Waterways (26 page)

“I’ll meet you at the bus when you get there,” Kory said. “Thanks, Nick.” And then, because his brother sounded so tired and forlorn, he said, “Hey. I’m still your big brother. I’m still gonna look out for you.”

“Maybe I should be looking out for you,” Nick said, in a cheerier tone.

Rounding a corner, Kory saw another set of headlights, and this time recognized Sal’s car. “Sal’s here. I’ll see you in the morning, Nick.”

“Kory?”

“Yeah?”

“Love you.”

His throat closed up for a moment. “Love you too, Nick.”

His brother’s words stayed with him, strongly enough that if the first words out of Sal’s mouth hadn’t reminded Kory of his mother, he very likely would have told his friend to drive him back home. But Sal said, “So what’d you say to get kicked out?” and Kory remembered his words, and his mother’s, and the anger came flooding back as he curled his tail around behind him and settled back into the seat.

“I think I called her a goddamn bigot,” he said.

“Wow.” Sal chuckled. “Pulling out the name of the Lord in vain. That’s, what, three Hail Marys?”

“None for me, now,” Kory said. “You have to repent to do penance.”

Sal whistled. “Harsh. What’d she say to get that?”

“Oh, urn…” Kory looked out his window. “She was saying stuff about Samaki. And his family.”

“The fox? You got kicked out of your house for a fox?”

He could see Sal’s reflection, looking at him, more amused than anything else. His friend’s equanimity helped him relax. “Well, she’s been going on about them for months. I just got sick of it.”

“So you cursed at her and she kicked you out? That don’t make sense.”

“We were fighting already,” Kory said, “about…” He couldn’t think of a plausible lie, and realized he didn’t want to. He turned to his friend and sighed. “Sal, pull over here a second. I need to tell you something.”

Sal listened to his confession, his eyes barely widening. He shrugged when Kory was done. “Dude, that’s cool. You never seemed really happy with Jenny anyway. Makes me feel a little better, you know, about all those times you wouldn’t come out with me.”

“Huh?”

Sal grinned. “I mean, it wasn’t me. It was just that you didn’t like girls. Good thing you found out early, or you mighta been really fucked up.”

“Thanks,” Kory said. “I mean, really.”

“Also explains your mom flying off the handle. I guess she just found out tonight too, huh?”

“Yeah.” Kory laughed shortly. “The number of people who know just doubled. Well, not counting the kids down at the Center.”

“The Center?”

And then he had to tell Sal about the Rainbow Center, and he was surprised at how good it felt to open up. Sal nodded, pulling back onto the road partway through the story. When Kory reached the part about Malaya being in the hospital, and came full circle to the argument that had led to him being in Sal’s car, Sal was just pulling into his driveway. He parked to one side, both parents’ cars taking up the garage, and they got out just as Kory was recounting the last things his mother had said.

“She said she was going to clean the carpets?” Sal whistled. “No offense, dude, but your mom is a little bit nutso.”

“More than a little,” Kory said, following Sal along the stone path across his lawn.

“S’okay, so’s mine. Just not in ways that get me kicked out.” Sal grinned at him. “I’d take you in by the pool, but if you’ve just got those clothes, we should keep ’em dry.”

“Good thinking.” Sal’s family lived in a large three-story house on the side of a hill, with a yard that extended all the way around the house (Kory had sometimes helped mow in the summer) and a large outdoor pool that connected with their indoor pool but wasn’t heated. The taupe-colored stone walls blended with the green grass to make it appear that the house had risen organically out of the hillside, an impression reinforced by the rounded corners and oval windows. A lot of personality,’ Sal’s dad said about their house, which also boasted pools on the upper floors and water slides running down through the walls.

Because of the upper-story pools, they had to climb almost twenty feet of stairs to get up to Sal’s room. Kory waved to Sal’s parents on their way past the rec room; they waved back, looking up from the TV for only a moment.

“You can stay here,” Sal said, opening the door across the hall from his.

Kory stepped inside and looked around. “Your mom redecorated again.”

“Yeah, she’s all into this ‘colors of the seasons’ crap now. She tried to paint my room in greens and yellows for spring, and I told her no fucking way.”

