Waterways (25 page)

He folded his arms and stared straight ahead at the road. Lightposts and other cars sped by them while Kory tried to figure out how he would talk about it with his mother so that she would leave him alone. As they exited the freeway, she said, “It’s that fox, isn’t it? He’s the one putting ideas in your head.”

“His name’s Samaki. You’ve eaten dinner with him.”

She turned onto their street. “Well, you’re not to see him any more.”

Kory laughed. “You going to ground me all the rest of the year until I go to college?”

“If I have to.”

“I’ll sneak out of the house. I’ll go directly from school.”

She stopped the car in the driveway. “As long as you’re living under my roof and eating my food, you’ll obey me.”

Kory found that his paws were shaking as he got out of the car, following his mother to the house with Nick close behind. “You’re just like Malaya’s father.”

When she whirled to face him, her eyes glowed. “How dare you,” she whispered. “I would never raise a paw to you. I have loved you, fed you, sheltered you…”

“Except when it mattered,” Kory said defiantly.

They both knew he was not talking about being gay. Mouth open, she stopped, turned, and opened the door. Paw on the knob, she stopped just inside. “That was not my fault,” she said. “I can only control what I do. I can’t be responsible for the behavior of others.”

“Except me, apparently.”

“Of course, you. You’re my son.” She closed the door after Nick and locked it emphatically. “I’m just glad you talked to me before you acted on any of these so-called ‘feelings.’ Lord knows what might have happened otherwise.”

Kory stared at her, and when she’d hung up her coat and turned around, she saw his expression. He made no attempt to hide anything from her. It was a relief to let the dam burst, all the things he’d hidden from her for the last six months plain to see on his face. He watched her eyes meet his, widen, and flick to his room, and he could tell the moment when she began counting up all the times Samaki had stayed overnight because her jaw dropped, slightly, and then her eyes narrowed. “Kory James Hedley,” she said, “you had better not mean what I think you mean.”

His heart pounded hard in his chest again. “What if I do?” he said.

“Don’t be insolent with me, young man.” She strode toward him.

“What are you going to do, break my arm?” He lifted his chin. “For being in… in love?” He’d never used that word to talk about Samaki, but he needed its weight in this argument, wanted to hit her with it as she was hitting him with her God and her motherhood.

“That is not love,” she started.

He interrupted, yelling, “Didn’t you tell me God is about love? Didn’t Father Green preach that every Sunday, and Father Joe every Sunday since then?”

“Don’t you throw the Lord into this. He is about love and this is not love.” She matched his pitch. He saw Nick standing frozen at the door of his room, his eyes like saucers.

“How do you know that?”

“Because love doesn’t make you defile my house,” she cried, and then, as if to herself, “Oh, dear Lord, I’m going to have to get the carpet cleaned now. I always hated that smell.”

“What smell? My
boyfriend’s
smell?” He’d been mad enough when she was only judging him, but to bring Samaki into it set his blood racing faster still. “You… you goddamned bigot.”

Her ears flattened all the way. “Don’t you take the Lord’s name in vain, you sinner,” she hissed. “And how dare you sit in judgment of me. I clothed you, fed you, raised you…”

“And somehow I turned out okay anyway.”

“You ungrateful child. You’re not even repentant.”

Kory folded his arms and shook his head, vaguely aware that part of him was shaking as badly as Nick was, but anger kept his defiance up. He looked his mother in the eye and said, “You’re the one who should be repentant.”

She breathed hard for a few heartbeats and then raised a paw and pointed at the door. “Get out of my house. Get out right now.”

Kory spun on his heels and unlocked the door. He heard her yell after him, “And don’t you come back until you’re prepared to—, “ but he never heard what he should be prepared to do, because he drowned out her last word with a loud slam that rattled the glass in the door.

He stood on his front walk, listening to the fan in the car engine. Crickets chirped nearby. Otherwise, his suburban street had settled in for the night, at the late hour of 9:32, by his cell phone. Slowly, his heartbeat eased. He was waiting, he realized, for his mother to come out and tell him to come back in, whereupon he could angrily tell her that he didn’t want to come back in, could turn his back on her pleading.

