Waterways (46 page)

“Lucky,” Kory said. “I have to sit on stage for an hour, then another half hour after we get the diplomas while Mr. Pena goes on about the future and all that crap.”

Samaki snorted. “Is he that college prep teacher? The one who was making fun of State?”

“Yeah.” Kory started to say something about State, then decided he didn’t want to bring it up. “Anyway, after that there’s the graduation pictures, and they say it’ll go fast, but when we had our yearbook pictures it was only supposed to take an hour and it took half the day.”

“Fancy.” Samaki chuckled softly. “We get one class photo. Otherwise it’s DIY.”

“Wish our whole thing was DIY.” Kory lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling. “Wish it were over. I’m looking forward to graduation being done with.”

He waited for Samaki to say something about moving in. “Yeah,” the fox said. “Me too.”

“Malaya and Nick and I are going out to dinner after,” Kory said. “Hope you can make it.”

“Of course,” Samaki said, without hesitating. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

That was all Kory had to hold onto as the Saturday approached. He hadn’t even dared make a comment about ‘brushing,’ and neither had Samaki, but at least he felt secure in their friendship, and could look forward to the dinner. He spent some time preparing his arguments and pleas, but the conversations he played in his head no longer had the frantic desperation they had from the night of the prom.

“I understand if we can’t be together.”

“I want to be with you if you want me.”

“I think we can work it out, but if you don’t… ”

The biggest problem was that most of the lines, as he rehearsed them, put the burden on Samaki to make the decision, and even as Kory savored the relief they afforded him, he recognized guiltily that they were a little unfair.
Not so unfair,
part of him said.
After all, wasn’t Samaki the one who’d made the decision in the first place?
He threw the question back and forth, but hadn’t come to any good resolution by Saturday morning, when the sun streaming through his window woke him to the last day of his high school life.

To his surprise, when he walked out into the living room, Malaya was dressed and standing by the door. “Please tell me we’re stopping for coffee on the way there,” she said, yawning. “Even Starbucks.”

He stared. She was wearing her nicest shirt and the jeans with only two small holes in them. “You’re coming?”

“If I’m invited. Might as well see someone’s graduation.”

“Promise not to embarrass me?” Kory’s tail curled happily.

She grinned back at him. “No.”

They rode the bus together down to the school, transferring at the hub between downtown and the suburbs. Kory broke the silence when they’d gotten on the last bus. “Weird. This is the last time I’ll be taking the bus to school,” he said.

Malaya fiddled with the buttons on her shirt. “I don’t remember the last time I did. I just remember the first time I didn’t.”

“How long has it been?”

She glanced at him. “Since the hospital.”

“Oh. Right.” He straightened his own clothes self-consciously. “You were still going ’til then?”

“On and off. Dad made me go when I moved back home. Not so much when I was at sunshine central.”

Kory watched the suburbs roll up around them, the now-familiar transition. “It wasn’t so bad, really.”

“Easy to say now you’re done. What did you really get out of it other than a place on a stage with a hundred other obedient little moppets?”

“I learned some things, that’s for sure.”

She chuckled, dry and short. “The real valuable stuff you didn’t learn in the classroom.”

Kory recognized some of the cars that crowded the streets as they approached the school, students driving themselves to the ceremony or being dropped off. The parents didn’t have to show up for another hour, but many of them probably would sit out in the audience and talk with each other until the official start.

He gave Malaya both her ticket and Samaki’s, and called Samaki to tell him to look for the bat when he arrived. The fox said “Okay, driving,” and hung up—one of the rules his parents had laid down was “no phone while driving.”

“See you in there,” Malaya said. “Get in your uniform and hop on that assembly line.” Kory smirked, waving as he followed the line of students into the school.

Inside, the scene could best be described as organized chaos. Teachers tried to gather the students into alphabetical groups, but friends crossed group lines to chat and laugh at each other’s robes. Kory stood with the G-H-I-J-K group and got his robes on with barely a word to anyone else. Across the cafeteria, he saw Perry struggling into a robe that was one size too small for him, at least; in the next group, Sal was already dressed and talking to one weasel Kory recognized from the vo-tech crew. He tried to catch Sal’s eye, but the other otter turned pointedly away.