Kory looked around at the brown walls, the artfully bunched orange and red curtains, and the coordinated drying mat and bed with the maple leaf pattern. “I think it looks fine,” he said.

Sal snorted. “It’s not your room.”

“Is now.”

They grinned at each other, and then Sal punched him in the arm. “So how long you think before this blows over?”

Kory shook his head, tired of thinking about that question. “I don’t know. I don’t care if it lasts ’til I go to college.”

For the first time in a night of revelations, Sal’s eyes really widened, and his ears came up sharply. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. Seriously.”

His friend whistled again. Kory rubbed a paw over his eyes and through his head fur. “Look,” he said. “She can’t accept what I am and she can’t accept Samaki, and I’m not going to give any of that up just so I can live with her. I’m almost eighteen. I don’t need her.”

Sal nodded, rubbing his whiskers, and said, “So you’re really into that fox, huh?”

“Pretty serious.”

“Cool.” Sal tapped his arm again. “I’d like to meet him sometime.”

Kory punched back. “You will.” He loved Sal for that.

“Well, I gotta finish some homework. I guess you don’t have any books or anything?”

“Homework’s mostly done. Nick’s gonna bring it tomorrow.”

“Cool.” Sal waved. “Good night, then. Tell me if you need anything. Towels in the usual place.”

Kory waved good-night, and when the door was shut, he took off his clothes and slid into the water. Its warmth surrounded him, penetrating and relaxing. More words circled round his head:
The prisoner escapes into the dark water, his chains lie piled on the shore. He flees the judgment from above, he runs from fear to love.
That word again: love. He thought it about Sal; he felt it for Nick; he remembered it for his mother. What did it mean for Samaki? Some combination of all of them? He set the word aside and played with the lines of poetry until they became abstract, and he stopped thinking about the fight with his mother. When he felt himself slipping out of consciousness, he slid up onto the drying mat and went to sleep, one arm stretched out as though searching for someone by his side.

For a moment, when he woke the next morning, everything was normal. Then he looked around at the turning leaves, the bookcase that was too small to be anything but decorative, the unfamiliar rough ceiling, and the posterless walls, and he remembered.

Trepidation warred with elation, a battle he was becoming familiar with and tired of. Freedom, not only to go where he wanted, but from his mothers expectations and prejudices, buoyed him, but the currents carrying him away from her didn’t tell him where they were taking him. The river ahead looked huge and unfamiliar, making him close his eyes for a moment and wish he were back home in his bed. Then he wished Samaki were there with him, and he found that the anger at his mother was not all exhausted after all.

He used its fierce flare as impetus to get up and get dressed. School, at least, he could count on being constant. Nobody knew what had happened, except for Sal and Nick, and he could make sure they didn’t tell. If it got out that he’d been kicked out of the house, there’d be explanations required. Being out to Sal was a good feeling, as if he’d crossed a chasm safely, but the rest of the school was unlikely to react as well.

Through breakfast and the pleasantries exchanged with Sal’s parents, to whom he said only that he wanted to hang out with Sal more and work on their college applications, he thought about the black fox and missed him, wondering what breakfast would be like in their house, just the two of them. Maybe, he thought, he and Samaki could just get an apartment together, somewhere in the city. Get jobs, earn their own money, start their own life. Nobody would have to know what their relationship was. There were plenty of friends who rented apartments together. He and Sal had talked about it, jokingly and half-seriously, the summer before last, when they’d both been grounded for being caught with beer.

Sal punched him as they got into the car, because he’d mentioned college, but when Kory pointed out that it was probably the one thing that had stopped further questions, Sal laughed and agreed, not really mad. Kory envied him the freedom from caring about what his parents thought, but Sal had always been that way. Kory was the cautious one, the one most likely to ask, “What would your mom say?” Sal forged ahead on his own path, not uncaring of others, just independent of them. Even when he lost a girlfriend, he was more annoyed at the loss of sex than he was about the relationship. When Kory asked him not to mention to anyone else that he’d been kicked out of his house, much less the reason, Sal shrugged as though it hadn’t even crossed his mind to talk about it.

Kory waited outside for the bus while Sal walked in to homeroom. When Nick got off their bus and saw Kory, he ran to him, but pulled up short a foot away. “Here,” he said, holding out Kory’s backpack.