He folded his ears down against the breeze. What had just happened here was a real event, not just a fight, the culmination of the past year of Kory’s growth apart from the path his mother had so carefully laid out for him. He’d started to hide things from her, not just little things like the occasional beer or the pictures he found on the Internet, but big things like his relationship and his work at the Rainbow Center. She didn’t even really know him anymore, not the things that were most important to him. He glanced back at the house and felt in his heart that it was just his mother’s house now, no longer his home. That quickly, he’d cut himself loose.

Freedom felt terrifying and invigorating. He could walk down the path and up the sidewalk and make his own way through the dark neighborhood, the quiet streets. A car drove slowly down his street and turned at the end. He followed it with his eyes, wondering where it was going, and then wondering where
he
was going. The places he could stay tonight were few enough that he could count them on one paw while still holding his phone.

There was the Rainbow Center, of course, if the buses ran this late. He had his cell phone, and twenty-six dollars in his wallet. Not much to go on. The list of friends he could impose on for one night’s stay, let alone an indefinite stay, was depressingly short. His aunt—his mother’s sister—was out. His only option, really, was Sal.

Unless he wanted to go sleep at the bus shelter. He’d only seen people do that downtown. He suspected that if he were to try it here, he’d meet a policeman in short order, and then there would be explanations and his mother would be forced to be involved again. He dialed Sal’s number and held his breath.

“Of course you can come over for the night,” Sal said. “Just let me tell Mom. Why? What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here. Can you pick me up at the Hilltop Shopping Center?”

“Sure. Be there in about twenty minutes.”

Kory took a look at his phone. 9:38. He looked once more back at the house and then started walking.

His familiar street comforted him, the smells and the configuration of the yards, promising that outside his house, the world was going on as it always did. The people in those houses, relaxing after dinner, had no idea what had just happened, and if he knew his mother, they likely never would. That was fine. It crossed his mind that he might never call this street home again, but he recognized that that was his dramatic imagination. Right now he had no desire to come back, but what else could he do, in the long run? They had a college visit planned for the end of the month. College? How would he afford college without his mothers help? And anyway, he couldn’t stay with Sal forever.

Forever was a long way away. He just had to get through tonight. He pushed away thinking about the fight and realized he had to call Samaki. He weighed the cell phone in his hand. It was late, he thought. He might be disturbing the household. And how would Samaki react? Would he tell him it was better to get it out in the open? He’d be thinking that, anyway. But he’d be sympathetic, too. And he had to call him. This couldn’t wait until the morning.

Mrs. Roden answered the phone, panting slightly, and he could hear Ajani and Kasim arguing in the background; they’d just gotten home. She fetched Samaki without any questions, and when the black fox came on, Kory could hear the concern that he’d felt just a couple hours earlier, when Samaki had called him off their normal schedule.

“I got kicked out of home,” he said.

The silence on the other end lasted for so long that he put one paw to his ear so he could hear the fox’s soft breathing. “Samaki?”

“I’m here. What happened? Are you okay?”

Kory glanced around the street, standing at the corner where he had to turn away from the bus stop and his familiar morning route. “I’m fine.” He started walking along Salmon, the winding street that would drop him behind the shopping center. “We had a fight about Malaya. I told her about us and she told me to get out.”

“Just like that?”

On Salmon Street, the strange smells and lights quickened Kory’s pace.

He began to realize how vulnerable he was out here in the dark. “I kinda told her what we’d done. I might have cursed, too.” The memory of that word brought a flush of shame to his ears.

“Oh, hon. Are you okay?”

“I am now. I think. But she knows for sure, now.”

Samaki sighed. “I guess we knew she’d find out sooner or later. Wish she hadn’t taken it so hard. Do you need somewhere to stay tonight? I can come pick you up in a couple hours when my dad gets home. Or I could ask my mom if you need a ride right now.”

“I already called Sal,” Kory said, watching a car approach. A large Jeep, with a hare at the wheel who ignored him as he passed.

“Okay.” Samaki was quiet for a moment. “I guess I won’t be staying over for a while.”

Kory chuckled. “Yeah. Me neither.”

“Well,” Samaki said, “I mean, you’ll be back home in a day or two, right?”