One person did catch his arm as they started to file out to the auditorium. “Kory!” Floras excited scent assaulted him. “Is your fox boy going to be here?”

The wolf in front of Kory flicked an ear back, but didn’t turn. In front of him, Geoff Hill was laughing about something with another raccoon and appeared not to have heard. “I hope so,” Kory said in a low voice. “He said he was on his way.”

“Spiff!” Flora grinned at him. “Good luck! Don’t fall asleep!”

He laughed, but it turned out to be a real concern. The principal droned on about the future, and then the two valedictorians struggled through painful speeches. Beverly Anderson’s was particularly tedious, a long analogy about Columbus crossing the ocean and how they were all standing now on the shore of a brave new world. Kory kept himself occupied by looking for Malaya and Samaki in the crowd, but he actually spotted his mother and Nick first. Nick yawned three times while Kory was watching him, looking stiff and wrong in his suit. His mother was similarly rigid, keeping her eyes focused on the speaker. Nick met his eyes and grinned once or twice, but his mother never, that he saw, looked in his direction.

He finally saw Samaki and Malaya right after the principal started announcing names, when everyone around was fidgeting from the warmth in the room and the concomitant rising odors. Relief infused all the scents as the first row of students got up to accept their diplomas, and when Chris Carkus, the six-foot tall stag who captained the football team, got up from that row, Kory saw the bat and fox in the space his antlers had been obscuring.

They were watching the stage, heads turned towards each other. Samaki looked pleased, as best Kory could tell from so far away. Then he lost them again, as some parents started to stand up to take photos of the diploma ceremony.

If the initial speech had gone by too slowly, the ceremony seemed to fly. In no time, the principal was calling, “Hedley, Kory,” and shaking Kory’s paw as he handed over a rolled piece of parchment tied with a ribbon. Then Kory was sitting next to the same kids on the other side of the stage, some pretending to smoke their diplomas, some unrolling them to read the message that their actual diploma would be arriving in a couple weeks, some flipping them from paw to paw, and some just holding them in their laps and staring vacantly ahead. Flashes continued to pop as the student body moved through the process, each in turn, until the principal was ushering “Zane, Bradford” off to the left stage and introducing Hilltown’s mayor.

The mayor, a lean vixen, said a few words about—surprise—the future. Finally, Kory thought, but no, it turned out the principal had a little more to say, and then Mr. Pena had to make his own remarks, and after that the vice-principal got up and said in a choked voice how wonderful it had been to have known all the seniors and how sad he was to see them go, while Geoff Hill and his raccoon friend sniggered to Kory’s right. And then, finally, mercifully, it was time for them to stand up and file out through the auditorium, while the juniors and sophomores in the band mangled “Pomp and Circumstance” not quite beyond recognition. Flashes strobed until it felt like a sedate rave, through which Kory saw Sal’s parents waving to him and to Sal, Malaya and Samaki waving to him, and his mother, watching the procession without expression while Nick smiled from behind her.

The tide of students accelerated as they reached the exits, bunched up just before the doors, and then burst through out into the field behind the school, where some of the thicker-furred species were already pulling off their robes. Kory was warm, too, but he left his on, knowing he’d just have to put it back on for the photo later. Some of the kids were tossing their mortarboards into the air, others had met their parents already. Kory had not set a meeting place with anyone, so he floated through the sea of eggplant-colored robes and jubilant expressions and kept an eye out through the crowd, panting in the heat of the June sun.

Malaya and Samaki found him first. The bat punched him lightly on the arm, while Samaki stood back and grinned. “You deserve an award for sitting through that,” Malaya said. “I thought I was going to die. I know I say I want to sometimes, but for the record, I never want to be bored to death.”

“Pretty cool,” Samaki said. “Congratulations.”

He offered a paw, but Kory pulled the paw toward him and embraced the fox in a powerful hug. “Thanks,” he said, as the fox’s arms closed tentatively around him, then tightened. “You helped.”

“Me?” Samaki nuzzled him and smiled, and for the first time in a while, Kory saw the smile light up his eyes as well. “You did all the work.”

