Waterways (17 page)

Nick’s swimming practice was starting up again, so this Sunday, their mother left with him immediately after the Mass was over to drop him off. Kory was in no hurry to walk home.

“Glad to see you smiling more, Kory,” Father Joe said, shaking the paw of Mrs. Jefferson and wishing her a good day.

“It’s been a good summer,” Kory said.

“Want to help me pick up the hymnals?”

Kory grinned. “Sure.” He walked through the now-empty church on the opposite side from the priest, collecting the books in his arms.

“Your mother tells me you’re doing quite a lot of charity work this summer.”

“Yeah, there’s a shelter on the north side of downtown that helps homeless kids. I go over there once a week and hang out with them, help paint the house, whatever.”

“That’s wonderful to hear.” The priest chuckled. “You know, if you have any leftover energy, the church could use a coat of paint as well.”

“School starts next week,” Kory said. “I don’t know if I’d have time.”

“I was kidding.” Father Joe looked over at him and winked. “Mostly. So how did you find this shelter?”

Kory didn’t answer immediately. “Oh, a friend of mine told me about it,” he said finally, glancing outside at the empty doorway. His mother had moved on to talk to some other friends of hers.

“Someone in this church?”

“No,” Kory said. “You don’t know him.”

When they reached the front of the church, Father Joe leaned against one of the pews. Kory looked up at him. “A few months ago,” the sheep said in a low voice, “you were having some trouble. Did you get that all worked out?” Kory nodded. “Did you call the people I told you about?”

“No,” Kory said. “I pretty much worked it out on my own.”

The sheep waited, but Kory didn’t volunteer any other information. “All right,” Father Joe said. “I’m glad to hear it’s worked out. But I think it’s also important that you be able to talk about it. It doesn’t have to be with me, but I hope there’s someone you can talk to.”

“There is,” Kory nodded, saying it more to end the conversation than because he meant it. “Thanks.”

He started to leave, but Father Joe put one hand on his shoulder. “These kinds of questions, Kory,” he said, “they touch on how we think of ourselves as a person. They mingle with species and gender and age and class and all those other things the people these days call ‘Orwell Act stuff.’ But who we
are
as a person,” he tapped his chest, “that’s in here. That’s what God looks at, and what He’s talking about in all that stuff I read every week up there. You know those lectures about the Pharisees?”

“I know,” Kory said.

“All right.” Father Joe stood. “Forgive me for taking a little more of your time, but it’s my job to think about things like that.” He smiled. “Good luck in school this year.”

Kory raised a paw. “Thanks.” He grinned. “See you next week, Father.” On the way home, he thought about it. Of course, he could talk to Samaki about any problems, couldn’t he? Or Margo, in a pinch? But Samaki was personally involved, and Kory was already worried the fox thought less of him for not being more forthright about their relationship. Margo was so energetic and well-meaning that Kory wasn’t sure he could even bring up the subject with her. She would just tell him everything was fine, just as Malaya always accused her of doing. And there was Malaya, but she would go too far to the other extreme.

Of course, he thought, there was Nick. He could always talk to Nick.

The first week of school was always disorienting. It seemed that the last school year ended right when Kory got the hang of things, and none of that helped in the fall when he was starting with new classes. At least his friends were the same as they’d been in the spring. Jason and Dev had both spent most of the summer playing World of Warcraft, of course. Kory wandered over to say hi to them and felt glad to get a hello sandwiched between descriptions of campaigns and strategies and artifacts. He listened long enough to get a feel for the game and a brief twinge of regret that his days of immersive gameplay were behind him, and then took his seat next to Sal.

“Funny,” Sal said as he sat down. “It feels like I didn’t see you all summer.”

Kory played with one of his brand new pencils. “Sorry I didn’t come by your dad’s office more often.”

“You would’ve been way better than Teddy. I still can’t believe you didn’t take the position.”

Geoff Hill, behind Sal, snickered. “Assume the position!” he said. “Get a room, you two.”

Kory ignored him and shrugged to cover the squirming inside. “I told you, my Mom wanted me to do something spiritual. Charity work.”