“Thanks.” Kory took it and slung it over his shoulder. He looked back at his brother’s blue eyes. “How you doing?”

“Me?” Nick forced a grin. “I’m fine.” He put out a paw and patted Kory’s arm, as close as they’d come to a hug on school grounds. “You?”

“I’m good.” He wanted to tell his brother more, but he didn’t know what. “I figured I’d come home and get some stuff after school, before she gets back.”

His brother’s ears perked briefly at the word ‘home,’ then lowered again. “Okay.”

Kory reached out and squeezed his brother’s shoulder. “You want to come over to Sal’s sometime next week? Maybe you and me could go out for pizza?”

“Yeah.” Nick flashed him a smile as the five-minute bell rang, summoning them inside.

Fortunately, Kory’s first class was trig, which he’d already done his homework for, and he was able to surreptitiously finish his homework for English while Mrs. Molken was droning on about sines and cosines in her high-pitched ferrety whine. By the time he got to the end of the day, he’d gotten the majority of his work done.

He actually stepped up onto the stairs of his bus out of habit before remembering that Sal was going to pick him up. “Not today,” he said, waved to the driver, and stepped down. Nick came running for the bus, but stopped when he saw Kory.

“You waiting for me?”

“Nah, Sal’s going to pick me up.” Kory looked along the front of the school for Sal’s old black car. “You want a ride?”

They rode back to Kory’s house in silence, Nick in the back seat, Kory in front. Sal tried to start talking about his day, but Kory, running through the checklist in his head of things he was going to have to get out of his room, didn’t encourage him, and Sal eventually shut up. Computer, of course, Kory thought, and clothes. Some music and books, but only the essentials. His photo albums from growing up. He wanted to take his toy chest and box of mementos, but that was already going to be more than would fit in Sal’s car. He asked Nick if he’d be willing to keep some stuff in his room to keep it safe, and his brother responded with a subdued “Yes.”

The house already felt strange to him, like a copy of something he’d once known intimately. Kory walked with only a slight hesitation over the spot he’d stepped when his mother had told him to get out, and crossed the small bridge over the pool in the living room into his room, with Nick and Sal behind him.

“What do you wanna grab?” Sal was rubbing his paws together, looking around as though they were doing something excitingly illegal.

Kory tossed a suitcase from his closet onto the bed. “Can you pack this up?” He started pulling shirts, pants, and underwear out of his dresser. “Nick, can you get my other bag from the hall closet?”

His brother left the room without a word, returning a moment later with the big blue bag and throwing it onto the desk beside the first. Silently, he walked over to the bookcase and started taking Kory’s books.

Of course Nick would know that he’d want his books. Kory leaned against the closet, just watching his brother, feeling the emotion swell in his chest. It would be so easy just to wait until his mother got home, wouldn’t it? It would save him all this trouble, and he could stay with Nick. He swallowed. “You know,” he began, but Nick’s expression stopped him.

“I know,” he said. “It’s about her. And you gotta, you know, stand up for what’s right. Don’t you?” Kory didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nodded. Nick put the books on the bed, facing away from his brother, his ears and tail drooping. “You won’t be that far away.”

“Never,” Kory said, and when Nick turned around, he hugged him tightly. He wanted to stay more than ever, but he would only be doing it for Nick, and Nick had just explained exactly why he had to leave.

While Sal and Nick carried his bags out to the car, he took his computer apart. With the wires packed into a plastic bag, he looked around his room, at all the trappings of his childhood. That was all they were now. He could take them with him, but they were mementos, not part of his life any more. The posters on the walls, the picture of his family at the ocean… he looked at that last one, picked it up, and put it into the plastic bag with the wires.

They carried his personal boxes into Nick’s room, and then he and Sal carried his computer out to the car. Nick carried the small printer, lagging behind them. They stowed the equipment in the back seat, and then Kory gave his brother another hug. “See you at school,” he said.

Nick nodded. “Get going,” he said. “She’ll be home soon.”

Kory looked out his window at his brother, getting smaller and smaller in the side mirror, but the sight grew blurry and he had to look away before they’d even turned the corner.