“Yeah, but you kept me on track, and made me look forward to study sessions.” The fox’s ears flicked and his grin widened.

“Always glad to help,” he said. “You earned it all, though.” He, not Kory, was glancing at the other students standing a few feet away in all directions, but everyone else was occupied with their own animated conversations. To Kory’s left, an ermine and a skunk were covertly passing a flask back and forth and tossing back gulps of whatever was inside.

“Can the sweet talk,” Malaya said dryly. “I’m chokin’ up here.”

Kory turned to say something to her, but was interrupted by the shouting of Mr. Pena. The fox had cupped his paws in front of his muzzle to project. “Students! Can I have your attention?” Everyone turned to face the tall teacher. “We’re going to be lining up for photos in the same rows we were sitting in on stage. Row one, over here to my right, please, and row two, get ready behind them. Parents, you should be in line with your kids so we can get all these photos taken quickly.”

“You’re like, row three, aren’t you?” Malaya said, as everyone went back to their conversations. The ermine handed the flask to the skunk and walked toward the photo stage. Beverly Anderson was already posing with her parents and what looked like her younger sister, all four black bears so portly they barely fit on the stage. Three flashes later, they made way for a family of cougars.

Kory nodded. “I guess I’ll head over in a bit. What are we doing after?”

“Well, if you haven’t had your fill of long, tedious spectacles, the new Oliver Stone film is playing. Or we could see that robot movie with the explosions.”

“Definitely explosions,” Kory said, and turned to Samaki.

The fox nodded. “I’ll take explosions over Oliver Stone any day.”

“Can you give us a ride back to the apartment so I can change?” Kory fingered the robes.

“Aw, you’re not going to wear them all day?” Malaya stepped back, pretending to size up his outfit. “You look better than that kid.” Up on the photo stage, a tall, gangly fox was having his photo taken with his much shorter mother. His ears couldn’t quite line up straight, he had a serious overbite, and his robes had slid to one side. His mother reached up to adjust them between photos.

Kory laughed, shortly. He still couldn’t see his own mother anywhere.

“Mom took the car back home,” Samaki said. “But those do look good on you. Even if you did wear clothes underneath.”

“How do you know I did?” Kory raised an eyebrow.

“Pant legs.” The fox pointed down at Kory’s feet.

“Dang. Should’ve rolled them up.”

Samaki smiled at him, and Kory felt again the emotion, the spark of healing. The argument might still be there between them, but so was everything else, and on this bright, sunny day, even in the throng of students, the shadow of the argument had receded.

“Row two, start to line up please,” Mr. Pena called. “For those of you who have been asking, Mrs. Holly is going to get the yearbook done in the next two weeks, so you won’t have to wait long.” Vera Donovan, Flora’s weasel friend, climbed up on stage with an ancient weasel and a younger sister. Vera pressed the billowing robes down, holding her paws on her hips as each flash illuminated her.

“You don’t have your yearbooks yet?” Samaki tilted his muzzle.

Kory shook his head. “We never get ’em ’til summer.”

“That’s weird. We pick ’em up the last week of school. How do you get everyone to sign them?”

“I guess just whoever we see over the summer.” Kory shrugged. He could count the number of times he’d seen people from his high school class the previous summer on one paw.

Malaya was looking at Mr. Pena. “I bet it’s these pictures. The parents want pictures of graduation. It’s not for the kids.”

“It’s just always been like that,” Kory said. “I dunno why.”

A compact brown shape in a white shirt piled into Kory, hugging him. “Hey, happy grad!”

Kory stumbled, grinned, and hugged Nick back. “Thanks.” He looked around.

“She’s waiting by the photo line.” Nick made a face. “I told her I wanted to put my suit jacket in the car ’cause it was so hot. What are you guys doing after?”

“Robots in disguise?
Samaki intoned.

“Cool. Can I ride with you guys?”

Samaki shook his head. “But I could call Mom. I bet Ajani and Kasim would want to see the movie too. Maybe she could come out here.”

“Can we all pile into the car?” Nick rolled up his sleeves.

“None of the seniors are going to be impressed by your muscles,” Malaya told him.

Kory grinned. “Some of them might. Don’t flex around Flora.”