This was partly true. His mother wouldn’t have been averse to Kory taking the well-paid internship with Sal’s father’s company, but she was worried that he and Sal would goof off all day, and she’d seemed relieved when he’d mentioned the charity work with Samaki. Had he told her the truth about Rainbow Center, he suspected she wouldn’t have been as enthusiastic, but she was happy enough that he was doing the Lord’s work that she didn’t press. The grocery store had evening hours so he could still earn some money.

“So you were hanging out with Sammy all summer?”

“Samaki, yeah.” Kory cast about for a subject to change to. “Hey, is Deb in any of your classes?”

He could tell right away that things had changed with Sal and Deb. His friend shrugged. “I dunno.”

Kory didn’t say anything right away, and after a moment, Sal looked at him. “I got tired of her whining, you know? She was always tryin’ to drag me out to hang out with her friends.”

“Like Sarah and…”

“Jenny, yeah.”

“She’s dating Yaro now,” Geoff Hill put in. “They were lockin’ lips at a party I was at in July.” Clearly he wanted them to be impressed that he’d been to a party where Yaro, the star of the swim team, had been, or else to be jealous that they hadn’t been invited.

Kory felt neither of those. The nine months he’d dated Jenny felt as vague as a dream now. He’d never felt as close to her as he did to Samaki.

“You’re still doing the vo-tech thing this year, right?”

Sal snorted. “Course. My dad can pay me to spend the summer shuffling papers, but I told him I still want to fix computers. He said just decide at the end of the summer.” His face stretched into the wide grin that Kory always found infectious. “A couple times a week I hung out with Dan. He’s the IT guy at Dad’s office, a weasel, and he knows everything. I told him what I’d been studying and he showed me a whole ton of stuff. He’s got it so good there. Nothing gets done if he doesn’t want it to, and he reads everyone’s e-mail. He showed me one e-mail a guy sent where he was talking about boning his secretary. It was cool.”

Kory grinned back. “Sorry I missed it.”

“I’m telling ya,” Sal said, “you’re missin’ the boat with this college thing. Why spend a hundred grand to get a degree when you could be out there working full time in two years. Dan makes fifty thousand a year!”

“I dunno. I just… I gotta go to college.”

Sal nodded. “I’ll buy you a dinner sometime while you’re paying off your college loans.”

“And fix my computer?”

“Well, sure.” Sal chuckled just as the homeroom bell rang.

With Sal gone for half the day at his vo-tech classes, Kory chatted with a few other acquaintances in Physics, Calculus, and English. Of those, only English class promised to be interesting; they were actually slated to do a unit on poetry in the fall, and Mrs. Digginson, the young rat, confirmed that she was planning another one in the spring when he asked her, after class.

Walking out of her classroom toward the bus, he noticed that a skinny wolf had hung back to listen, pretending to fidget with the unbuttoned collar of his shirt and pushing his glasses up on his muzzle every other minute. Kory remembered after a moment that his name was Perry, and he usually hung out with the hackers, a group unusual in the high school in that apparently only one member of each species wanted to join. Besides Perry, they included an otter, a rat, a raccoon, a grey fox, and one of the only two coyotes in the school. Most of them attended the standard English class, but Perry had been in the advanced class with Kory the year before, and Kory had noted without noticing that he was there again this year.

“I’m glad we’re doing more poetry,” Perry said without preamble.

“Uh-huh.” Kory didn’t encourage or discourage conversation.

“We’re probably the only two excited about it, huh?”

“Probably.”

The wolf stayed a half step behind him, silent for a few more paces, until he said, “Uh, I really liked that poem you did last year.”

Kory’s stride broke, but only for a half-hitch before he started walking again, a little faster. “Thanks,” he mumbled, his mind wrenched away from thoughts of calling Samaki, back to the present.

“No, really.” Perry hurried to keep up with him. “You have a great vocabulary and you used meter and imagery really effectively.”

“Thanks,” Kory said again, canting his ears back to listen. The last thing he wanted was for that poem to be brought up again on the first day of the new school year, but for it to be complimented on its merits was new.

“I wanted to say something to you last year about it, but, you know, those guys… and you looked so uncomfortable. I tried, the one time, but you just ran away. I think you didn’t hear me.”

He didn’t remember that, but he said, “Probably not.”

“And I thought it really sucked that they picked on you like that.”

