought, was that several of the rest of the class were chuckling along with him. He sank down in his seat.

“Asshole,” Sal muttered. Kory shrugged. “Don’t worry. They’ll forget it pretty soon.”

“Not while Deffenbauer has it posted in the hallway cabinet.” 

“We could bust it…” Sal shut his mouth as their teacher walked in, and opened his math textbook. “So… did you do the homework?”

They talked about school while Kory thought about what Sal had said. So Samaki
had been
hitting on him—and by giving him his phone number, Kory had effectively said, “Sure, stud, let’s get it on.” Well, it was nothing a phone call wouldn’t clear up, he was sure. The fox was friendly enough, and once he heard it was all a misunderstanding, he’d happily go on his way. Maybe they could even stay friends. Samaki didn’t seem as obnoxious or predatory as most of the gay people he’d heard about.

That night, though, when he called up the fox’s entry on his cell phone, he was unaccountably nervous. What was he going to say? “Sorry, I’m not gay?” What if Samaki wasn’t gay? He paced back and forth in his room, and just as he’d decided to close the phone, that Samaki wasn’t going to call him back anyway, it rang.

Looking down, he saw Samaki’s name flashing, and automatically picked up the phone.

“Hi, Samaki.”

“Hey there.” The fox’s voice was cheerful and light. “Good, I was worried for a minute you might’ve given me a bogus number. How’s the head?”

“Oh, fine, as long as I don’t think about it.” The ‘bogus number’ comment sounded like something someone who’d been hitting on him would say.

Samaki laughed. “Sorry.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean…” He laughed too, worry receding. “It’s okay.”

“No blackouts or dizzy spells?”

“No, I’m fine, really.”

“Well, that’s good.”

There was a pause. Kory tried to decide what to say next, but the fox beat him to it. “Hey, I was going to try to hit that new movie on Friday,
Planet Death
.” For a moment, Kory thought,
oh, no,
and then Samaki said, “It’s supposed to be terrible. Want to come along and make fun of it?”

“Sounds like fun,” Kory heard himself say.

“Great!” The fox sounded almost relieved. “You know where the Landmark 8 is?”

“I can find it online,” Kory said.

“Cool. I’ll call you later in the week when they have the show times up. It’ll be the sevenish one.”

“Okay. Or you could just e-mail.”

Samaki hesitated. “Sure. What’s your e-mail?”

They traded addresses. Kory entered Samaki’s in his online address book. It looked like a generic cable address. “Do you do any stuff online at all?”

“Not much,” Samaki said. “Some homework. We only have one computer in the house for all of us.”