Now Kory remained quiet, until Samaki said his name again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t want to go back.”

“What did she say?”

He could see the words as though they were written in fire in the air before his eyes. “She said we defiled her house. She wanted to send me away to one of those ex-gay summer camps to ‘fix’ me.”

“Just give her time to cool down…”

“She doesn’t need time to cool down. She needs a complete brain transplant.”

Samaki paused, and then said, “Well, you can stay in our basement if you need to. I’ll ask Mom, but I’m sure she won’t mind. And we don’t have to worry about them finding out.”

“You’re lucky,” Kory said with only a little bitterness. “She had that stuff about the camps all teed up. She must have been reading about it.”

“But she didn’t figure out about us?”

He scuffed his feet along the sidewalk. “She’s freaking paranoid. She probably had drug rehab camps and alcohol rehab camps and weight loss camps and loss of faith camps and every other behavior modification thing for disobedient teens all ready. Probably she was happy just because now she knows it’s not one of those other things. Now she knows what’s wrong with me.”

Samaki said instantly, “Nothing’s wrong with you.”

“No,” Kory said, as another car rushed by him, on its way home, no doubt. “I know.”

In the background, he heard their house phone ring. Samaki ignored it. “So you want me to come by tomorrow?”

“Maybe. I can probably stay at Sal’s for a while. They have a lot of room there, and it’ll be easier.”

The pause that came before the fox spoke again didn’t register immediately with Kory, distracted as he was with thinking about staying at Sal’s place. Later, he would remember it. “Okay,” Samaki said. “I’ll still see you this weekend, right?”

“Sure.” Kory’s ears flicked against a chilly breeze. “I have to call Nick and get him to bring my stuff to school. I’ll call you tomorrow night.”

“Sounds good.” Over the fox’s soft voice, Kory heard Mrs. Roden, her voice raised as he’d never heard it. “I’ll see you Saturday, too. And don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”

“Thanks.” He put his smile into the word.

He said good-bye, closing his cell phone and walking around the next curve. The night still seemed ordinary, the shopping center just ahead of him already closed for the night. The only cars in the lot were a few employees still closing up shop. Kory looked from the center down to his phone. He and Samaki had talked as if him leaving home was ordinary, was just something to be gotten over, not a life-changing event. The impact of it hadn’t really hit him yet, but it was starting to, now that he was thinking of the one person he had left to call.

After hitting the speed dial (his brother was ‘3’, just after his mother and voicemail and just before Samaki), he hesitated over the ‘Talk’ button. What if his mother was in with Nick now, monitoring the phone in case Kory called, or just taking out her anger on him?

There was no help for it; he had to get his schoolbooks and notebooks and some clothes before tomorrow morning. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—go back to the house, so he stabbed the Talk button and took a deep breath.

Nick answered almost immediately, his voice low but genuine enough that Kory knew he was alone. “Oh my God, Kory,” he said before Kory could say anything at all. “Where are you?”

“Sal’s picking me up,” Kory said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be okay tonight. I just need you to grab my books and bring them to school in the morning.” It was weird, talking to Nick on the phone. His voice sounded different, whether from the phone or from the stress of the evening.

“You’re not coming back tonight?”

“Why would I come back? Did Mom tell you she wants me to?” It wouldn’t change his mind, but it would give him a great deal of satisfaction to know that she regretted her words already.

“Nooo.” Nick drew out the word reluctantly. “But where else are you gonna go? You can’t stay at Sal’s ’til September.”

Nick was probably right, but when Kory looked ahead to the shopping center where Sal was going to meet him, he felt a burst of desperate confidence. “If I need to, I can. I’m not coming home.”

“But…”

“You heard what she said about Samaki. What she said about me! I have to do the right thing for my life, and I’m tired of her roof and her rules and her narrow-minded bullshit!” The word felt dangerous and good to say. He threw in a “God damn it!” at the end just to punctuate it.

Nick didn’t respond immediately. Kory’s triumphant bravado faded, leaving him feeling a little dirty about the swears. Finally, Nick said, “I’ll bring your books to school tomorrow. I can bring ’em to your homeroom.”