“Thanks.” Now he slowed. “Do you write any?”

Perry hurried to catch up to him, ducking his muzzle. “Oh, uh, no, not really.”

Kory grinned at the wolf’s flicking ears, stopping in front of his bus. “Hey, you saw something of mine.”

“No, I don’t… I mean, I’m not that good.” He saw Kory’s look, then, and rubbed one ear. “Well, maybe.”

“I’d like to see it. This is my bus,” Kory said, waving up to the driver, who was beckoning to him. “Nice talking to you.”

“Yeah, I’ll, uh, see you tomorrow,” Perry said. “Oh, are you in that college prep group?”

Kory tilted his head. “What group?”

“My mom signed me up for it. It’s every Thursday after school for an i hour. We go over college applications and stuff.” He shrugged. “If I want to get into N.I.T., I guess I’ll need it. You should be in it. I mean, not that you need help, I’m sure you’ll get into a good school, but…”

Kory paused on the step. “Yeah, good luck,” he said, and waved as he climbed into the bus.

On the bus, he sat alone and looked out the window. There was really nobody on the bus that he knew well; most of the other seniors in his area proudly drove their cars to school just because they could. The juniors and sophomores he knew, but not well, and of course, Nick was a freshman this year, but he had his own group of friends and wouldn’t have wanted to sit with Kory.

Halfway home, Kory used his phone to send an e-mail to Samaki, wishing the black fox had a phone that accepted text messages. Maybe for Christmas, he thought, but he knew it was a stretch for the fox to have a phone at all. His plan didn’t allow for many calls, so they used e-mail most of the time, but Kory didn’t want to wait until he got home. His school day had immersed him in the other world, the one which had receded all summer, and he wanted to re-establish contact with Samaki, to find out what the fox had been doing and what his first day at Hilltown P.S. had been like.

Nick talked about his homework as they walked to their house from the bus stop, past neat lawns that Kory had thought of as small until he saw the yards in Samaki’s neighborhood. He hadn’t taken this particular walk in three months, but he still knew it by heart: The Jeffersons’ maple tree and warm lupine smell, Mrs. Liata’s profusion of rosebushes overwhelming even the odor of a skunk family, the white house with maroon trim that glowed in the sunset light later in the fall, the old three-story blue house whose circular corner towers and turrets brought to mind a modern-day castle, and all the other familiar landmarks cemented his return to school and the world of his normal life, the world where he was just Kory Hedley, Nick’s brother and Celia’s son, high school senior.

That world was comfortable, with patterns that were easy to slip into. He knew what was expected of him and had no trouble conforming. Over the summer, he’d come to regard the Kory who was Samaki’s boyfriend as a different Kory, one who flushed guiltily during some church sermons now, who obsessively watched everything he did around his mother or left in his room, who had thought of the old Kory as nothing more than a shell he wore, a chrysalis to be discarded when the time was right.

Now, with the warm fall air ruffling his fur and the familiar sights and scents, the smell of school still in his nostrils and that creeping anticipation that the evening was only a break from the never-ending procession of classes, he felt like more than a shell. It wasn’t until he slipped into the sanctuary of his room, with Samaki’s scent faintly lingering despite his mother’s attempts to dispel it, that he remembered the Kory of the summer. Relaxing into his chair, he found a reply from Samaki, and the warmth of summer infused him as he read it.

They’d set up an arranged time to talk each night, when Kory’s phone minutes were free and Samaki would make sure to be somewhere private. Even if they could only talk for five minutes, it was worth it. Reading about Samaki’s first day back at school, Kory wanted to call the fox that minute, not wait until after dinner. He contented himself with writing a long reply. He told Samaki about Perry, about the extra poetry unit, and about Sal’s summer.

Dinner was salmon, one of Kory’s favorites, even though his mother had paired it with bland lima beans. He took seconds while Nick told them about his first day at school, and then he told his mother more or less what he’d told Samaki, shading it with nuances she’d favor about how challenging his classes were going to be. Briefly, he mentioned Perry, and the college prep class, and his mother flicked her ears back.

“I never got that paperwork,” she said. “I wonder why.”

“I don’t really need it,” Kory said. “I have all the brochures, and there’s plenty of stuff online to tell me how to register.”